Alpha 8.5 - Feedback: Modular Wings & Pylons

I'm missing this shape.
Dont look at my drawing skill.
But its a straight wing 1 or 2 blocks shifted.

But the widest and the 'smallest' size both are the same length, thought it was 7 for large ones.

Now the only wing you can repeat and fits on the same shape is the straight one. The rest are only followed by medium and then a small one.

 

Cut all your wings down the middle to have sloped edge blocks, and flat middle plane blocks.



This lets people stack up arbitrarily large wing, so they can make huge, 20, 25 block sized wings for big planes.

 

Very nice feature in general. A few comments:

• Attaching pylons is unintuitive. In my experience I have to go to the other side of the wing of where I want it to go, to attach it right. It seemed backwards. I should see the pylon on the side of the wing I am looking at.
• You can't attach pylons both above and below a wing in the same position. I think you should be able to do that, either by having a "double pylon" block, or by relaxing the restriction on having multiple objects in the same position, which seems to be how pylons already work.
• To me the term "pylon" here was not intuitive. I would probably call it a "mount" because you are generally using it to mount either weapons or thrusters.
• For a new user the difference between "wings" and "modular wings" is not going to be obvious. I also think the name "modular wings" is not quite right - it makes sense as the name of a feature, but once you build one of them, you have not created a "modular wing" but you have created one piece of a wing. So perhaps it should be "Wing" vs. "Wing Section" (or "Wing Part").

Some more advanced suggestions:

• Add an "Extra Large" version of each, that is 9 units long.
• It would be nice if the modular wings were allowed for CV.
• Right now all wings are in a flat plane. It would be nice if there were wings that angled upward at 30 degrees and 45 degrees, respectively. See an X-Wing or Bird of Prey for examples of where this sort of thing is used. What would be really flexible is if there was a block type in the game called a "joint" that could be set to any angle, and have stuff mounted on it. If you mounted wings on that then you could get any angle.
• You should be able to mount lights on the wing properly. Right now you can put lights/flares on pylons or connectors but they don't really mount elsewhere on the wing without "floating". They should be able to mount on the wing surface much like pylons.
• Add a variant of the connector that can be used to mount weapons, thrusters, or other devices in alignment with the wing. Below is a picture of where I have put a gatling gun and thruster. It would be nice if there was a "magic something" that could cover these and make it look like a more natural part of the wing.

 

Sort of related to this: Can we have collapsible wings? If you take the modular wings and imagine that they could fold sort of like an accordion, you could then retract the wings somewhat by folding them down to a single block width. This might just be a special section that you can't attach a pylon to.

There are airplanes and jet fighters with folding wings now, for example the F-14. I think this is usually for aerodynamic reasons but some aircraft can also fold wings so they fit into tight spaces. I saw this when I toured an aircraft carrier once but I'm not that knowledgeable about planes so I have no recollection of what planes I was looking at. I just remember seeing how they could fold up their wings to fit more planes side-by-side in the ship's hangar.

After the retractable turrets, fixed weapons, and landing gear, I'd like to see the idea applied in a way that could make a ship with long wings fit into a narrower hangar. And the wing folding could be hooked up to a proximity sensor so as you approach the hangar maybe they just fold up automatically.

 

More feedback:

• Hitpoints are too low. Hitpoints should really be calculated something like this: Take hitpoints of steel block. Multiply by number of blocks the wing takes up. Take a percentage of that (e.g. 75%). Otherwise, it is crazy to use a wing instead of just building it out of steel blocks, they're too fragile.
• See previous bullet. Add "Heavy Wings" which are the same, but made out of hardened steel instead. Correspondingly heavier, but with higher HP.
• Can we have them for HV? What I really want are more like "fins" I guess. But the modular wings would work great, if only I could attach them.

 

at the moment there's only an angular shape for one of the modules.
I think a nice update would be to have angular version of the others as well