A way that cargo pods could be remote-mobile without being self-propelled:

  To summarize the discussion toward the end of the pod-stacking thread:

1) Pod mobility in the game is currently implemented by implicit thrusters on pods. These are weak and have an upper speed limit of ~100-200  m/s when under AI pilot control. I think that you can (with some code hacking) REM link to pods and accelerate them above this limit [I have REM linked pods as an early means of docking them to the player ship but didn't try the continuous acceleration option]. If that's right, it's a bit unreasonable and also could lead to the use of pods as self-propelled kinetic weapons, which might be a bad thing in-game.

2) There is a physically plausible mechanism for remote manipulation of objects through use of magnetic fields generated by a ship or station acting on a magnetic circuit inside the pod. The total amount of electrical energy required to manipulate a pod in this way would be similar to the amount of chemical or nuclear energy required to self-propel a pod with thrusters, so reconceptualizing pod-thruster-self-mobility into ship/station remote magnetic manipulation does no more violence to the physical realism of the game than is already there in pod self-mobility.

As an side, this mechanism of magnetic control of objects is already in view for some near future satellite astronomy missions:

dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/40894/196905565.pdf?...


3) This suggests a modification of the game mechanics as it pertains to pod handling, and a corresponding optional modification of ship and station equipment

   a) a new class of ship/station equipment, "magnetic grappler" could be created and optionally mounted. My sense is that ship-mounted and station-mounted grapplers ought to be different classes of object. Perhaps station mounted grapplers could be mounted to mega-freighters but not to smaller craft.

   b) ships without a magnetic grappler would be obliged to dock to pods using the ship thrusters (or else rely on "forklift" tugs or drones to dock the pods to them). This is slow and would motivate players and notional non-player actors to spend resources to upgrade their ships with grapplers.

   Stations without a magnetic grappler would be obliged to have a tug or drone to move pods about.

  c) The range of a magnetic grappler would realistically be less than the current 20km max (implemented in modded code -- there is no intrinsic game limit) range for issuing AI autopilot dock orders to pods to approach and dock to a ship or station. There's a basic physics reason for this:

 If you are "far away" from an electrical circuit, where "far away" means at a distance a few times larger than the size of the circuit, you are in the "far field" of the circuit (adopting language from antenna theory). In the "far field" of a magnetic circuit, the field strength declines as 1/r^3 or faster. Dipole fields decline as 1/r^3 and higher order multipoles decline faster. In the "near field" of a circuit, the field strength does not decline rapidly with distance.

 So the power required to create a strong field a a great distance from the magnetic grappler circuit (whose dimensions will not exceed the dimensions of the ship/station to which it is  mounted) is extremely high and this imposes a realistic limit on how far away a ship or station magnetic grappler could "reach out" to control a pod.

 You could also modify that max range a little based on the mass of the pod (or other object) to be "grabbed". A very light object could be grabbed from somewhat further away (the maximum range would vary with the third root of the object mass, a rather weak effect).

 d) Multiple pods can be simultaneously and independently manipulated with a suitably complex magnetic circuit. This suggests that magnetic grappler equipment might come in a range of grades, with the cheapest grade being able to manipulate only a single pod at one time, and higher grades being able to manipulate more. If this approach is taken, I suggest that the "number of independently manipulatable pods" for each grade grow as a power of 2:  1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. There's a plausible physics reason for this -- adding additional L-multipole circuits increases the angular resolution and number of lobes in the field pattern by a factor of 2 for each additional L-multipole: dipole, quadrupole, octupole, etc.

e) the maximum range for magnetic pod manipulation would be some simple math formula involving the size of the ship to which the grappler is mounted, the powerplant rating of the ship, and a modest increase with higher grades of grappler.

  The modest increased range with grappler grade and the dramatic increase in number of simultaneously controlled pods would motivate the player to upgrade his player ship (and wingman) grapplers as his resources permitted.

f) this re-interpretation of pod mobility would lessen the incentive to introduce cargo tugs or "forklift" drones, though there might still be a use for these at stations to retrieve pods that are beyond the range of the station magnetic grapplers. Scrap salvage career paths might also find a small fleet of cargo tugs/drones to be useful for rounding up widely dispersed scrap fields.

