Goodbye Earth!

Re: the small miner ship breaking loose during launch- one other possible cause that occured to me: maybe the small ships' ions and dampeners were on, and it simply burned itself off once the ions started to work...?

Failing that (seemingly over complicated) option, there is this method:

A timer on the small ship- that doesnt time or count down anything, but when trigggered from the toolbar:
-Docking connector switch lock
-Landing gear group switch lock
-Smallship Cockpit Dampeners on/off
-Smallship thrusters on/off
-Smallship gyros on/off

Then its a Single toolbar button press to lock, dock, stop fighting it, and rock! And SAME single button press to power up and fly off.


...almost like there are multiple uses of timer blocks, or something

 

Except, it doesn't address the fact that there are still two grids, each wanting to do it's own thing.You can turn off the thrusters, you can turn off the gyros, but you can't turn off the mass. The gyros on the main ship ignore the appended mass and, therefore, do not compensate for it. You either have to compensate manually (good luck with that) or use auto-pilot.

Merge blocks make one large grid. Everything on both grids cooperate. A script that would make both grids cooperate as if they were one sounds like a viable alternative, if it were possible.

 

What you describe might indeed prevent a docked ship from fighting against the parent... which is not really the issue I was addressing. I was talking about adding the docked ships thruster/gyros/etc. to the control of the main vessel when it is docked.

Anyone hear ever read the original Thrawn trilogy of Star Wars novels by Timothy Zahn. Essentially I am talking about what he called a "slave circuit."

 

Yes; an excellent trilogy that should have been made into a movie (or movies). To me, those books set the gold standard for Star Wars literature.

 

I have never experienced this mentioned "mass messing up things" after connector locking a ship to my baseship. My baseship gyros simply haul it around normally.

... but then, my baseship is not several kilometers long, either. I play in keen official servers, and the PCU limit of 37000 PCU keeps things... how to put it politically; "within the scale the designers intend". Maybe thats an underlying cause to many, small portion of the player base issues...

 

This was for the most part dealt with in the physics update. It's nowhere near as much of an issue now as it used to be.

 

Well, nothing docked to my base ship noticeably affects it, since it sports eight giant gyros and has around 200 million kg of it's own mass. In this particular case the problem is not that the ship gets any harder to handle. The problem is that when I want to Zig, everything connected still wants to Zag. The base ship just shrugs that off, but what does happen is that when the ship is stopped it will drift if other ships are just connected. I talked about this in another recent thread.

Perhaps, but according to the OP:

Connectors and landing gear will, indeed, firmly lock to the other grid and will remain attached while the rest of the grid breaks away and continues on the path Newton laid out for it. That's why I use merge blocks. Even though the grids are attached at only one single point, they're merged, and there are not two separate calculations going on as to which way we're going. To me that's worth all the other hassle involved with merging grids with the intent to un-merge them.

It's a typical engineer's solution (It works. What's next?).

 

I recently dithered with this problem for a new high-capacity modular cargo ship I'd built. I wanted the connectivity of the 10 cargo modules, including the use of their dedicated thrusters and hydrogen tanks supplies. Nope, using connectors I found that the thrusters fought me tooth-and-nail, so that part didn't work. Merge blocks allowed them to play together, but I lost the ability to "pass gas", so that wasn't really an option either. In the end I opted for connectors instead of merge blocks because I wanted the increased hydrogen supply. I had to significantly change my intended design because of the lost thruster contribution, but it's certainly a lot better than dealing with merge blocks. (Of course, that's my opinion and is certainly subject to change! )

 

This I have never seen. Damage made to the gear and connector, making them break and release the grid, yes. Before the fix. But this? Never.

Given what I know of how Space Engineers works I will require evidence. There must be a misunderstanding of sorts here. This just can't happen without damage from an external source. Phasing blocks by phantom movement (which should not happen any more), unintentional thruster damage etc. But breaking apart like there was structural integrity? Nope. Not buying it.

 

[facepalm] of course!! I forgot the most obvious answer- and the amazing part it, its the same reason for all problems listed above:

 

@Calaban I know you were joking, but... even Clang has his limits. Clang is caused by physics inaccuracies, desync and - for the extended interpretation - bad code. It would be the cause of the phasing reason, for instance. He can separate subgrids and he can move subgrids where they're not supposed to be (causing phasing), he can even move a single grid where it shouldn't be, and he can take existing functionality and corrupt it, but he cannot alter the single grid, simply by the nature of what a grid is and how it works.

