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This is a script I created to assist in the placement of stations on a regular lattice. Anyone who has ever completed a few station building missions will know how easy it is to simply
This script adds a command to the the special commands menu of TL ships with trade command software mk3 installed, "deploy placement beacons". One navigation relay satellite is required in the cargo of the TL for each nav beacon deployed.
There are two options for station placement.
The first creates a spherical array of nav beacons in a cubic close packed lattice. This is designed to be best for complexes between a few dozen and several hundred stations. There is no hard coded limit to the number of stations, but I make no guarantee of performance beyond a few hundred. If there are less than a few dozen stations, this may look kind of silly as it will be a heavily pixelated sphere.
For smaller complexes, I created the next option: a simple single level hexagonal grid. This is ideal for the placement of most food/bio/energy complexes because the way the nodes are placed on the models will allow for nicely aligned tubes.
There will be 2*(w*h + w + h) stations in such a grid, so for example a one by one grid will have spots for 6 stations.
Uses page ID 9433 and command slot 557.
This is my first script, so feedback both positive and negative is welcome!
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If your wondering what sizes are good for the minimum station distances, I've found that 1km is good for small tech fabs, 2km should be sufficient for all the food facilities, M or L, and 4-5 km is sufficient for SPP XL and mines.
There is, of course, nothing stopping from using this script recursively, say to make a lattice with a separation of 20km, then several smaller spheres of hundreds of stations at each of the nodes. Well, nothing but creditsss and your computer
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[Edit 8/10/2011]
New version. Added hex grid placement option, fixed some overflow bugs that led to rounding errors, fixed issue with double placement of a few of the beacons.
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