Hey all, I've been tinkering with CV's in Survival this evening, which leads to this question... Basically, I have a small, armed CV in my current survival game. It's near the T2 CPU limit for several valid gameplay reasons - I've "specialised" it - and is not capable of Warping, unless of course I increase its CPU cap, which isn't possible yet. I thought it'd be fun to resurrect an old CV design of mine, but build it again from scratch in this Survival session. Basically it's a flat-top carrier CV designed to hold multiple HV's and SV's on its large open deck area. With the advent of CV to CV docking some time back, I thought I'd expand on this idea to allow CV's to dock to this Warp-Capable Carrier. Now, my small CV has internal docking space only, in which it can fit several SV's though currently has just one multi-role SV docked. Of course, this SV being docked to the small CV, means said CV cannot dock at the "Carrier" CV. Naturally I just move the SV to the Carrier CV and all is well, however, this isn't really ideal is it? I want to be able to Warp to a system then hop into (or teleport to, which is pretty cool and convenient lol) to my small CV. However, I then have to exit the smaller CV, space walk over to the Carrier CV, get into the SV and park it on the small CV - that's just faffing around. Ideally, once this feature matures, we'll genuinely be able to have a vessel that's docked at a vessel with lots of other vessels docked at it that's docked at another vessel. Phew. You get what I mean though. Convenient and organised and no micro-management moving assets around. THIS is CV "specialisation". Something the Devs have tried to encourage with the CPU system. However, it's a little...unfinished due to the lack of "nested" docking I feel. Is this something that's being worked on? I know it's been discussed in the past and I thought the intent was to eventually improve on things, with the current limited CV to CV docking (and SV to HV, HV to SV etc. etc.) being the first step, with more flexible docking to follow. Not a game-breaker, but it is a pain to have ships with multiple smaller assets docked at them to have to undock all those assets in order to be able to dock themselves. This breaks specialisation to a degree, and I don't think my use-case here is anything particularly wild is it? Basically, I have a small, armed "local" (non-warp) CV, with smaller vessels docked to it (just one at the mo) which offer greater utility for that CV. It's a specialised planetary explorer ship with a tender, in effect. I then have the large, unarmed Carrier-class CV which is purely for carrying said smaller CV. Like I said, I'm just playing around here, but it seems a valid use-case for specialised CV's (and vessels in general) is made less useful / user friendly. Sure, I could build a bigger "super carrier" CV - I've done that in the past - and just dock EVERYTHING to it always, but that does take a lot away from the utility. Plus, there's the resource issues here. Everything in both these CV's has been mined / scavenged from the starter planet and moon, I need to warp to find more resources. I might be able to reach somewhere with a warp-capable SV, but I cannot leave the system, and I want all my assets with me at all times. Anyway, I waffled - it happens from time to time - but, when all is said and done - being able to have "nested" docking working would be GREAT. Cheers, Scoob.
I have a similar approach that would benefit from nested docking. I'd like to have a large "carrier CV" that does all the space stuff including combat and a smallish "landing cv" that's just for planetary operations without a warp drive and space turrets. Right now in single player it's kind of a pain to micro manage all your docked vessels just to work this system. I really don't enjoy the idea of shifting HVs around in space. Plus what if I want to just utilize a bare bones CV warp frame? You can't really do that atm.
