Can anything be done about stations drifting?

[Valhar2000]

Ever since update v0.12, which keeps sectors with player ships in them loaded, I often find that my stations will sometimes drift very far away from their original position. The latest one drifted 800km away, and was still moving at a steady 120m/s before I gave up trying to find it and push it back, and instead restored a backup of the save game.

 

Is there anything that can be done about this? Can I build my stations in such a way that they will stay put? Can use a cheat to relocate a station, or edit the save files to change its position?

[Ravien]

The only thing I can think of without mods is to increase the mass of your stations so they are less likely to be bumped. Using rock is a cheap way to do it since rock armor doesn't use power or crew and is cheap.

 

Hopefully in the future thrusters and intertia dampers will work on stations!

[Narainoshi]

If someone finds a solid solution without mods I'd love to hear it as well. This can be very annoying.

[Valhar2000]

The only thing I can think of without mods is to increase the mass of your stations so they are less likely to be bumped. Using rock is a cheap way to do it since rock armor doesn't use power or crew and is cheap.

 

Hopefully in the future thrusters and intertia dampers will work on stations!

 

Thanks! This does seem to work, so far. I didn't realize that rock was so cheap, in terms of materials. It is relatively easy to add a lot of mass to a station using rock.

[Valhar2000]

I can confirm that using rock to increase the mass of a station works well enough.

 

I was able to determine that my stations drift because NPC ships sometimes crash into them, and sometimes the get stuck trying to fly but unable to avoid one of my stations, so they end up pushing the station hundreds of kilometers.

 

Yesterday I found and NPC ship doing this to one of the stations that I had added rock to, and I found that instead of pushing the station at a speed of 150m/s as before, it was pushing it at a speed of 45m/s. This made it a lot easier to catch the problem before the station got really far away. After getting rid of the NPC ship, I added more rock to the station, so now it will be even more difficult to push.

 

So, if you are reading this because your stations are getting pushed around, follow this advice: add lots of rock to it! Rock is cheap and heavy, so it works very well to add weight to a station that you don't want moved.

[Shrooblord]

I know you guys asked for a no-mods solution, and since one has been posted that appears to work fine, I'll leave my pro-mod weigh-in on this conversation also.

 

There's the Better Docking mod that makes AI ships' pathing to Stations waaaaaaay better i.e. they now should never crash ram into them and push them away ever again.

 

I mean I know you asked for no mods, but eliminating the source of the problem rather than patching the problem sounds like the proper alternative to me. ;)