shipyard dock to center of dimensions.

[DrTarDIS]

Stop docking to the core in a shipyard. have the ship "dock" to it's center-of-dimensions. this will move as the ship is expanded upon,

This small change will allow every single 45*45*45 ship to dock/be built in a 50*50*50 shipyard.
The current mechanics would require all those 45^3 ships to have their core within five units of the ship's center to be produced in the above shipyard. Woe-be to the 45*45*10 fighter that's core is in the noze, fir it will not "fit" is the above shipyard, as it's ass is too big for it's small front end.

 

[nogg]

YES!!!! every one of my ships cores are in a different position, docking ships in shipyards to the center of balance would be great.

 

[terra mining corp.]

or just make the shipyard anchor so it can logic switch with pickup rail.and place pickups in different locations?

 

[PLIX]

great idea
[doublepost=1480932526,1480932483][/doublepost]

or just make the shipyard anchor so it can logic switch with pickup rail.and place pickups in different locations?

that would be a bit more coplicated to make and use if i understabd you correctly

 

[splatthecat]

How about being able to place multiple anchors within the shipyard? This might be easier to program.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

How about being able to place multiple anchors within the shipyard?

I dunno about the programming, that's nearly allways a tricky endeavor. (if nothing else, new stuff tends to introduce new bugs) I do, however, agree that having more than one anchor per computer would be quite usefull.

I currently have a Shipyard, that contains 3 different "shipyards" within one enourmous yard.
I dressed up the arms so it'd look like one large yard, and the whole reason was due to my various ships having a variety of core placements.
(and me not wanting to dick-around with truly separated yards, this station was being difficult to design allready)

EX: cores were mostly forward for a civillian/cargoship/Star Trek-replica, mostly centered for most of the military/miners, mostly aft for the "spinal gun" destroyers/special ordnance ships.
Then there were all the ships I'd patch up for anyone who dropped by, never quite knew where they'd put the core.

Building the "shipyard control room" got to be so annoying, I gave up and built three identical clones, and put in a fast-rail linking them. (shootout rails were soooooo usefull for that)

Most of my difficulties would have been greatly reduced (I'd still be overall terrible at designing it) if I could have properly used more than one anchor per computer.

 

[BDLS]

I suggested this when shipyards came out, one of the devs said it couldn't be done. Not sure why seems easy enough mathematically and to remove the dumb anchor block.

 

[jayman38]

I suggested this when shipyards came out, one of the devs said it couldn't be done. Not sure why seems easy enough mathematically and to remove the dumb anchor block.

Well, it's not impossible, but very very time-consuming. I imagine that moving the ship whenever the CoM shifts would be the lag equivalent of moving-and-pasting the entire ship. Every time you place a block or group of blocks. This would not be an issue for tiny ships, but for the titans that everybody builds, it would be a lengthy process that would make the game unfun for about an hour, during which the server calculated the new block positions. If things like more advanced build helpers and fill-with-block helpers are implemented, massive changes could be calculated all at once, reducing the pain, but until those things are in place, moving-and-pasting entire ships are just too painful to consider for such a widely-used game mechanic.

 

[Gmodism]

Yes this should be made now! If the old docking system could adjust how to dock this should be piece of cake

seems easy enough mathematically

as well as it seems very easy enough...
We want this now! ^^

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

[

I imagine that moving the ship whenever the CoM shifts would be the lag equivalent of moving-and-pasting the entire ship. Every time you place a block or group of blocks.

I see where you're going, and have a somewhat simple solution.

Both of these "checks" are run, and either can trigger it. (obviously, not both at the same time, that'd flippin stoopid.)
Only run the adjustment on docking.
Only run the adjustment when a new block would exceed the physical bounds of the shipyard. (yes, this would mean we'd have to be able to place blocks outside the shipyard, at least untill all possible room along that axis is used)

 

[KiloZulu]

The file is going to contain the maximum dimensions of the ship, and the shipyard has bounding box dimensions of its own - why can't it just center the ship in the yard based on that? Why does it need a block at all?

