Anchor to Asteroids!

[trail lava]

Pushing rocks around is fine and dandy, but it would be really cool to see stations or ships anchored to them on the same grid!

This would be an easy feature to add alongside docking and detaching ships, as it would likely share code elements - but it could be added before then as pre-built pirate and neutral stations. Flanking around immobile fortresses or digging through the back side with mining lasers would be a fun puzzle! Maybe you could even see asteroid haulers/pushers as neutral ships flying by.

Unlocking the tech to do it yourself (whenever docking is added) would also be a nice toy to have for late game when the free armor value isn't totally busted.

[worldly geyser]

the image in my head instead of complicated high tech its just

big chains

and that's literally the harpoon update

[cedar iris]

I don't think having the ship and the asteroid on the same grid is even possible.
Maybe with the smaller ones, but probably not any of the bigger ones.

The harpoon idea is more likely to at least be possible, but wouldn't that just end up to be a mechanical tractor beam?

[brave hatch]

it’d be cool to see a station where a docking port (once those are added) or smth is sticking out of an asteroid (and maybe some guns or smth) but most of the station (storage, reactor, crew, etc.) is inside and surrounded by rock

[worldly geyser]

tractor beams are smooth and gives force over distance
harpoons either completly stop the ship or end up broken if you pull too hard

magnet forces vs just tying a rope

not stretchy

[cedar iris]

Yeah I agree! It would be really nice to have such bases in the game. I just think it's gonna be ... tricky, to find a way to implement them (but then again I'm no good at programming so I don't really know what could be done)

[cedar iris]

true, or the harpoon disconnects from the asteroid if it isn't ankored well enough

[floral crescent]

just like pirate ships and stations in stellaris?

[final thicket]

There's a mod that added the ability to build "rock pieces" using a bit of steel and a new item, "stone," that all asteroids dropped. Mining asteroids always produced a lot of stone you could later scoop up and use to recreate the astroid around your ship. It wasn't possible to latch on to a rock and build into it, you had to first deconstruct the rock and rebuild it.

That's an issue I see with current cosmoteer, is that as far as I know you can't "latch on" to ship parts. You have to deconstruct and then rebuild them. Which is a shame because I'd love to make frankenships that are just shards of other ships bolted together. And that would be the same principle as anchoring to asteroids.

[cedar iris]

Asteroids are a different type of ship.

All existing normal ship parts like reactors, structures, armors, factories, etc, they are all a single type of ship.
Asteroid is not.

So I'm not surprised it's not easy to somehow combine the 2