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From my limited Pog coding experience in a package, iDockingUtil, that I hope to contribute to the US code base, I believe that it would be straightforward to implement the range limitation and number of simultaneously "grappled" pods limitation. This probably should go into an amplification of the tsPodUtil package. I'm less familiar with how one would go about adding a new class of equipment subsystem to the game.

Admin, this is up your alley -- is it a headache?

  One problem that I am not sure about is how to determine whether a grappler is mounted to the player ship. For some reason, PS coders did not want modders to be able to determine from within game the .ini template file of the player ship. There is a fragile workaround for this in (IIRC) tsShip.pog. I would like a more robust method, and am wondering if one were to temporarily move the player-pilot to another ship (perhaps to an invisible flitter docked to the player ship at the "crew" location), whether the prior player ship template file would become accessible. I'm thinking that the game must know what the player ship template file is -- for some reason this is made inaccessible to modders. I'll fiddle with that to see if it works.

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Briefly, there are some other interesting possibilities that the introduction of "magnetic grapplers" would bring to the game:

1) remote manipulation of ferrous metal scrap would be more realistic -- the magnetic field produced by the ship would induce a magnetic moment in a distant ferrous metal object, which would act similarly to the magnetic circuit that is imagined to be inside cargo pod containers. This would be a "dipole-induced-dipole" effect with a 1/r^6 distance dependence in the far field.

2) if one wanted to be hyper-realistic, one could actually simulate the field strength fall-off with distance by dynamically changing the pod/scrap mass property as a function of the distance to the grappling ship/station.

Sim mass is a readable and writable property of the hsim handle. I haven't tried this, but I assume that one can fiddle this and have real in-game effects.

The mass would be set very large (related to the distance dependence of the grappling field) for very distant objects, which would make the pod accelerate very slowly under the AI autopilot (which would still be used as the code implementation of remote grappling of pods) and as the object got closer to the grappler, its mass would be set lower. In the "near field", the mass would be the base mass of the pod/scrap.

 This could be used in place of the hard upper limit, adding realism at the cost of some additional background task computation until the pod/scrap were docked. The background computation could go into a pre-existing Pod-autodock-monitor task that is already implemented and working within iDockingUtil.pog

  I'm not sure that this is a good idea, but it may be worth trying. The hard-cutoff at the defined max near-field range is somewhat arbitrary and this would be a way of having a realistic range cutoff that was also realistically "soft" rather than a sharp step from full strength to zero.

3) ship boarding. In some EoC mods (not sure about US), one can grow one's fleet by hiring marines and capturing ships by docking to them and boarding them. The ability to force dock another ship's dockport is highly unreasonable. But magnetic grapplers could be an in-game realization of a boarding mechanism (the docking code would still be used for actual contacting of the ships, but the grappler issue would determine whether such docking was possible). Grapplers could also be used to repel an approaching ship, so the stronger grappler would prevail in such a contest, and a ship with a weak grappler would need to knock out the power, or damage the grappler, of a stronger ship in order to board.

All in all, think its a concept worth considering.
The coding aspects would not be difficult. I'm less sure about the new ship equipment. I have the impression from Admin that the loadout system has become very complicated and that tweaking it is not a task that one would lightly contemplate.

Hi SRC,

Just a quick comment on this, on my way to work...

None of the ships in US are made of any kind of 'metal'.  Everything in the middle states is based on nano-materials.  The entire economy has a new layer, which involves the fabrication of nano/smart materials.  Sooooo...that would mean everything would be non-magnetic.

However, pods could be created with purposefully crafted magnetic-nanomaterials, exposing them to manipulation by 'grapplers'

My snap reservation with grapplers was that anything that could manipulate things the size of cargo pods in space would be weaponized.  However, if everything is made of non-magnetic nanomaterials, the issue is abrogated.

