Docked ships and dock reconstruction - can we block a dock for landing?

[Good Wizard]

Hello,

this was discussed several times: We know, that ships still on a dock will be destroyed, if the dock is destroyed, because of rebuilding or changing the station.

There seems to be a rather strange thing, if a ship leaves the dock after reconstruction started: It seems to be flagged as destroyed, despite the fact it sill exists and flies, but with strange behavior. No idea if this is fixed yet.

A dock COULD be blocked for reconstruction if there are still ships docked, but this was not done yet, I think.

I just once removed a dock from my fairly new and empty player HQ, and knowing what happens to docked ships I made sure all my (few) ships were not docked there. So no problem.

But now I have a very busy production station, which offers silicon wafers, chips and advanced electronics. It has a Argon 3M/6S dock and is so busy that sometimes (once every hour or so) ships are going to storage because of huge demand. These ships are station traders which belong to me, but at least 20% of the ships belong to factions. which do trade with my station.

Question: What must I do, to ensure no ships are docked when I - for example - want to rebuild the dock? I can stop trading entirely, remove all station traders from stations control and park the in free space. But what about the faction ships? Do I really have to stop trading entirely?

The reason is, if I build a new dock (in addition to the existing and busy dock), without touching the old dock, this will work and traffic will distribute to the other new dock in some way. But even with a new dock I cannot delete the old dock, because it still will be used.

I think we need a 'block docking' command which allows us to refuse landing on a specific dock on our station. This way after a short waiting period all docked ships will have started (except ships put to storage ourselves, but this will be our responsibility) and the dock will be empty and remain empty, because docking (landing) is blocked. Is this a feasible idea? A station should have control about who docks and (if more than one dock) where. We have to ask docking privileges, but I never heard a 'NO'. If the faction allows docking for me, it will work. Anywhere.
How about a bit of better management for docks on our stations?

[Casishur]

this works at least to a limited extent, but it does work. I did this back then to dismantle a large shipyard in order to rebuild it at a different location.

With the help of the trade rules it is possible to forbid the players and the computer to trade. This way you can prevent ships from landing on the station to trade, at least for the time being

First set the trade forbid to All. This will forbid all computer factions to trade with the station. only the player is left. Now remove him from the list and voila all factions are restricted from trading.


das funktioniert zumindest begrentzt aber es funkioniert. Das habe ich damals gemacht, um eine Große Werft abzubauen, um sie an einer anderen stelle neu zu bauen.

Mithilfe des Handelsregeln ist es möglich Den Spieler sowie den Computer komblettes Handels verbot zu erteilen. damit kann man zumindest vorerst unterbinden das weiter Schiffe auf der Station zum handeln landen wollen

Zuerst setzt man dort Handels verbot auf Alle. Dadurch werden alle Computer fraktionen verboten mit der Station zu handel. nur noch der Spieler ist vorhanden. Nun Entfernt man nun auch ihn von der List und voila alle Fraktionen für den Handel begrenzt.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 3346070750
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 3346070713

[LameFox]

For removing a dock I have just tended to grab nearby ships and tell them to go away. NPCs that are too close I cancel their trades. Then if you pause before entering plan build and removing modules, no new ships can land while you aren't looking, and I don't think the module can be used in the process of dissolving so no more should land on it after.

One thing I'm not sure about is if you removed a lot at once, whether they can all dissolve simultaneously or there's a limit that might let some ships creep back in. But you can check this in plan build, as it shows their progress in a countdown.

[BitByte]

I have done plenty of stations rebuilding in my previous save.
Like adviced build new (temporary) dock and when it's ready you can remove old dock.
Ships will stop using it when dismantle process starts.

It's ok to remove multiple modules at the same time because all of them will be dismantled same time (not one by one like construction).
Ising pause is also good option as then you are aware the station status while make changes and cannot see the map.

[azaghal]

I think we need a 'block docking' command which allows us to refuse landing on a specific dock on our station. This way after a short waiting period all docked ships will have started (except ships put to storage ourselves, but this will be our responsibility) and the dock will be empty and remain empty, because docking (landing) is blocked. Is this a feasible idea? A station should have control about who docks and (if more than one dock) where. We have to ask docking privileges, but I never heard a 'NO'. If the faction allows docking for me, it will work. Anywhere.
How about a bit of better management for docks on our stations?

While the ability to manage docks would introduce some interesting options (like reserving the best spots for your own ships etc), personally I think that ships should not just automatically get destroyed when a dock they have landed at (or are in storage of) gets deconstructed. The first time this happened to me - with an NPC faction - initially I was confused, and then just baffled that my ship did not simply launch prior to dock getting deconstructed. It made zero sense to me that I have a pilot just sitting in the ship and watching the construction robots take them out of existence alongside the ship without any kind of reaction (even a simple "Boss, they are about to destroy the ship you have parked over here").

So, instead of all the complex management options being added for this particular use-case, why not simply have the game issue a take off order to all landed/stored ships, alongside to not allowing any new docking operations to proceed?

