Shift your ship into Neutral with contact Docking [Not Future Proof]

[Crimson-Artist]

I've been experimenting with contact docking and i was finally able to test out a concept that I came up with a long time ago. Gear shifting.

As you know when a ship is docked to another its flight controls get disabled and can't do much. My idea was to try and create a parking break in space without putting down a station. Now that we have contact docking this concept actually works.

As you can see it very simple. In essence all it is is just forcing an undock between ships. The Gear shift ship is undocked from the parent ship then it immediately causes the parent ship to dock to it. Then when the gear shift ship undocks the parent ship, the gear shift ship then docks to the parent ship.

The timed cooldown for redocking doesn't hurt the process. The only down side to this is that i've found that attempting to shift into neutral while stationary is not completely reliable. The most reliable way to gear shift is to move extremely slowly then undock the gear shift ship. When the gear shift ship undocks it will clip into the parent ship forcing a contact dock.

Now you must be wondering why would I want to put this on my ship? Well I've come up with some reasons.

1. If you're using a logic auto jump drive charger then this will allow your ship to safely charge its drive without the risk of jumping away. I've outlined this in my most recent R&D log
2. Maybe you just want to make sure that the only way to fly your ship is to shift gears.

Now i know that the devs have stated that contact docking will be changed to have a distanced based cooldown rather then a timed one so in a way this system is not future proof. Though that depends greatly on how distance cooldown is implemented.