HannerLambda

Docking ports are pretty great, but they have a number of limitations and problems. I'd like to suggest a new block type that would alleviate a lot of these issues: Docking Bays. In terms of placement, appearance, entrance, and exiting they would work just like Fighter Bays, except that they're for whole ships instead of fighters. Preferably they would only store one ship at a time and the ship would behave just like a docked ship does currently, but it would be much simpler to have the AI use something similar to the way fighters return and exit than worry about the intricacies of manual docking.

Factories have an update interval of somewhere in the range or .98 - 1.02 seconds when you are in sector. When you're not in sector, 4 seconds are added to this, presumably for performance reasons. When an update occurs, any productions that have been running long enough are finished and new ones are started to fill in any vacant slots. This means that when you are out of sector, your productions could take almost 5 seconds longer than they should to finish a cycle because any time between production finishing and the next update running is essentially wasted.