Workers Commuters

[JD]

Has anyone actually seen a Workers' Commuter ship (from Commies.oxp) successfully dock with a main station? I've found myself queued behind quite a few just recently, and they've all ended up as a ball of white light and a cluster of cargo pods right by the station docking bay. I can't recall whether I've ever seen one succeed.

Does it depend on the station oxps installed? Most of mine are PA Groove stations, while the most recent occasion involved a non-vanilla Coriolis, which might have been Griff's.

[Commander McLane]

It depends only on the size of the ship compared to the docking bay:

ship > docking bay = kaboom!

This is the reason why it's a bad idea (bordering on a bug) to create ships which are bigger than a standard docking bay, and then give them an AI which makes them dock at a main station.

I have to admit that I wasn't aware that the Workers Commuters fall into that category as well.

[JD]

I'd assumed that it was perhaps just too close in size to the docking bay, leaving no margin for error, rather than being plain too big. Those ships are so cumbersome they seem barely able to match the station's roll. I also wondered whether some of the oxp stations might have narrower docking bays than the commuter ships had originally been designed for.

I think it's a testament to Oolite's immersion factor that I find it a bit of a shock to see them wipe themselves out like that.

[Commander McLane]

I'd assumed that it was perhaps just too close in size to the docking bay, leaving no margin for error, rather than being plain too big.

Seems you're right. The Commuter is 60 meters high, the docking bay 64. I also think that I've seen Commuters docking without problems. Perhaps it's a question of frame rate?

EDIT: I just tested it. The Commuter did a lot of corrections while approaching, and it took some damage on entering (shields glowing three or four times), but finally it made it. Frame rate around 100.

[JD]

60 fps here. Would a slower frame rate hinder the collision detection or the correction manoeuvres more?

[Eric Walch]

EDIT: I just tested it. The Commuter did a lot of corrections while approaching, and it took some damage on entering (shields glowing three or four times), but finally it made it. Frame rate around 100.

With me, I see them usually dock fine. Before 1.73 they crashed a lot more with me on the same hardware. Frame rate might be an issue as at low rates it will do larger corrections per leap with more chance of overshooting the target direction. Although a fps of 60 should be well enough for good docking this big ships.

An other issue might be the observed damage. Damage is proportional with the mass of the object it collides with. And with bigger stations it might be just to much.

Generally it is a bad habit of designing ships that just fit. Even when they dock okay, it still looks a bit odd.