Wandering Bases

Making orbiting objects is one of the easiest things to do. In your modelling program simply place it way off center. Export it to a cmp and add spin in the system ini file.

A warning, FL has a couple of bugs with doing this…
1 - in MP each player sees it in a different part of the orbit according to when they enter the system
2 - spin has a slow rotation bug, it tends to stop moving if the spin is too slow, anyone who has added spin to planets has had this issue

Adding it as a dockable base is a whole other ball of wax…

The spin bug was solved by adoxa.
common.dll : 0E698E 7C->EB and at 0E79BD 03->02

what if each planet was set up as a portal (docking ring?) to a stationary base somewhere else?

In other words you would select the planet, hit F3, approach the planet and then you’d dock on a separate object somewhere else?

Of course you’d have to figure out how to handle undocking as well…

Because the planet is “orbiting” the sun, it could be anywhere on a 360 degree arch when you want to dock… unfortunately, the system.ini has specific entries for the docking rings, with specific coordinates. The idea of docking some where other than the planet would only work if you followed the planet around it’s orbit till it came up on the docking ring… unless someone else has found a better way to handle this.

So you might be able to do orbiting planets, just not dock on them…
Well, I guess that’s what bases are for. Of course you wouldn’t be able to have bases in a geosynchronous orbit (or any orbit) around a planet anymore either. All bases would have to be made deep space bases.

actually, you could set a low to no death zone so you could actually fly between the planets and the sun… though I’d imagine you’d still have to have a long, thin, invisible object connecting the planet to the sun… but I don’t think the bases would have to be deep space…

I actually made a trade lane go straight through the center of the New York system star… Although I was able to travel straight through it w/o exploding, I did notice that I took hull dmg every time I shot through there. After adjusting death zone to 0, I don’t take dmg any more. Infact, if I try to fly into it manually, or escape trade lane in it, I just ricocheted out/off of it.

Or you could make a docking Ship looking a planet^^, and atribute this ship to a specific factice faction, so that, the planete, or station, will have a patrol path, and you can fire it to destroy it ( add hard shiel and hull for good resistance, and a crapy manuvrability ), and Voila, you have a mobile Base/planet (according to have a planete which have not a circular orbit, or define a custom one around another object)

The only problem is to make NPC ships dockable, not only the human team members 's ships in order to make this working.

Here’s another wrinkle. You’d need to position the planets and spines in such a way that at no time would an orbiting object run into another space object. I wonder how they’d do traveling through an asteroid field while a player is present.

It would be no less dangerous than actual space travel.

robocop wrote:
Here’s another wrinkle. You’d need to position the planets and spines in such a way that at no time would an orbiting object run into another space object. I wonder how they’d do traveling through an asteroid field while a player is present.

That just means actually making use of the Y coordinate that apparently is 0 for most all bases and planets… I guess it’s like a gravitational plane… but I think using the Y value would add character to the game a bit more…

How to do this requires use of FLHook, as I understand it.
This particular method I know is for creating player flown dockable carrier, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be adapted to do docking to orbiting planets.

• Use FLHook to create some sort of command, say /dock or something, that only works when you’re targeting a particular planet and inside a maximum distance. Or, if you’re good enough, set up a Hook to do the same job when you hit F3 at an orbiting planet, but I don’t know how possible that is.

• Make this command teleport the player to inside a base that sits somewhere in the system (you’ll need an extra base per planet, in the system). These base rooms will appear to the player to be the rooms for the planet they just docked at.

• When you undock from aforementioned unreachable base, have FLHook teleport you back to in front of the planet.

I’m sure you can see how this works for docking to a player-flown carrier, just replace the planet with a player carrier. (Docking to the spare base allows players to be able to launch if the carrier they’re docked to dies or leaves the server. They just get arbitrarily dropped to wherever you want, either in front of this spare base, or to some location or somesuch.)

Hope this helps, but sadly I only know the method to do such a thing, not how to actually implement it.