[suggestion] Hovercraft parking brick (garage)

[Uncle-Ulty]

To make the explanation as simple as possible, we have the shipyard brick, where we can set some configurations and it allows us to dock a small ship inside a bigger ship or on a station.

A hovercraft parking brick would do the same as the shipyard brick, but for hovercrafts. Why am I saying that? Well, currently the only way to transport hovercrafts is using maglocks, and it isn't so easy to use them, cuz the hovercrafts act erratically inside/near other objects.

Elite dangerous' ships have this kind of mechanism that transports landing vehicles, and you can equip it in your ship. This brick would also allow AI ships to operate with land vehicles too, with a simpler code/logic, instead of a complicated maglock-based garage system...

[tsunamayo]

Hi, well I havent planed this for hovercraft, the plan was more to use the maglock (it is what maglock are for...). Now instead of giving up on maglock why not simply fixing them? Tell me what is wrong with them and I will improve them. Cheers

[kynamats]

I've had a lot of issues using maglocks and hovers in the past. There are a couple that i can think of that really get in the way of using them fluidly:

• if a hovercraft is turned on while still attached to a maglock, when that maglock is tuned off it will launch itself and embed in any nearby entity. my suggestion to get around this is to have maglocks automatically lock on to any entity that the player stops controlling, and let go of any entity that the player starts controlling.
• driving a hovercraft on another entity can be difficult, as some bricks/entities seem not to have collisions for hover pods to repel off. This makes the construction of large, detailed interior 'garages' a wasted effort.

[Uncle-Ulty]

Hi, well I havent planed this for hovercraft, the plan was more to use the maglock (it is what maglock are for...). Now instead of giving up on maglock why not simply fixing them? Tell me what is wrong with them and I will improve them. Cheers

Maglocks are useful, and they can be useful to handle containers and other smaller objects. But I think a "garage" brick would make things easier to merge hovercraft ad spacecraft gameplay. Once the planet's surface becomes available, tons of players gonna carry their hovercrafts around, between planets and moons. Also, I believe the garage brick would make it easier to code AI behavior to load and unload hovercrafts on the surface. If the Lua script becomes available in the future, for every player to code their missions, this would be even easier, I guess...

but it's not an urgent concept, just some idea to make a more fluid gameplay :D

[Dwarf-LordPangolin]

The maglock is a very useful block, but it does not have a "snapping" ability; that is, it will not cause things that it's locked to to snap to a specific location and orientation, which is very important in connecting vehicles together. This is particularly true in areas like hangars or vehicle garages that tend to be a bit cramped. The maglock seems better suited for schlepping things around on an ad hoc basis, not for designated parking.

That said, I'm not sure we need a garage block, although Uncle-Ulty does raise a very good point about AI behavior. For player-use, I think that once the docking connector is properly functional, that will serve the need for an attachment point for hover vehicles -- assuming it causes connected objects to align with each other and move as one, which I think most of us have been assuming.