Ship based repairing "yards"

[TheOriginalBIT]

I'm currently making a drone mothership and it would be awesome if it were possible to have a repair frame the drones can fly through which would repair them based on a single blueprint that is loaded into the structure.

I figure that shipyards inside just any ship is not desired, for this reason I recommend purely a repairing frame. I know we have the Astrotech module, but that is only capable of repairing damage to blocks it can touch, I'd like the ability to replace completely destroyed blocks on the drones as well.

 

[Bishamonten]

a mobile repair bay does sound kinda cool on mother ships and the like. something like having far smaller dimensions.

not too sure about it in general though. the problem comes when there's no distinguishing between what's a "drone", a "fighter" or even a really compact battlecube. so then it becomes of a matter of how large or how small do you allow it to be or that it consumes massive amounts of energy.

as per internal blueprints that's already something that has been discussed before and i think is even planned.

 

[TheOriginalBIT]

Yeah I did think about the size restriction thing, and for that I don't have an answer. But I don't see a problem with it being able to repair anything as long as that ship can fit inside its structure.

To help distinguish the ships this is where I saw the internal blueprints coming into play. Ship yards already utilise this mechanism, and if/when they change it so that you can only produce a ship in a ship yard then that would mean blueprints are in any core, that repair structures would be able to read to repair. I also saw this suggestion tying into the identification of ships too.

 

[Nickizzy]

There have been ideas of having shipyards work on ships, by each empty block in their area weighs 5 mass, making them super heavy and they already draw a lot of power. The idea that they could only repair is a good one, one that would have to go with a design-imprent system, so you couldn't put in a fighter, and "repair" it to a battlecruiser.

 

[Durendal5150]

I think the best solution to this particular problem is just to make astrotech beams able to replace blocks, personally. They're already in the game, and not used very often. Better to shore up existing mechanics than to add whole new ones, imho.

 

[Nickizzy]

I think the best solution to this particular problem is just to make astrotech beams able to replace blocks, personally. They're already in the game, and not used very often. Better to shore up existing mechanics than to add whole new ones, imho.

Given that(this is a copy paste because I use it so much):

What if astrotech beams worked like salvage beams in reverse(smaeb egavlas). As in, they shot through the target until they hit a missing block,then they would, if they had it in their inventory, place the needed block. The catch is, the block would only have one HP and no AHP. Once all missing blocks within the beam had been replaced, it would start working from the back forward to heal block HP normally.* The AI would have a "constructor" mode, checkbox, that would work in the same order as the beam, but on an entity wide scale.

*It could also have the ability to heal AHP at a slower rate, such as 1/10th or so, but could only heal the amount a block had lost, so each block would have it's individual APH kept track of and be healed by astrotech.

Because of the aux reactor update, they couldn't heal their own ship as turrets either, so ships couldn't be self healing. They could have repairing drone fleets though.

 

[TheOriginalBIT]

I think the best solution to this particular problem is just to make astrotech beams able to replace blocks, personally. They're already in the game, and not used very often. Better to shore up existing mechanics than to add whole new ones, imho.

Given that(this is a copy paste because I use it so much):

What if astrotech beams worked like salvage beams in reverse(smaeb egavlas). As in, they shot through the target until they hit a missing block,then they would, if they had it in their inventory, place the needed block. The catch is, the block would only have one HP and no AHP. Once all missing blocks within the beam had been replaced, it would start working from the back forward to heal block HP normally.* The AI would have a "constructor" mode, checkbox, that would work in the same order as the beam, but on an entity wide scale.

*It could also have the ability to heal AHP at a slower rate, such as 1/10th or so, but could only heal the amount a block had lost, so each block would have it's individual APH kept track of and be healed by astrotech.

Because of the aux reactor update, they couldn't heal their own ship as turrets either, so ships couldn't be self healing. They could have repairing drone fleets though.

Oh, I always forget about the astrotech beams... they seem so useless given they don't replace blocks.

Yeah this would be a potential solution as well. We have blueprints in the cores, so they'd be able to know what block needs to be added back. It could make for some really cool mechanisms, like "car-wash" style systems where you could dock a small ship and it goes through a bunch of repair beams. Or there is like a repair arm which moves a beam back and forth over the entire ship. I like the idea that it needs multiple passes as well to fully repair, 1-pass to replace blocks, 1-pass to repair blocks.