Shipyard tweak - Ghost ship if too big

[Echinos]

When trying to construct a shipyard, or trying to use a shipyard for a particular ship, if the ship is too big or if for some reason the core block is somewhere that making the ship dock there is not possible, at the moment you only get a message to that effect.

I would suggest that when you load a design, you still somehow get to see a ghost representation of the ship where the shipyard core would make it dock, even if it's too big etc, so that you then have an idea of what modifications need to be made to the shipyard to accommodate the ship. The ghost could be shaded red to indicate it doesn't have a valid placement.

Ideally the ghost representation would persist so that it was visible while you were making changes to the shipyard, and possibly it could change color/shading to indicate when it has a valid placement.

 

[Blaza612]

This should be done for docking in general, as not knowing why a ship doesn't fit onto a dock is extremely painful.

 

[kiraen]

You might as well enlarge your swimming pool without emptying it first.
The arms/struts define the area the shipyard can work in. Without that definition, the shipyard can not work. The shipyard can't do anything outside this area. If you disassemble the arms the shipyard is disabled and shuts off.

It is not possible to project the hologram outside the struts, it us not possible to project the holograms with incomplete struts.

You might be able to make new struts outside the existing ones and then transfer them over, but it will still 'reboot' the shipyard and unload the design.

If you can't auto dock because your ship is to big, fly it in manually. Look for the places that you actually run into. That's the part that's to big.

 

[Echinos]

I can see your point, but I see 2 main uses for starters:
1) If you are building a shipyard to accommodate a particular ship, you can build 1 arc and see where to go from there (which is what prompted this idea for me)
2) It allows you to see if the docking direction makes the ship collide with something, in case the anchor is pointed the wrong way or there is something colliding that you didn't see etc.