Yet...grapplers still would not help with wreckage and asteroids.

I like the grapplers idea.  In general.

Just a note:  in US, purchased pods ate ejected via the pod spewer, in a reverse if the unloading mechanism.  SRC, you indicated in another post that they just appeared, which was true for Torn Stars, abd perhaps the US Alpha, but not the current Beta.

Back to original train of thought:

Currently, if a player arrives at a 'battle field' waypoints, they are going to be presented with a scattered field of wreckage.  To collect the wreckage, they simply issue a 'collect all' order to a cargo ship wingman, or if they are piloting a cargo ship themselves, hit the 'collect all' key.  Then they just wait.

By adding in a range limitation to the pod/wreckage collection ability of the ship, we can add some gameplay.  The player would now need to actively target wreckage, move closer, then collect it.  This would not intrinsically be better, but if the player were under fire while doing so, suddenly things become much more interesting.  Add in my desire to create wreckage collecting 'operations' or NPCs, and things get even better.  Then the player would be competing with the NPC to get all the wreckage.  It might even be the cause of disputes, which could escalate to armed encounters.

So here, limiting pod collecting abilities, could improve, or add to, gameplay. 

Magnetic grapplers can also work with wreckage and asteroids.  Asteroids are currently modeled with a small 'engine' attached.  This 'engine' can be assumed to work with the magnetic grapplers, providing something for them to latch onto.  We have no free floating, 'raw' asteroids in game currently.  They are essentially exactly like pods.

Battlefield wreckage can also work.  In two ways.  One, we can force the player to approach and dock to the wreckage directly.  This provides difficulty and incentive to get out of the wreckage collection business.  It is the bottom of the barrel of careers.  A second way to deal with wreckage, is like this:  The magnetic grapplers have been in use by stations and ships for more than a hundred years.  Currently, no ship has any 'metal' components, as they are all constructed with nano/smart materials.  However, ALL ships are designed to become magnetic when they are destroyed.  The materials themselves are smart enough to know whether they are 'whole' or broken, and when broken they become magnetic, specifically to allow collection of the wreckage by magnetic grappler equiped scrap collectors.  Easy.

Either path is simple, but both should force the player to work a little harder for their battlefield wreckage, particularly if we implement roaming NPC scrap collectors to compete with the player.

Now, regarding the grapplers themselves. I think all stations, with pod spewers should be presumed to be fully equiped with the grapplers.  It is just standard equipment, an integral part of the pod spewer.

Cargo-pod hauling tugs can still be used, but only as tugs, which move cargo back and forth between a warehousing area around a station, and close proximity to the pod spewer.

Magnetic grapplers on cargo ships should be standard, but upgradeable.  Players will always have the ability to collect cargo, but can improve the speed and range through upgrades.

The ship mounted grapplers should have a simple set of parameters.  Although it would be cool to have dynamic range abilities and real time updates, these things might not make sense to the player without huge amounts of informative feedback.  They will need to know why something works and why it does not.  If their grappler was not working at 15km one time, but was at another time, it would just confuse them. So we need to create several fixed categories of grapplers with a basic feature improvements, namely their range.  It would be fun and cool to have more parameters, but potentially too difficult to communicate them to the player.

As an example,  a base grappler, standard equipment on all cargo ships (and tugs perhaps) would have a range of perhaps 5km.  An upgrade to that could push the range to 10km.  A further upgrade to 15km.  The top range grappler could work at 20km.  Simple, and easy.  The player can grasp it, and clearly see the benefits of upgrading their grapplers.

Additionally, none of this effects operations around the pod spewer.  A basic grappler can interact with pods coming off the station as the range is so small.  Actually, we can also assume that the station is handling all transfers at this point.

This will all be relatively simple to set up code-wise, as SRC points out.  I will have to double check that I can add a system like this, though I am fairly certain we can.  The system will simply have to attach some kind of flag to the ship, that then allows the grappler code to know the range that the ship is capable of.  The pods will know no difference, and will simple start docking or not, depending on whether the grappler code decided they were within range or not.

