Locking is a method of joining ships that allows for extremely stable and consistent joins.
Guide to Locking
How It Works
The game uses at least two different methods of collision avoidance depending on ship’s relative speeds to each other. I’m not sure what these are called, but one checks for collisions before a gametick happens, and one checks after.
Below 21 m/s
Above 21 m/s
As you can see, you can’t lock at above 21 m/s. The game checks to see if there’s going to be a collision, and if there is then the collision happens in the next tick. If the speed is below 21 m/s, the game won’t check for a collision and will only calculate a collision if the bounding boxes go over each other. So, that allows for locks to be a thing. Note: I’m not sure the actual speed where the collision physics changes. 21 m/s is just a close guess.
What allows locks to repeatedly work is very constituent setups. I’m going to go over two different methods of locking in this video: One player and two players. The difference between these two is the setup.
One player locks use explosive charges to set up, while two player locks have to use a structure alignment tool, then explosive charges to line up.
Steps for Locking
- Get a ship that can lock. Make sure that they fit together without anything hitting each other. You’ll want to keep one ship/part of ship stationary while the other thrusts. Boost thrusters allow for the easiest setup for locking, so you will want to have maybe two of them for part of a 1.5m ship and four for a full 1.5m ship that locks with another. I’ll talk more about making the lock later.
- Go into dev mode. You can do this by clicking play then selecting developer mode.
- Press ctrl+` and select Sim>Debug>Fixtures. You’ll now have the pink lines which allow you to see the colliders of ships.
- Make locks like this about 12 blocks apart. Your ship will put these locks inside each other, making the ship essentially one ship. You’ll probably want a full lock on each side of the ship in order to maintain structural integrity. Still do this if you’re going for a two player ship, as it’s easier to test this way (see image below).
- When putting down explosive charges, make sure that they are at least two blocks away from any non-structure block. If they are closer, then they will give some knockback to the ship and cause inconsistency.
- Save your ship, then explode charges and fire boost thrusters. Make sure to set speed to .01 when they get really close to see how far you are off of things. You can use page up and page down to reach .01x, but you can’t reach it when you press the arrows on the top of your screen. Your goal is to make the pink lines come really close to touching in the tick before they lock.
- There’s three ways to adjust the locking of the ship: change in mass (of the moving part), change in thrust, and change in distance between locks. Typically, distance is the easiest one to control. If your ship went faster than 21 m/s, shorten the distance between the locks by a block. If it went slower than 18, make it farther by a block. Try changing distances before anything else, because those are the easiest to change. Next thing to try is adding thrusters. You can add any type of thruster, as long as the speed is in the right range. There’s a lot of guess work to this and trying things until it works, but that’s about all the guidance I can give you. Good luck!
- If you want to make a two player ship, now you can separate the two ships. Instead of the ships being already in position, you’ll have to position them yourself. A good way to make sure this is consistent is by using structure aligners like these. You’ll want to ram the moving ship into the non moving one, and then keep going back and forward until you get them exactly in place. The non moving ship must have some thrusters to get the speed to zero after alignment. You need to make sure all commands are canceled on both ships. If you don’t, it’ll mess up the lock. Make sure that both players are out of direct control mode. Wait until the speed is zero. Then, the moving ship will detonate the charges and auto fire thrusters.
Notes
This is really hard to do on your first try. If you’ve gotten it, congrats!
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