How would you give a hangar bay repair capacity?

[The Magic Murder Bag]

As my Hiigaran Battlecruiser is nearing the final stages and getting retrofitted with a heavy armor skin, there's one thing I always wanted to implement: repair zones for said ship's hangar bay. Problem is that the main ship build, coupled with the 3 days it took to solve an oxygen issue, drained me of most of my energy and I'm starting to slouch and tire out. So now I ask, what is the best way to implement a repair system?

EDIT for usual spelling mishaps

[A Fat, Angry Serval]

It's quite simple, actually. Designate a repair area in the hangar and put several welders in the floor.

[The Magic Murder Bag]

Just gathering up info due to my tire out, but will take that info regardless, so thank you. Seriously though, the oxygen issue messed with my head and drained my energy faster than keen's reactor.

[AlexMBrennan]

That will only work for superficial damage to the outermost layer.

"Dumb" welders will let you fix the ship layer by layer, i.e. require that you first remove the damaged layer entirely. For example, if you have a hole in your ship like this
XX____XX
PXX_XXX
XXXXXXX
Then there is no way to simply patch up that hole barring manual labour.
You could start the repair process by grinding off the damaged layers, but that would require pretty detailed knowledge of the ship (because you have to keep the projector intact) that would make this hard to automate.

Never mind complicated non-cuboid ships...

Tbh, the simplest way is probably to scrap the old ship and print a new one.

[BurnedToast]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

Tbh, the simplest way is probably to scrap the old ship and print a new one.

^^^This

Build a grinder grid into part of your hanger and just grind the ship every time it docks.

Then rebuild it with a welder grid in the every time you want to launch it.

It also perfectly solves the problem of landing gear exploding, and lets you store a LOT more fighters (the parts for most ships fit in a smaller space then the ship takes up, even on 1x cargo).

There's absolutely no reason to carry around completed fighters when fabricating new ones is so quick and cheap (0 parts loss, minimal energy usage)

[Erebus Alpha]

Originally posted by BurnedToast:

Build a grinder grid into part of your hanger and just grind the ship every time it docks.

Then rebuild it with a welder grid in the every time you want to launch it.

It also perfectly solves the problem of landing gear exploding, and lets you store a LOT more fighters (the parts for most ships fit in a smaller space then the ship takes up, even on 1x cargo).

There's absolutely no reason to carry around completed fighters when fabricating new ones is so quick and cheap (0 parts loss, minimal energy usage)

This is actually quite brilliant! Every time I try to build an industrial drone carrier, it either becomes unnecessarily huge (with lots of drone bays), or it never seems to carry enough drones. This could fix my problem quite brilliantly!

[The Magic Murder Bag]

Originally posted by BurnedToast:

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

Tbh, the simplest way is probably to scrap the old ship and print a new one.

^^^This

Build a grinder grid into part of your hanger and just grind the ship every time it docks.

Then rebuild it with a welder grid in the every time you want to launch it.

It also perfectly solves the problem of landing gear exploding, and lets you store a LOT more fighters (the parts for most ships fit in a smaller space then the ship takes up, even on 1x cargo).

There's absolutely no reason to carry around completed fighters when fabricating new ones is so quick and cheap (0 parts loss, minimal energy usage)

Intersting concept, though I do not know how to properly build a functioning gantry unit /Ship printer (3rd ship made since getting this game after all). Perhaps I can leave the Hangar barren and let others customize it as they see fit (It's practically my signature ship building method since I tend to leave many non-critical rooms barren for modularity sake; leaves room for any future mods/updates).

[Foodoman]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=392150840


This is an example of a drone carrier that uses the recycling idea. it's got 4 bays to build drones, and a single recycling bay too, well recycle the ones you don't need.

[Erebus Alpha]

I built 4 relatively standardized drones, quite uniform in design, and each able to fit in any 2x2x6 space on a large ship or station. One is for mining, one is for welding, one is for grinding, and one is for shooting things. 3D printing works a lot better when you use a merge block as the starting point for the build, and when you have a fairly small and standardized design.