There is a couple of things that would require handling in terms of what the evicted ships do, but it would probably boil down to:

• Ships that have explicit dock-and-wait order could re-dock on another dock of the same station if available.
• Ships with some other type of behaviour would simply try to continue with their current order etc (this could mean trying to redock to complete the order as well).
• If all else fails, ships should just idle in space, and player would get a notification for his/her own ships.

Spoiler

Show

In some ways, there is already something like this implemented in the game - ships running away from the tide.

Am I really missing something (non-)obvious here on why something like this is not already part of the game?

[Good Wizard]

I think we need a 'block docking' command which allows us to refuse landing on a specific dock on our station. This way after a short waiting period all docked ships will have started (except ships put to storage ourselves, but this will be our responsibility) and the dock will be empty and remain empty, because docking (landing) is blocked. Is this a feasible idea? A station should have control about who docks and (if more than one dock) where. We have to ask docking privileges, but I never heard a 'NO'. If the faction allows docking for me, it will work. Anywhere.
How about a bit of better management for docks on our stations?

While the ability to manage docks would introduce some interesting options (like reserving the best spots for your own ships etc), personally I think that ships should not just automatically get destroyed when a dock they have landed at (or are in storage of) gets deconstructed. The first time this happened to me - with an NPC faction - initially I was confused, and then just baffled that my ship did not simply launch prior to dock getting deconstructed. It made zero sense to me that I have a pilot just sitting in the ship and watching the construction robots take them out of existence alongside the ship without any kind of reaction (even a simple "Boss, they are about to destroy the ship you have parked over here").

So, instead of all the complex management options being added for this particular use-case, why not simply have the game issue a take off order to all landed/stored ships, alongside to not allowing any new docking operations to proceed?

There is a couple of things that would require handling in terms of what the evicted ships do, but it would probably boil down to:

• Ships that have explicit dock-and-wait order could re-dock on another dock of the same station if available.
• Ships with some other type of behaviour would simply try to continue with their current order etc (this could mean trying to redock to complete the order as well).
• If all else fails, ships should just idle in space, and player would get a notification for his/her own ships.

Spoiler

Show

In some ways, there is already something like this implemented in the game - ships running away from the tide.

Am I really missing something (non-)obvious here on why something like this is not already part of the game?

All things you mention are good ideas - but I fear that the simple scripts used won't allow these kind of things. If a ship has landed and fulfills an order (buy/sell), this is probably not interruptible. I think the 'destroy all ships during deconstruction' is a very simple solution, which can cleanly interrupt everything just running, because the running command becomes irrelevant, since the ship ceases to exist. The reports for strange behavior after this happens (invisible ships running around as a sort of Zombie for a while) show, that something seems to wrap up wrongly despite the brutal 'solution'.
But I do not know the scripts, this is only a guess.

The question is, can a script coming from reconstruction (destroy dock) order wake up all ships scripts for docked ships (Dock&Wait, Trade, ...) and bring them to do something useful, without totally disrupting the current order?

But yes I agree, just destroying ships is a lazy solution, which never should have been done, and fixed long ago...

[flywlyx]

All things you mention are good ideas - but I fear that the simple scripts used won't allow these kind of things. If a ship has landed and fulfills an order (buy/sell), this is probably not interruptible. I think the 'destroy all ships during deconstruction' is a very simple solution, which can cleanly interrupt everything just running, because the running command becomes irrelevant, since the ship ceases to exist. The reports for strange behavior after this happens (invisible ships running around as a sort of Zombie for a while) show, that something seems to wrap up wrongly despite the brutal 'solution'.
But I do not know the scripts, this is only a guess.

The question is, can a script coming from reconstruction (destroy dock) order wake up all ships scripts for docked ships (Dock&Wait, Trade, ...) and bring them to do something useful, without totally disrupting the current order?

But yes I agree, just destroying ships is a lazy solution, which never should have been done, and fixed long ago...

The most practical approach is to do the opposite: disable all docks and delay deconstruction until all ships have undocked. However, I’m not sure if there’s actually a script that can control the deconstruction process.
Honestly, the funniest part for me is that player on the deconstruction module will be killed in the process. The instant game over.

[azaghal]

When it comes down to what can or cannot be done with the scripts... At the end of the day, devs have full source access to their own game engine - so they should be able to implement any necessary missing pieces. Now... How hard it is to implement it and whether it should be prioritised is a different thing. But generally, I would be even happy if the stop-gap solution would be the station jettisoning all the docked ships into a 1x1km cube and watching them all "explode" (not get destroyed, more like fan out) in a cacophony of collisions and frame drops.

[flywlyx]

When it comes down to what can or cannot be done with the scripts... At the end of the day, devs have full source access to their own game engine - so they should be able to implement any necessary missing pieces. Now... How hard it is to implement it and whether it should be prioritised is a different thing. But generally, I would be even happy if the stop-gap solution would be the station jettisoning all the docked ships into a 1x1km cube and watching them all "explode" (not get destroyed, more like fan out) in a cacophony of collisions and frame drops.

If it’s not in the AI script, modding it will be much more difficult. Considering this seems like a fail-safe feature, the likelihood of them changing this behavior is relatively low.