Making your own Vehicles - Engineering

ENGINEERING:

BASIC IDEA:
I think that you should be able to make your own vehicles. There should be items such as legs, wheels, traction wheels, wings, motors, cogs as well as cockpits, hulls etc. which you piece together to make your vehicle of choice. As well as this, you can make the basic from out of vehicle parts, and then place blocks on top of those. This way you could have moving houses or even cities (Traction cities OH YEAH!)

VEHICLE PARTS:
The vehicle that you make should be made of certain parts that you can upgrade, find customize and add to, allowing for a lot more variety in your vehicles. These parts should include mechanical parts, weapons and control centers (cockpits). You should be able to vehicle by putting these parts together, and also placing blocks between them. There may also be some blocks designed for vehicles. There will also be vehicle frames which give you the basic structure of a vehicle, people who want to can use them. Hull casings is a possible idea which is a sort of foreground casing for vehicles. These vehicles could also be animal drawn, and work together with mounts. One final point is that there will be vehicles for land, air, sea and space travel.

MECHANICAL PARTS:
There will be many mechanical parts which these vehicles have. As not to confuse people, and to make things simple if need be, there will be very few required parts. These will be the engine, a gearbox or something equivalent, some sort of thing which will allow it to move, a control box and fuel tank. The engine needs to be connected to the fuel tank through pipes which allow the fuel to go between them, and the engine must be connected to the gear box physically (not through wiring), which is either by putting them next to each other, or by connecting them by a sequence of gears. Then the control box needs to wired up to the gear box, and finally the gearbox must be connected to the moving parts physically. Sometimes you can just wire up the gearbox to the moving parts, but then the moving part which it is wired up to must have its own engine. This is the basic procedure which you must do to get a home-made vehicle functional, but a lot more can be done to make it better.

ENGINE:
The Engine is the big box which runs the machine. It uses fuel to work, and will send it's power to the gearbox or computer which is the mind of the vehicle. If you want to, you can see the engine as the heart, and the fuel tank as the lungs. Don't ask me what the control box is. If you must, call it the parent which tells the machine what to do. Happy? I thought not. An engine has several parts inside it which you can change around and upgrade if you are that picky about things, and not just find or craft yourself a new engine. (Making an engine out of engine parts is harder to do, and will require a special workstation where you do it, but it is cheaper and makes the engine work more for what you want (large fuel buffer, high efficiency, you name it) whilst the other one can be crafted a lot easier). The parts of an engine are: the input pipe, the fuel pipe, the pistons, the generator and the output cable. More parts can also be added for extra stuff. If you want to know more about making an engine, click the spoiler below.

Coming Soon!

BASIC SMALL ENGINE:
A basic engine can make a small machine travel at a relatively slow speed, but still quite a bit faster than walking. It can hardly budge a medium sized vehicle let alone a large one. It will be relatively easy to craft, but I don't know anything about crafting items and the starbound crafting system (at least not to the extent that I can tell you even approximately how this would be crafted). In short, it is cheap but weak, yet good enough for something like a hover-bike.
POWERFUL SMALL ENGINE:
This is a more powerful version of the basic engine, and therefore will be able to carry bigger things without slowing down as much. This does not change the maximum speed of the engine.
FAST SMALL ENGINE:
This engine has the ability to go faster than the basic engine, but does not change the maximum weight it can carry, like the powerful one can.
EFFICIENT SMALL ENGINE:
This engine uses less fuel to get the same amount of power. 'nuff said.
BASIC MEDIUM ENGINE:
A basic medium engine is just a basic small engine with better speed, maximum weight and fuel buffer, as well as bigger version of all the other parts you can cram into the engine. All the other engines are self explanatory, but if there are any special case engines which I think of I will add them.

FUEL TANK:
The fuel tank is the part of the machine where the fuel is stored. It can come in many sizes, and you can have several of them in one vehicle. The fuel tank has four essential parts: The canister(s) which holds the fuel, the pump which pumps the fuel out, the output pipe which is the pipe that connects it to the engine (please note that only the first little part of this piping actually counts as the fuel tank), and then then the input pipe, where you can fill up the fuel tank, connect another fuel tank through it's output pipe or even connect some sort of fuel making machine. The fuel tank can have bigger versions, quicker versions (which pump out the fuel faster) etc. (just like the engine has efficient, powerful and fast versions), and as with the engine, you can edit each part individually. For some more detail on what each part of the fuel tank does, and what modifying it does, it's all in the spoiler below.

Coming Soon!