That is in essence what I was trying to achieve in my current game, it's not practical though. I mean, here are the steps I just followed after warping to a new system: 1 - Approach Planet in my Carrier SV and park in orbit. 2 - Walk up to the docked smaller CV and climb aboard. 3 - Undock smaller CV and park in space next to Carrier CV. 4 - Space suit over to Carrier CV. 5 - Climb aboard SV docked on Carrier. 6 - Fly SV to smaller CV and dock 7 - Repeat steps 4 through 6 depending on any other docked assets. 8 - Finally fly my smaller CV down to the planet, leaving the "jump harness" Carrier CV parked in space. Ideally, I wanted to dock several smaller CV's at the Carrier CV, each with it's own utility tenders, such as Scout SV's, Freighter-type SV's, Mining and Tank HV's etc. I'd want each smaller CV to have it's own dedicated tenders and not have to swap things around each time, it's a pain. As an aside to this and more of a generalisation of docking in general. We need the ability to be able to reverse the dock. What do I mean by that? Well, currently if I want to pick up an HV in one of my "Lifter Class" SV's it goes as follows: 1 - Fly to HV in SV 2 - Land SV 3 - Get out of SV, walk to HV and get in 4 - Drive HV to SV and dock Why not: 1 - Fly to HV in SV 2 - "Dock" SV to HV then reverse the dock, i.e. HV becomes docked the SV, not the other way around. Being able to swoop in and quickly pick up a deployed HV without leaving the SV would be great. Convenient in Single Player and really great gameplay in Multi. Obviously context is important here and mainly applies to SV / HV docking as per the example. Back to my original point. I want to embrace this whole "Specialisation" thing that the devs implemented CPU to encourage. However, current docking rules do not support this in practical terms. Having a large collection of various vessels, each with potentially other vessels docked to them, ALL coming together to dock on the "Super Carrier" Warp Ship would be great. However, currently it's a micro-management nightmare. Remember, this is coming from someone who just plays Single Player, so must cause extreme frustrations when a group of players try to work together. I.e. Several players, each with CV's with their own compliment of HV's and SV's docked but no Warp capacity as the CPU is spent elsewhere specialising their CV's for a given role(s). Another player has spent their CPU on a Large, Warp-capable specialised CV, but when members of the Faction come in to dock, there are 101 SV's and HV's to manually dock first. Not fun gameplay that. Scoob.
I've heard XCaliber call this "manual docking" in his streams. Something they could maybe add in the P menu? I believe I read somewhere before that it's an issue to implement because of how the parent/child relationship works in the engine but I'm not positive. It would certainly help if you want an HV that docks under an SV. As setting up easy SV cockpit access in this scenario can be difficult or an eyesore.
Thanks for sharing that. I do understand, with how things are currently implemented, that it might not be so simple. However, if they're going to add everything docking with everything then it needs to work a bit better, and more intuitively, than it does. I've barely touched docking vessels to other vessels outside of the basic HV / SV to CV due to how clunky it is. I tried again this game, hence my posting about it, but it's still not really that workable. I think, as you mention, a Control Panel option - ideally also mappable to a hot key - would be a good way to reverse simple manual docking between two vessels such as HV/HV, SV/SV and HV/SV. This could work with the current docking implementation fairly well I'd expect, certainly less involved than docked vessels with docked vessels aboard for sure. Scoob.
This has been a long-time issue, and it has to do with how Unity handles constructs. I've heard the full explanation a while ago, and it's somewhat convoluted, but ultimately it is a Unity thing. Personally I'd just be happy to have CV's able to dock with BA's, but again, this has something to do with how these are descended.
Ah, it's a core Unity issues rather than Empyrion its self? Wasn't aware of that. Hopefully it's something that can be sorted, but I wonder how many Unity games currently would benefit from it outside of Empyrion? Scoob.
Planet Nomads, also Unity-based, allowed for landing of one kind of craft on another, without any real limitation, though there were some glitches unique to this as well. It's not purely a Unity issue, but a good 80-90% of it is. I believe the term used for constructs like this are "grids" and docking one construct to another means merging two separate grids to act as one grid, and that's kind of where things go weird. In PN, early versions of this often caused smaller craft to be catapulted from larger ones, sometimes hundreds, or thousands of miles from where they should have been. Here, we just have ships that fall off of, or out of, other ships when that connection of grids is broken.
Guess we'll see if it can be resolved. I remember when there was a time that anything other than CV to BA, HV/SV to CV / BA was deemed not possible, but the devs got it working...to a degree. Scoob.
