Docking

Docking is there process of attaching one star ship to other entity in StarMade. When docked ships gain various benefits such as sharing power, shielding, and even homebase invulnerability.

Overview

Docking is an essential part of StarMade's core gameplay. Any Ship Core driven entity has the capacity to be attached to another entity be it a Space Station, Asteroid, or even another Ship. Players can also attach any number of ships on to each other creating massive chain docks. All in docking in the game requires the use of the Rail Docker and the various rail blocks. Using the Rail system players are able to not only create static docks for their ships but also fully mobile platforms. Ships docked to a rail network will move accordingly depending on the type of rail block used and its direction. Logic Signals are used to control the movement in a rail network. Docking a ship to a Faction Home base will make it completely invincible and access restricted keeping it safe while you are away.

When a ship has been successfully docked it will begin to share several vital systems with its parent entity. The Energy Supply of the parent is added to the docked entity allowing the docked ship to rely entirely on its power for things like weapons and other systems. It should also be noted that the maximum power capacity will stack for each entity as the docking chain goes deeper. The only down side to this is the fact the power generation is not shared and must be generated locally.

Shields on a docked entity and its parent entity is shared but only to a certain extent. When struck with weapon fire a docked entity will count as part of the parent entity thus draining the parent's shields first. However as long as the parent entities shields remain above 25% (configurable) then the docked ship will be completely shielded. If the Parent entity's shielding does drop below 25% then all docked entities must rely on their on-board shielding for defenses. In larger fights going after a ships turrets can be a very high priority as they are simultaneously a ships strongest and weakest points.

Static Docks and Linear Movement

TBA

Rotation

TBA

Turret Docking

Turrets are also created using docking but are less straight forward in their construction. They require the use of the Turret Rail Axis block. Most require two docked entities, one "base" for horizontal rotation and one "barrel" for vertical movement. Each

Fleet Docking

TBA

Logic

TBA