Hi Minion,

   The EoC universe has many physical realism features, for example it is the only space flight simulation (or was the only at the time it was released) that actually used Newtonian physics in its flight model.

  But there are things that are not realism features, but rather physical impossibilities that are included for the sake of the story or for game playability. The capsule space drive and near-instantaneous interstellar travel are the most obvious example of physical impossibility in the game. They're needed because an interstellar space game with only sub-light-speed travel would
be a very sluggish story/

   The inertialess LDS drive is half science fiction and half total fiction. You can't have inertialess motion, even appealing to quantum mechanics. But the game needs some way to travel at close to light speed if interplanetary travel within individual star systems is not to be too sluggish.

  So these two  unrealism features are in the game, but are needed for the sake of a playable game. One willfully suspends disbelief when using them in order to enjoy the game.

   On the other hand, remote magnetic manipulation is real physics, and will be deployed in the near future for controlling small formations of satellites.

   Note that calling the pod manipulators magnetic grapplers does not add anything that is not already in the game -- pods are already mobile (and in fact an enterprising POGger could make code to remote log onto them and fly them). The question is, "what do you want to call this mobility".  There is a sense that having freight containers be self-mobile is a little tacky, so we're looking for a different thing to call what it is that makes them mobile. That thing ought to be physically reasonable if possible, and magnetic technology is more reasonable than the impossible sci-fi features of LDS and capsule drive that the Particle Systems people invented to make the game playable.

   At least, that's my justification.

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  Hi Admin,

  I'm fine with whatever parameters you think are best.

  One question regarding the grappler behavior. It would be reasonable that the grappler strength increases the closer the pod is to the grappler. I could straightforwardly implement that by spawning a task for each moving pod that frequently checks the distance between the pod and the loading ship and adjusts the pod mass based on that  distance --- at shorter distances, the pod mass would be set lower, which would make the pods accelerate faster. The upper speed limit for pods could be increased from the present value (around 100 m/s, I think) if that were considered desirable.

In answer to Minions questions:

Yes, with some coding.

Yes, with some coding

Battlescrap is already immobile...but it may be rotating...

That is an interesting idea.   Though my assumption, after reading some of the EoC manuals, was capsule drives are not really controlling gravity fields, but are rather brutally inhibited by them, anda hence the need to use the capsule drive at l-points, places where local gravity fields are cancelled out.

SRC,

Regarding the grapplers...some kind of tweak of range or speed, in either way that you have described (both good ideas I thought), would be good.  Otherwise everything continues to operate essentially as it does now, with a nice explanation for it floating around in the background that no one knows about.  We need a consequence of this "technology", and some kind of range/function would help illustrate it.

Your second idea, namely of color coded pods, would be a nice way to illustrate the constraints of the grappler model he is using.  It would also quickly let them know why a pod could not be grappled.  If they were not color-coded, and the player had not memorized, or didn't realise the range limitation, they may get confused.  Color coding would help clear things up, as they would quickly 'get' what the coding meant, with some helpful feedback from one of the crew members too.

I am not as sure about the variation on the pods mass.  It kindof seems like cheating, and could effect other things, like in the case where a pod hits a nearby ship.  However...it is another incentive and reward for better piloting.  If the player gets very close to pods/wreckage he wants to load, he gets it real quick.  If he is lazy and just hits the load all order, he has to wait as the pods/wreckage slowly, slowly approach from far off. 

So perhaps both your ideas should be implemented.  They seem both realistic, and good for gameplay, which is what we want.  We can also attach lots of feedback from the crew to ensure that the player gets what is going on.

There might be something to be said in favor of revising the ship death scripts -- assuming that they are similar to vanilla EoC, in which destruction of a ship, pod or gunstar results in total disintegration of the object. The in-game justification for that was that a hull breach would inevitably lead to the explosion of the fusion  ring.

  One would think that ship crews might demand the ability to shut power down quickly to avoid their own deaths. So "destruction" of a ship would  generally result in a badly damaged but structurally intact hulk.

  It's just a thought.