 

Clang is, I suspect, an AI running behind the game engine, causing antics in a particularly amusing (to him) fashion (at least thats the doctrine of how the Cult got formed)

Grids that simply are, or IS, absolutely can be messed with at random. Maybe youve never seen the "landing gear been locked for weeks checking in here, Im just going to detonate now, when its a really bad time for it to happen" signs of Clangs' handiwork

So Because Clang Hates You was only 33% a joke.. IF clang is really back there, behind the curtain

 

That is a textbook example of the phasing problem, where the entire grid, not just the landing gear, has been moved (by Clang if you will) in such a fashion that the server thinks the landing gear is colliding with the grid it's attached to, causing it to explode. So that only confirms my statement, it does not violate it.

 

Well, I'll give you that it hasn't happened to ME recently, but then again as a rule I don't connect ships using connectors any more. I gave my reasons. You've seen the type of ships I build. My entire fleet is designed to merge into one giant ship. I'm not trusting that to connectors, I don't care how much work Keen has put into them.

The OP stated he (or she) experienced this recently. I relayed my experience and gave my advice. If you say it can't happen any more I have no reason to doubt you. You know your stuff

in order to merge any of my large ships with any of my other large ships, I use connectors to stabilize both grids. Before connectors are locked they work like the greatest shock absorbers ever. I extend the connectors with pistons and let the second grid make a "soft" connection. Then I use the pistons to bring the two grids slowly together. The connectors tend to dampen any unwanted motion, and when the two merge blocks are firmly in contact I can lock them together and, usually, the merge happens without incident and I can then still use the connectors to transfer items. This has become a Standard Operating Procedure for me and will remain so until a block that performs both functions is created.

I'm not gonna wait, though.

 

@Stardriver907 I don't doubt that connectors can phase, get damaged and break. They claim this is fixed but that's still a possibity and always will, since they're designed to be able to break away. They're just making the probability smaller as they fix it. But they cannot break off their owner grid based on movement or pressure, and they never could. There simply is no function to do that.

A block cannot exist without a grid. For a block to break away from its parent grid there must be code to create a new grid and move the broken off part onto that new grid. This cannot happen spontaneously. The only way this kind of break could ever happen is if the block they are attached to (on the owner, not what they are locked to) gets destroyed somehow, via thruster burn or impact.

I don't doubt that you have seen what you have seen, but perhaps the cause was not what you thought it was? Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding you and keep going on about something you already understand...

 

When connectors are locked the link is literally infinitely strong. The connection can't be broken by any kind of stress as there is no structural integrity in SE. I get the impression that some folks here are trying to apply real-world events to a game that simply is incapable of them. Landing gear are iffy, everyone knows that, but connectors are pretty rock solid at this point.

 

You can’t break the connection, that is true, but you can spin on the connection. This is why I lock my subgrid vehicles with two connectors. (I once did a high-speed evasive maneuver with a rather large, large-grid miner attached to my ship. It spun around and trashed itself and my ship.)

You can disagree all you want, @Oskar1101, but it happened. It's a fact. That said, I haven't recently re-tested with only a single connector to see if the problem recurs.

 

Oh I was talking about when it's locked. When a connector is ready to lock you can spin and you can force them apart, but when it's locked it's locked. No moving, no spinning. Infinitely solid.

 

Nope, I'm talking about spinning after it locked. I'll test it again.

 

To be clear, I did not observe what happened. I have one large ship that I had experimented with having some small grids attached to it with connectors rather than merge blocks. There were... several... occasions where I connected the grid, went on a short journey, then noticed the small grid was missing. Most notably for me, and the reason I went with merge blocks, was the many occasions where I made it a point to "dock and lock", made sure the connectors were green, ended the session, started up again the next day and the small grid was gone and generally could be found floating a few kilometers away. The other thing I observed is that ships that are connected tend to drift. Even my largest ship is subject to this. Hence, I merge grids to get predictable behavior.

The big bugaboo about that, aside from the identity crisis thing, is that only the merge blocks can touch, so I'm always on the lookout for mergeless blocks.

 

Yes! I've seen the same thing! We are now brothers, brother.

 

Well, I'm glad it's not just me.

Which is not to say I'm glad it's happening to you, too

 

That I too have seen. Afaik it still happens although to a much lesser degree than it used to. I can actually have ships - even small ships - with retractable landing gear now.

 

Hi all!

@bigbangnet
The engines of the little ship were off
The small ship was moored to the big with a connector + two landing gear.
There was no engine of the great ship in the area where the small was moored.


The fact is that in flight, the landing gear broke and the Connector did not hold. ^^

But it's ok! Now i'm in space with another ship!

 

See, I think that although Keen fixed landing gear, it's still possible to induce some motion in the grid that is using them. As always with grids in SE, it seems that if motion is induced between two grids it never dampens and only increases until something breaks. Landing gear and connectors do not deform when damaged so you don't know something is wrong until they disappear.

I'll be willing to bet that if you tried it again the exact same way you'd be just fine.

 

@Stardriver907
Maybe!

I think I'll try again soon ..