I can 3D print any of those drones with the same assembler. All I have to do now is build a reasonably efficient and effective grinding/disassembly bay.

[zgrssd]

There are several ways to repair a ship:
- Manually. This will likely require an oxygen atmosphere to do effectively in the near future. So you would need a big enough "sub hangar" that can be kept pressurized while the main hangar is in operation

- articulated arms. Take 1 Remote controll block, 1 camera, 1 Gyro, 6 micro thurstes (there are several mods), and put them at the end of a rotor articulated arm. You get welding arm that can be manually controlled around via arrow keys and has access to conveyor network
You still have to manually place the blocks, however

- integrate a projector into the ship. Either make it the "core element", or undock it via merge blocks. that way you don't have to manually place blocks. Only flat grind/weld them a bit

- Grind, rebuild:
Have one room that automatically grinds the ship and collects all stuff not collected by grinders
Have a second room that welds a similar ship together using 1 projector, material from the grinding and extra material as needed. You have to transfer some uranium per hand or programming block, however.
Result: You grind down one ship, use the materials to build another ship. Only adding material that was lost due to damage. You also have facilities to grind down enemy ships/weld totally new ships yourself.

[Erebus Alpha]

I'm actually experiencing some difficulty building a perfectly lossless grinder bay. All too often, I have ships split apart in the grinder bay, which then bounce around.

I have had some slight bit of luck with a solid wall of grinders on a piston, which acts like a slow-moving 'crusher' apparatus. I use a sensor to detect when something is near the grinders, so they pause and grind instead of over-crushing and damaging the target ship (and the grinders themselves). On the opposite wall, I have landing gear, set to auto-lock (to capture any ship that enters the grinder bay), and a timer block that unlocks the target ship briefly, so that if it splits or separates, the multiple parts will easily be recaptured by the gear.

Gyroscopes are particularly troublesome. They bounce around everywhere and often jam in the cracks between the welders and the walls of the grinder bay. Also, they tend to bounce around at extremely high speed between active grinders when they do separate, and I think it is causing damage to the grinders.

Also, the surfaces of the landing gear do not form a perfectly sealed 1x3 area, and so, small ship blocks will often get forced through the cracks of the gear, and into the hollow cavity to which the landing gear are mounted.

Does anyone have any design tips about building a non-jamming, mathematically lossless grinder (grinds 100% of all inserted blocks regardless of how easily the target ship splits apart), which never requires repair or manual upkeep?

[arreclain]

Have you considered the use of a slowly rotating blast door to herd objects toward your grinders?

[Greyson XMG]

The best thing to have ( IF it freaking worked ) would be to have a area welder in the wall of your hanger.

It does work when you are on your own PC, but a dedicated server has sieze ups when you try to use them there.

KEEN has not addressed this limitation yet.

I still install area welders, but don't have any illusions of using them untill things are fixed.

[arreclain]

Why is Keen in all caps? Is this the way to type their name to show proper deference? I just generally called them The Great Makers, or The Great Engineers in the Prague.

[ARK1974]

Originally posted by The Magic Murder Bag:

As my Hiigaran Battlecruiser is nearing the final stages and getting retrofitted with a heavy armor skin, there's one thing I always wanted to implement: repair zones for said ship's hangar bay. Problem is that the main ship build, coupled with the 3 days it took to solve an oxygen issue, drained me of most of my energy and I'm starting to slouch and tire out. So now I ask, what is the best way to implement a repair system?

EDIT for usual spelling mishaps

The welders in the floor work, if you are not adverse to using mods, you can find mods for welders that have a bit larger AOE than standard. What I did is my big ship is made a place that had welders in overhead and floor and put in such a way where their AOE intersected, just hook them to the conveyor system so they are supplied by assemblers. Yes it does limit the size of my fighters but you can stack a whole lot of firepower on a tiny ship in this game.

[aether.tech]

A fun idea, if you've got the space - put your welders some were, then add a merg block on a piston, a merge block on the thing that needs reps - and .. well, bbq-rotator-repair shop?