Landing Gear
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Used to attach to other ships or to stations for docking. Also useful for towing.
Operated when piloting a ship; maneuver the ship such that the landing gear is in range (it will be indicated on the HUD, as well as by the ring around the foot turning yellow), then press P (default) to lock the landing gear. The ring around the foot will turn green to indicate that it is locked, and the ship will be attached to the target. You can then press P again to detach.
If built on another ship, they will automatically start pre-attached.
Landing gears can be set to "Auto-lock". In this mode the color stripe turns light blue. In this mode, the landing gear will lock automaticly to any surface that comes into magnetization range.
The maximum force a landing gear will absorb can be adjusted in the control panel. If this force is exceeded, the landing gear will unlock itself. If set to "Unlimited" the landing gear will not unlock. If in this case the force on the landing gear gets too high for the structure to handle, it will explode.
Known issues
V01.079.008 and earlier:
Landing gears are currently known for beeing unstable. They work fairly reliable in single player. But in multiplayer, especially when used on a dedicated server (DS), and in some cases also in single player, they show the following problematic behaviour:
- sinking into the ground of the surface they are currently magetized to and exploding upon unlocking them in this sunken state
- vibrating increasingly until they explode
There are no 100% workarounds yet. But some things should be considered when using landing gears.
- always deactivating inertia dampeners or powering down the whole ship that is magnetized to another ship or station. This will prevent unnecessary force on thr landing gears because the docked ship will fight against the movement of the ship it's docked to with its thrusters
- having a ship not only rest on the landing gears, but also sdjacently paced armor blocks can reduce their tendency to sink into the ground
- magnetizing landing gears slightly above the surface (as soon as the indicator strip gets yellow)
- setting the max force to a value < Unlimited can reduce their tendency to explode. However, the docked ship might still come loose at some point. Setting them to "auto-lock" in this case might be worth to try.
- Using a combination of a connector and landing gears to dock ships
