Visual Idea : building drones for Aux Ships (to repair L-XL ships)

[aurelcourt]

Hi,

I just happened to F3-watch one of my destroyers going for repairs to the AUX after a battle.
It felt visually disappointing. Having to go through a whole docking procedure, and then magically having the hull go to 100% in 1 tick... immersion breaking

Why not have the damaged ship fly next to the AUX (say 1-3km?), in a random position (no need to align anything or dock), and have the AUX send building drones to repair it over time?.
It could also go +5%/sec to give an impression of progression.

That way, the AUX could repair several ships at the same time if they're close enough, and visually it would be a hell of an improvement to watch this !! I already love the way the building drones work, and they're super fast.

Of course, all that could be completely disabled in low attention, it's only eye-candy if we happen to be in the the Carrier or AUX nearby

[chew-ie]

I like it Besides the improvement in terms of immersion it'd also solve some problems.

Right now the docking-on-aux-ships has a few quirks (too slow, signal events stacking at the aux ship with disproportionate timers blocking every new docking request). In general drones decoupled from the pathfinding fix a lot of docking related problems - like e.g. the crew-transfer-drones fixed quite nicely the very cumbersome crew transfer. I wish they'd use the same mechanic for ware transfer.

[magitsu]

What if.... that one mod who someone hastily made for Captain Collins was on to something: Repair laser on a ship. It could provide some visualization while avoiding the usual drone pathing hassles. It could be strictly Aux thing with green beam or something distinct.

[flywlyx]

Current capital ship docking is way too slow, I prefer the repair laser idea.

[Manawydn]

Just let repair drones affect hull as well as ships other than the host via setting (on by default for carriers/auxiliaries)