Oolite Bulletins

Is it possible for a station to have more than 1 docking port, like Nuit Station was supposed to have?

I think not. It was tried before for a model of the Galactica, which was supposed to have two docking bays on the left and right side. All information I recall should be in its thread. Searching for "Galactica" should bring you there.

Hm, I actually think that both docking bays on that ship work - at least I have repeatedly docked at both bays and both worked.

Perhaps I misremember, and it did work in the end. I don't have the OXP, so I never looked at it myself.

Commander McLane is correct, you can only dock with the left-hand docking tube.

Thargoid wrote:

Not tested the idea yet, and the downsides I can see would be if the player is using the docking computer via the "long" way, and also what NPCs under dockingAI.plist would do.

Yeah, I think it would be bound to screw up docking AIs.

Still, it's an interesting idea.

Try changing the docking bay sub-entity to one of the "arms" only if the player's ship is very near that "arm" then?

Or...
My other thought would be to make the bottom "arm" the real docking bay sub-entity and removing the docking bay slot up top. That could probably be done in such a way so that huge ships could dock but the station would not show them docked nor would it tie up the bay.

Maybe with scripting the side arms could be shown as "occupied" after 2 big ships dock?

...Going even further, could the station be made to either only accept big ships or only 3 ships total, and be a huge docking fee to reduce/prevent unwelcome visitors? Sort of a dictator's private station and/or heavy trader only center. This would mean the station should get no regular NPC traffic of course.

Thargoid wrote:

This is one thing on my scripting "to play with" list (which I haven't had time to do anything on in ages).

I was wondering what would happen if by script you moved the docking bay sub-entity between two positions rapidly (say every 0.25s by script). I would set up two bays, one the real one and the other an identical-looking fake one (just the model, without the docking bay keys) and swap their position over by script.

Then for the player docking it may appear that you are capable to dock in either (unless you are flying very quickly) as during the docking process the ship would be in the docking radius of the dock sub-entity at least half of the time.

Not tested the idea yet, and the downsides I can see would be if the player is using the docking computer via the "long" way, and also what NPCs under dockingAI.plist would do.

Could generate some interesting collisions and crazy ships if nothing else

Interesting idea, I might have to revisit BSG at some point.