Landing large ships

[Hartifax]

Maybe I'm just a terrible pilot, but has anyone really landed a large ship on a station or the like well enough? Light armour on the station being landed on always tends to get ripped apart for me, and heavy gets dented to hell. If this was intentional, maybe landing gear should be tweaked to not cause impact damage, at least at the -20mps mark.

As is though, I'm half tempted to start using the landing gear's resistance to impact to make an enormous hammer ship with a bunch of gyros and landing gear to smash into another ship repeatedly.

[Vargali]

a lot of damage also comes from engine thrust too...even from landing... this goes for large and small.... this is why i like the concrete mod... look up Beton in workshop

[Lothos]

if you plan to land flush down on a deck with thruster damage on, you need at least 3 blocks space between the downward facing thrusters and the landing surface.

[ontheroad]

One solution for this is to have a special extra engine/engins that you only use for docking/landing and switch between these modes, and these need ofcorse need the clerance that Lothos mention...
There are many solutions though so its just a matter of design

[Skywolf*]

Position yourself stationary above landing pad.
Turn off inertial dampers.
Turn on the gear auto on.
Do quick down burst.
Drift down.

Take off is same - with dampers off a quick tab will drift you up with almost no damage to deck. When a safe dist away ... put the pedal to the metal and engage warp 9 :-)

[AlexMBrennan]

You could also use a gravity type launch system - quickly reverse gravity on the deck, then engage thrusters once you are clear of the deck (cf soft launch)

[Defektiv]

Originally posted by vargali:

a lot of damage also comes from engine thrust too...even from landing... this goes for large and small.... this is why i like the concrete mod... look up Beton in workshop

I honestly didn't think I'd have a use for that mod until some form of planets were implemented. I think I might now.

[SpannerMonkey]

One thing to note , is that 20 ms = 72kmh = near enough 45mph, now if you drove your car into a wall at those speeds you'd be lucky to walk away uninjured and your car would be scrap.
The same is going to happen to anything you smash into the ground at those speeds, just because you're in space does not suspend newtonian physics

[Namdoolb]

Yes to the above -

As someone who's landed a couple of smaller large ships on platforms/other large ships there are a few ways to avoid or minimize impact damage:

Thrusters need to be out of the way. Unless you have an extremely light hand on the controls you'll need 3-4 blocks of clearance between the thrusters and the platform. Large ship thrusters will burn holes in your landing platform.

If you plan on actually touching down (bringing the landing gear into physical contact with the landing pad) then your contact speed needs to be low...
Probably nothing over 3m/s, and preferably under 1m/s.
(probably best to complete the landing process with dampeners off and just tap the "c" key to get the absolute minimum downward velocity.

Autolock is your friend: Setting the gear to autolock will avoid actual physical contact with the landing pad and will vastly reduce the chance of denting or otherwise damaging either ship.

As mentioned earlier in the post, dampeners are bad for landing ships of this size. You need to be fairly precise and light-handed with the controls, and dampeners make it hard for you to do that.
Also they fire the thrusters at a very high intensity when slowing/stopping your ship and will end up burning holes in things.

And if all else fails, try building the pad out of blast door blocks.
Since the don't deform they tend to make a slightly more durable landing pad than the armour blocks.

[Nightwing]

The only times I'd land a ship like this, is when I land a small ship on a large landing pad, where I use heavy armor, since it's almost immune to small ship thrusters...
Large ships are usually left to float nearby.

[fabricator77]

Or you could simply turn off thruster damage, and save all the headaches it creates.

Landing gears do extra damage to blocks if the blocks already have damage. Due to the surface not being flat. Ship design is also a factor, you can have too much forward (and by implication not enough reverse) thrust.

[Hartifax]

And ah, turning off thruster damage did actually reduce the damage it did massively, thanks for that. I hadn't realised it was such a problem. I might try the blast doors and paying attention to dampeners later, though, for when I want thruster damage on. So thanks, this was one of the better community responses I've ever had, from everyone.

[AlexMBrennan]

Or you could simply turn off thruster damage, and save all the headaches it creates.

You are free to play the game any way you wish, but if you are simply going to disable everything instead of, you know, coming up with ways to get around the problem then an "engineering game" is probably not for you.

I mean, what do you do when you run out of power? Go mine some uranium, or just spawn a ton of ingots? Which is the more satisfying way of playing the game?