 

[BDLS]

Well, it's not impossible, but very very time-consuming. I imagine that moving the ship whenever the CoM shifts would be the lag equivalent of moving-and-pasting the entire ship. Every time you place a block or group of blocks. This would not be an issue for tiny ships, but for the titans that everybody builds, it would be a lengthy process that would make the game unfun for about an hour, during which the server calculated the new block positions. If things like more advanced build helpers and fill-with-block helpers are implemented, massive changes could be calculated all at once, reducing the pain, but until those things are in place, moving-and-pasting entire ships are just too painful to consider for such a widely-used game mechanic.

If you're making something new, you can just place the core first like how you would center on something in the galaxy map.

Then you simply just can't place blocks outside the bounding box of the shipyard dimensions.

No need to re-calculate.

 

[DrTarDIS]

mmm-hmm, so you only update position every time it's re-loaded? Eg sector loads/unloads, shipyard activated-de-activated, ship docking event occurs. Basicly, whever it would already be being done(though based off of core location, not center-of-entity(different than center-of-mass)

 

[Az14el]

this + large core forward ships

did you know I have a 530m long ship that needs a 950m long shipyard if anchored centrally? whad de fuk :D
Thankfully we can move the shipyard anchor for now

 

[jayman38]

If you're making something new, you can just place the core first like how you would center on something in the galaxy map.

Then you simply just can't place blocks outside the bounding box of the shipyard dimensions.

No need to re-calculate.

I do a lot of pre-planning, so this works fine for me (and is basically how shipyards worked anyway). However, many builders don't really have a plan for their ship when they start, so the core could easily be at one end of a long ship. (Examples: A bridge pod at the rear of a cruiser, or a cockpit in the nose of a corvette.)

It's easy enough to make a shipyard to accommodate a well-planned ship, but I didn't think this suggestion was aimed at those carefully-planned ships. This suggestion seems to be aimed at seat-of-their-pants builders.

Updating the ship position whenever the ship approaches the edge of the shipyard would definitely be a good optimization, per Lord_Greyscale's post #10, versus moving it with every placed block. (Caveat: the update needs to happen whenever an edge of the ship approaches the edge of the shipyard minus the maximum advanced-build-mode-dimension, in order to avoid problems with mass-placing beyond the shipyard bounding box.)

 

[splatthecat]

Ok, how about this..

Instead of having multiple anchors or some kind of anchor that appears centre of the shipyard in all planes but somehow centres itself to the core of the docked ship we could, if the anchor has to be a single fixed point, have an advanced build feature accessed from within the shipyard computer that places a "grid" between all of the shipyard modules that the core anchor (and core anchor only) can be easily placed at ANY point within the shipyard area.

My thinking behind this is we already have the code to sense the shipyard volume and an advanced build feature. In theory, it should be possible to add this in so that it wouldn't be a lagfest with dozens of collision calculations being made in real time.

It would save having to build towers of blocks in order to place the anchor in position and then remember to remove them after!

 

[JNC]

Two years later, still relevant suggestion... Ship core no longer has to be placed at ships center for flying around, but is essentially still required to be placed center of mass for shipyards, or the shipyard will have to be much larger than should be. Why not just allow the shipyard to dock to a raildocker?? Ship design could just have a docker placed near its center just for the purpose of using shipyards... seems simple.

 

[nightwalker_007]

Two years later, still relevant suggestion... Ship core no longer has to be placed at ships center for flying around, but is essentially still required to be placed center of mass for shipyards, or the shipyard will have to be much larger than should be. Why not just allow the shipyard to dock to a raildocker?? Ship design could just have a docker placed near its center just for the purpose of using shipyards... seems simple.

Because the ship core serves as the starting point of ship construction. Shipyards are for building ships, not docking them... Now, there's nothing stopping you from building a shipyard with a rail docker build into it.

 

[JNC]

Because the ship core serves as the starting point of ship construction. Shipyards are for building ships, not docking them... Now, there's nothing stopping you from building a shipyard with a rail docker build into it.

Because a ships core must be "docked" to the shipyard core anchor in order to be built / repaired you either have to build a shipyard specific to a ship design or build an excessively large shipyard in order to accommodate even small ships.... simple because their cores are placed in places other than the ships center....