Moving broken vehicles out of the road

[darktoes]

The shock absorber thing is neat. In my experience the fusion blaster rifle works pretty well at vehicle clearing, if you have the energy for it.

[nameless_survivor]

Will the shock absorbers work with a military composite ram in front of it?

[mlangsdorf]

The entire point of bike racks - I know because I wrote the darn things - is to give you a way to transport vehicles that aren’t foldable. Bike racks don’t care about weight or foldable or anything like that. As long as the vehicle is a single tile wide and every tile of the vehicle is adjacent to bike rack in a single row of bike racks, you can rack the vehicle.

So put a cargo rack on casters, rack that on the back of your panzercycle, rack the cycle onto the back of your deathmobile, and drive them to the next zombie infested town you intend to scavenge.

[darktoes]

Do things attached by bike rack still work? I.E could I put wheels onto the side of something by attaching a frame with wheels via bike rack?

Also, do things detached from a bike rack retain their speed? Could I launch a hardened ram into a horde at 300km/h?

[Theundyingcode]

Could I launch a hardened ram into a horde at 300km/h?

If you can’t we definitely need to make it so you can.

Reminds me of:

Issue: Nuclear missile not valid way to complete "Kill Bandit Leader"

[mlangsdorf]

Racked vehicle parts are supposed to be unavailable but there’s some bug reports about that not working.

There’s no way to access a bike rack on a moving vehicle (you have to examine the rack, you can’t examine it while the vehicle is moving) so you can’t use it for rams.

However, there’s nothing stopping you from building a ram sub-vehicle at the front of your vehicle, attached by a wooden frame, and then dropping a radio activated pipe bomb on the subvehicle and detonating it. Vehicle splits due to lack of connecting frames can happen at speed and both vehicles keep their original speed. And yes, I tested that code a lot too using that method.

[darktoes]

…very interesting. Very interesting indeed. Is there any chance of an explosive bolt detacher or something along those lines in the future? Maybe something like the bike rack that DOES allow racked things to function, so we could make modular vehicles?

[nameless_survivor]

If we ever do get modular detachable vehicles like that, I’m turning my tank into the fucking batmobile. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=umNO0Xal9WM

[Theundyingcode]

How hard would it be to add a decoupler vehicle part that you can activate from the controls/electronic controls and destroys all the parts on it’s frame when activated? (no explosion to damage other parts I care about) Could multiple be activated simultaneously? Now I kinda want to launch a tank at a horde with a few active mininukes for !!SCIENCE!!.

[darktoes]

Screw that, I want to launch a unicycle into a horde at 400km/h while riding it in heavy power armor. That’ll show those chimera mutants…

[mlangsdorf]

I don’t think it’d be very hard: controls are easy, and there’s lots of ways to force a part to break off.

[socom55]

we need a crane to pick up and move vehicles and it would be good to move them where you want or a flat bed truck to carry vehicles around

[nameless_survivor]

Is that APC stuck in the mud? I didn’t think a little mud would stop one of those. You get that picture off the internet or did you take it?

[socom55]

i got the image on google https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mobile_crane_lifts_a_Fuchs_tank.jpg

[darktoes]

It’s dry and there’s no tire tracks in the mud. I suspect they just picked it off a truck or something.

[mlangsdorf]

The crane would be easier to implement than the flatbed. The flatbed is hard for so many reasons.

[nameless_survivor]

The crane would be easier to implement than the flatbed. The flatbed is hard for so many reasons.

You can’t code it in the same way as the bike rack? Have the crane to just move the vehicle adjacent to the bed, and there must be enough space on the flat bed to hold it?

[mlangsdorf]

Bike racks work by merging an adjacent vehicle with the carrier vehicle. The carrier can’t have any components at the same global co-ordinates as the carried vehicle. The carried vehicle keeps its global co-ordinates during the merge.

Flatbeds can’t work that way - you expect the carrier vehicle to have the flatbed components at the same global co-ordinates as the carried vehicle. ie, you expect to go from:

/--\
|##|
+--+
bbbb
b1bb o^o
bbbb  # 
bbbb o=o

that is, a quad-bike next to a flatbed, to

/--\
|##|
+--+
bbbb
bo^o
bb#b
bo=o

with the quad-bike on the flatbed.

It is super-hard to figure out that the flatbed space at ‘1’ should be the location where the quad-bike’s front left wheel should end up unless both vehicles have the exact same facing. Like this:

/--\
|##|
 +--+
 bbbb
  b1bb   o^o
  bbbb    # 
   bbbb o=o

It’s not at all obvious to me how you sort that out.

There’s a separate question of having multiple frames at the same vehicle co-ordinate, which can sometimes happen with wreckage but the game mostly assumes that won’t happen and that weird behavior will happen when it does. Setting up a system to enable that is going to be tricky.

But a crane that just picks up a car and moves it around? I don’t think you run into any of those issues. You can use the existing code to displace the car to a new position and things should just work out.

[Kurchie]

Seems as z level support could fix this problem, lift vehicle to move onto flatbed part, then activate secondary ratchet straps part to hold vehicle to move, on flatbed, but on z level above main vehicle, treating flatbed area as ground surface.

[nameless_survivor]

What if when you used the crane, you turned a vehicle into an item? Like when you fold up a bicycle, or a folding telescoping crane. Then it’s just down to storage volume. Have a bunch of “flat bed” tiles that act as a single modular storage volume when placed adjacent to each other.