Shuttle (service) from mother ship

[DirtyDan86]

I absolutely love building huge ships, but I don’t like them clipping into most of the cities, so…

How cool would it be, if you could dock/call a small shuttle - either one of your own builds or maybe even a shuttle service from the faction of the planet you want to land. The mother ship stays in the planets orbit and you can go back, dock and take over again.

EDIT: Sorry, I just saw the request „Capital ships“ is basically asking for something similar 

I don’t have the skills to mod (yet) but I was playing around a little bit and here‘s what I got so far:

- when on my mother ship, I can leave the pilot seat and set another ship as my home ship via console command

- I can call my new home ship to the mother ship via existing mods and it says docked, BUT:

It‘s only partially there. If I wanna enter, I‘m glitching in space and see some interior parts of the ship.

If I do a save and reload sometimes it loads the interior correctly and I can undock… but can’t actually fly, only fast travel.

If I want to teleport to my new set home ship via player.moveto (ID of ship) it says the command is ignored because the ship isn’t enabled.

So:

1. Is there a way to set new homeship to „enabled“?

2. Do you guys know any other ways to probably make this work? Or no chance before ck is released?

3. If the game is unable to display 2 home ships, is there a way to spawn any in game ship and make it dock to your home ship automatically?

Edited December 30, 2023 by DirtyDan86

[HeyYou]

I expect that once the CK drops, shuttles, and surface vehicles will become a thing.

[aurreth]

From my feeble experiments you have to make the mother ship a space station instead of a ship.  That allows it to stay in orbit, and you can take off from a planet and dock with it.

The problem is "home ship" seems to be defined as "the last one you moved".  If you "pilot" a space station it becomes your home ship, and the only way to switch to another is using a ship technician (or terminal, which the game considers a technician).  And those won't let you change home ship if you are, tada, already on your home ship.

So basically you have to change the function so that anything with a station keyword can not be your home ship, and then put a terminal on the capital ship that lets you set something else as "home", and that will be docked the way it does at someplace like the Den.

A lot of the parts are already in the game, but weren't implemented because stations are buggy as hell.

[DirtyDan86]

@aurreth you can’t actually fly a space station, can you? Since my „mother ship“ is a huge battleship it would be nice to actually use it in a space battle.

And one off topic question: I saw you mentioned in the capital ship topic a ship builder terminal inside of your ship. May I ask how you „stole“ that from your landing pad?

[aurreth]

13 hours ago, DirtyDan86 said:

@aurreth you can’t actually fly a space station, can you? Since my „mother ship“ is a huge battleship it would be nice to actually use it in a space battle.

And one off topic question: I saw you mentioned in the capital ship topic a ship builder terminal inside of your ship. May I ask how you „stole“ that from your landing pad?

Yes, you can actually fly a space station.  Sort of.  If you use the console to place a pilot seat you can grav jump it a lot of the time.  You can't do anything else, because you can't see outside.

However, this usually breaks things, because most space station are not actually stations, they are moons.  They have the LocTypeStarstation keyword, but they also have the LocTypeOrbital keyword.

There is an experimental mod that enables building stations.  Those don't have the Orbital keyword, so you can fly them from one system to another.  But they have the same home ship problem if you do that, so you need to console yourself someplace else to set home to another ship.  That mod could probably be reworked to do the capital ship thing, but it would be a lot of work.

[DirtyDan86]

Oh yeah, I could get my station to grav jumping to another system. I used the clone ship glitch to clone my M-class battleship over the station slot, so I already had a pilot seat. It still displays the mobility and speed but doesn’t move. Weapons do work.
I can call my home ship (shuttle) to it. It docks and I can take off from there. That works pretty smoothly. 

So I can either have a huge ship that glitches into half of the city when landing OR the shuttle to my main ship without being able to take that baby to battle.

Guess that’s as far as we can go before CK, but I still love to play around with all that stuff.

[aurreth]

17 hours ago, DirtyDan86 said:

And one off topic question: I saw you mentioned in the capital ship topic a ship builder terminal inside of your ship. May I ask how you „stole“ that from your landing pad?

Sorry, missed this one.  The landing pad with ship builder is a really strange beast.  The ship terminal is what actually triggers the UI, and you can target it in the console to get its RefID, then board your ship and use "moveto player" to move it from the landing pad to your ship.  BUT you can not delete the landing pad or the terminal will go away too, no matter where in the universe it happens to be.  It is forever linked to that landing pad.

There's probably a better way to get the terminal, I just never bothered because it's of limited use on a ship since it can't change home ships by getting a ship to dock with the one you're currently on.