Replacing the Big Crappy Station

[Zordey]

Looking really good :)

Are the hand rails actually modeled or are they a cube / plane with transparency? Using a cube with transparency would greatly reduce tri count but I dont know if it would be any advantage in the Pioneer engine, it would depend how well / badly it handles transparency.

[jpab]

There's a way to display different parts on a different lod level if they are in the same station/craft? That. Would help a lot.

I don't think there is right now, but it shouldn't be difficult to add.

John B

[FluffyFreak]

It looks really cool so far :)

[Marcel]

Now that's really crappy! I'm loving it thus far!

[bszlrd]

Some detail for the medium docking area. Most of the geometry is there for baking.


I'm not sure about, how should the station's large airlocks work. (Not as a game mechanic, but generally) There could be modular doors like below, only opening the central part for smaller ships, but you still need to fill up/drain the entire airlock before opening the inner part.

Or the docking area should be in vacuum eliminating the airlock problem and the doors would close only when you need to pressurize the docking area for some reason.
Or there are shields in the game, so there could be some kind of atmosphere retaining shield, ships can go trough. Like in Star Wars. There could even be a transparent membrane barely visible with a faint glow.
What do you think?

[NeuralKernel]

The presense of shields does throw some assumptions out the (now redundant) window. Even without some kind of force field there are some interesting potential solutions. I like Utility Fog... potentially as an explanation for shields in general...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog
Airlock specific version...
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/45e779eaed091

[torham2234]

If the game sports "atmospheric shielding" ship system, I think it is very reasonable to think that the same technology can be used as an airlock. At the same time the docking area is perfectly fine being de-pressurized. Each ship can have a access tunnel, something like for boarding a plane on the airport today.

PS: The station looks extremely cool, god work so far.

[bszlrd]

@NeuralKernel: I'm not sure about nanomachines and things like that, like that utility fog you mentioned. They have quite a few spanning implications we might want to avoid. (Like outright shapeshifting stuff for example). Shields have those too though, but they might be a more entrenched trope to make avoiding (not mentioning) implications a bit easier.
Anyway this kind of atmo holding membrane negates the need for an airlock cycle which would be boring to wait trough for the player.

Another thing in favor of pressurized docking area is that it seems to me that it helps creating the artificial gravity from spinning since it can push the things "down" slowly as the molecules move outwards. Centrifugal force is just an apparent force that comes from centripetal force. You would need to be at least touching the surface to eventually feel the gravity if the whole thing is depressurized.

Access tunnels would be nice, but only if we can see them in the game dynamically attaching to docking rings. :D But I hide before a developer reads this and yells at me for bringing up yet another feature. :D

[jmf]

Why should the inner of the docking area be pressurized?
Spaceship make a lot of noise and a lot of waste (toxic gases and similar).
Air in the shipyard would only make sense if there are very serious works done but not all the time.
Doors still make sense since little meteorites could come through the un-doored hole and hit ships and also in a battle shuttable doors would be useful.

[bszlrd]

@jmf: If we keep the main propellant water, then I don't think pollution would be only a concern of high speed very hot mists of water. A pressurized docking area might alleviate that a bit, but I'm not sure.
Another thing for a pressurized dock is it might be easier to heat then to sue individually thermal controlled suits for the vacuum workers, since there are already a great deal of waste heat to use for that. Well, it might be a problem of cooling the air really with pressurized.
And it's only a little thing, but with a pressurized dock, there would be some scattering light to make illuminating the area up a bit easier while softening the shadows.

Anyway, here's another tiny update with some minor details, like pipes, struts and cranes: