Ship Repair & 'Schematic'

[Achriel]

When my ship gets beat up it hard to fix, especially non-visible damage. To that end I thought of a change to the 'Repair Beam' and adding a 'schematic' of the ship before it was damaged.

1st off in the Structures menu area add an ' Update Schematic' for the ship. This is like a memory of this specific ship at the time the button is pressed, only one 'schematic' unique to each ship so when repairing it will be repaired to this template. Changes are remembered by updating (press the button) and it's automatically created from the catalog when 1st made. Ok, so we now have a point of reference for repairing a damaged ship.

Next the Astro beam needs to work from the longest range 'backwards' to the beam source, fixing damage as it's found from the range limit back. The more powerful the beam the longer the range etc.. but perhaps it repairs slower at greater distances. This keeps the beam from being 'blocked' by undamaged blocks and the visual of the beam growing shorter let the operator know if somethign is being repaired (you see a beam it's fixing something).

So here is where it all comes together. The Beam now repairs from inside out on your ship, no more unseen damage. Missing blocks are detected by compairing the 'schematic' and blocks needed are supplied from personal inventory.. if not there then purchased from a nearby shop at going rates or a notification on-screen of a block type being unavailable. By having the beam also remove unwanted blocks (not on the schematic) it would undo mistakes and patches as needed.

This should help on release when not everyone can fix a large damaged ship. It might also allow many people to fix the same ship at one time using many inventories. I know I woudl find it useful. Hope I explained by idea well enough

 

[darktoes]

This sounds near perfect, now just let us make turrets that do this and space stations can actually be useful (as well as the repair beams).

 

[Imperial_Gold]

Add this with LunaMoonbringer\'s shipyard idea, and I think we have something VERY special. http://star-made.org/content/shipyard-1 Now if the shipyard could restore the destroyed blocks (by taking the amount of blocks needed from your inventory or a chest linked to the shipyard) you could then use the beam on the damaged blocks. Also, It would be a nice thing to have if the Astro Tech Computer sorta \"highlight\" damaged blocks so you know where to repair.

 

[Achriel]

Instead of beam we could make the Astro Tech a \'field\' in that it is an omni-directional effect that works at a range from the control or emitter block. This would play well into making the repair function a \'shipyard\' based block that could be used to create a bay for repairing any ships that enter the bay. It could still be used on small repair ship.

A plex storage next to the control could be its block supply or have it manually operated and use the players inventory (or shop inventory).

 

[Syzygy]

I really like the idea. However, it would take a toll on server memory, because it would have to store a blueprint for every single ship on the server (very many). People tend to modify ships, personalize them off from what blueprints are now.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

That won\'t be the case. It would be like it is now. They pilot would have to make a blueprint on the server for this to work.

 

[Curithwin]

I think this is a great idea. The schematic would only need to be the vessel you have, so if you up date it you can press an \"Update Schematic\" to update it to the newest iteration.



This would also allow you to bring in REPAIR bays where you fly and dock (at the repair bay docking block) on to it and in the shop you could chose repair vessel and it\'ll cost you x credits to do it.

 

[Syzygy]

They pilot would have to make a blueprint on the server for this to work.


And that is why there would be a ton of blueprints. If each player only has one blueprint slot for their current ship, its still a huge amount of data on servers.

 

[Achriel]

Potentially it\'s double the storage for each ship & station on the server but is it really all that much (storage is cheap)? We already store every planet and it\'s state and that is millions of blocks per planet. The Schemartic could also be stored locally on the client comuter but having servers do server fucntions is probably best.

Keep in mind the schematic isn\'t \'active\' in server memory, it\'s a file for compairison during repair. Schematics will use hard drive space but not active memory.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

People already have tons of blueprints on their servers.