THE GEAR-BOX:
This part of the mechanism is the brain which controls the whole thing. At the lowest level it is a gear-box, but a higher level it is more of a computer. This machine uses the energy which the engine gives out, and using signals from the control box (which is what the player controls) it allows the moving parts of the machine to, well, move. The gear-box needs to be specialized to the vehicle it is in, so that it can control it. In the gear-box there are <NUMBER> things. These are: the control unit which controls everything (and everything in the gear-box must be wired up to this), the individual part control units, the input cable (which takes energy from the engine), and the motor (which is what makes the cogs spin). This does not all have to be in the control box, in fact the individual control units would very often be by those parts, and then have their own engines, as to allow more moving parts without a lot of space being used up in 1 gearbox, as well as allowing for more power ! More on the parts in the spoiler:

Coming Soon!

THE CONTROL-BOX:
The control-box is what allows the player to move the vehicle. There will be default keys which are linked to controls, but this can be changed in the control box GUI. Control boxes are not very complicated, but you can add some things to it for it to work better. These include: a hands-free AI thing (this can be upgraded, will need to be upgraded to do many things, like knowing when to kill something, how to fly etc.). This control-box has a GUI which you can use to move, shoot and do whatever you do, or you can have a remote control on your item slot, and then can move the machine from there. To know more about the AI-thing and other fancy stuff, there is a spoiler below, just for you

Coming Soon!

NOTE I AM JUST SAVING IT, IF YOU SEE THIS MESSAGE I AM WORKING ON MORE FOR THIS!!!

 

Love the idea!

However I have some ideas:
*A general size of the vehicle (A closed vehicle), Maybe for the moving city you can only have a horizontal stick with wheels.
*Also the strength of the blocks determines how many you can place

My main worry is just that people can create UNFAIR vehicles, everything else is great!

 

I think the problem of unfair vehicles could be solved by:

1. Having a limit to the ammo carried by vehicles.

2. Have vehicles designed for certain things such as mining and fighting where as the mining vehicle will have much less firepower than a war machine.

3. Have a fuel system so someone can't just camp by a spawn and nonstop kill.

4. Give smaller vehicles their own advantages like the ability to say do a small jump or quickly plant bombs.

5. Perhaps a vehicle that is more for support such as in dune 2000 having only the ability to transform into say a small base or a ramp or large bomb.

6. A vehicle to disarm said bombs.

7. Have exploitable weaknesses logically the larger the vehicle the more fuel needed which means larger exhaust pipes making for a weak point.

8. To prevent too much power : overheating.

9. Mech suits of different speeds and durability and mor able to traverse rougher terrain than most vehicles.

 

more customisation!.
sounds good.
perhaps the parts will have stats.

 

Trains!!!!!!!!!

 

Loving the stuff! I will come back with more updates to this when it hits 25 comments

 

I love this idea, as it adds so much customisability to all of your vehicles and stuff. Maybe a good balance would be that certain parts and equipment is REQUIRED for certain environments? Like a dune buggy wouldn't handle very well in the tundra, the environment you're in could heavily influence how your vehicle looks/behaves but still leave a large amount of the customization up to you. Also, to balance weapons and such attached to your vehicle I can think of two penalties; cooldown and reduced maneuverability.
When you attach guns to your vehicle is becomes a bit slower and harder to handle.

 

tiy said no cooldowns in starbound.
he absolutely hates them.

 

As long as I can make a Sharkmobile, I'm on board with this.

 

Hmmmm then I think that ammo is a pretty good handicap. You need to expend resources that you will never get back, and if you were to repeatedly gun down people at spawn that would be a MASSIVE waste of time and effort.

 

will it play the jaws theme?

 

Yes I agree with this. I think that that would be great and it makes sense too if any of you have read my mount breeding post I think the same mechanics should apply. Where there are levels of speed flying jumping speed and such things and in order for something to work such as flying the weight need to be feasible.

 

If we could build things similar to that Banjo game where you build vehicles, that would be so freaking amazing and fun O_O
Id make an engineer RP guy and build a ton of wacky things to drive and troll things (Drives to enemy, when attack animation, SPRING JUMP)

 

but if they are infront of you how would a spring jump hurt them?

 

Spring jumping, now that's an idea!

 

Hurting is so old school
OR: Bazookas.

 

Bazookas are for pussys.
Riping two turrets out the floor and dual wielding them are what real men do.

 

THAT WAS MY FAVOURITE GAME EVER AHHHHHHHHH
Anyways yes, similar modular equipment and weapons, same method of armament vs. maneuverability. If these things happen I will be happy.

 

This man has class!

 

Perhaps a durability mechanic like if things wear down they provide no more use. A work station would be nice, click on it and it will open a HUD that will show the durability of each part like joints, legs and armor. In this HUD you can build the machine and repair the parts in said HUD.