Pushing an asteroid out of the way with no damage.

[DeathTech]

Hey guys,

 

This one is a bit weird and does not always work.

 

But earlier today doing research for my tutorial series I noticed ramming an asteroid "VERY SLOWLY" sometimes results in the game moving the asteroid out of my way.

 

I'm not sure of the conditions. I just know that most of the time it works if I fly into the asteroid directly and very slowly in a drone. If I understand what is happening it must have something to do with the placer detecting an intersection and moving the asteroid to a new location.

 

If others can confirm this happens to them too then would be great thanks.

[Ulrich_Rüstungjäger]

Are you referring to the asteroid basically teleporting to the side a few meters or are you saying the asteroid will just slowly move. The latter of these 2 thing happen because of game physics

your wording leads me to believe you are clipping into the asteroid slightly which does trigger the game to teleport either the ship or the object you are colliding with to a "safe" zone outside of the hit box of both objects. I've seen this happen multiple times when I try to """""dock"""""" my escape pod to my light cruiser.

[Shrooblord]

Yup, the teleportation thing is a bit weird. You can see it very clearly when piloting a fighter and running into your mothership (or anything else for that matter). I've seen asteroids teleport out of the way, too.

 

But if it's simply very slowly pushing an asteroid, I don't think that should be considered a bug. In fact, I'd almost love to make a suggestion for a "suction cup" block that you could attach to the front of the ship, so you could more safely lock onto objects and use your engines to push them away. I'd love for something like that.

 

In fact, I almost consider the reverse to be true: the fact that if you very slowly push yourself against an asteroid (or anything else), you get damaged, that I find buggy behaviour. When you slam into things, sure. But resting on another object's surface, making soft contact, and then starting to slowly push both yourself and that object away, shouldn't intuitively cause you to damage yourself. Do you get hurt from impact damage when you're trying to push a box or cupboard away in real life? No, you don't.

[SivCorp]

I bet you can "capture" an asteroid with a combination of push and pull force turrets.  I've pushed many asteroids out of the way with my asteroid clearing ship... but never tried to capture one and fly it out.  Time to experiment. ;)

[Shrooblord]

Have you ever had an effective (amount of) Force Turrets? I've experimented before, but even when equipped with 8 of them, found them all rather puny and unsatisfying in their ineffectiveness. But maybe I just had bad Turrets: who knows.

[DeathTech]

I was referring to the time I tried to see how the game handles death by boosting myself full speed into an asteroid only for it to magically disappear on me, only to discover it was moved by the game out of my way.

 

Then I tried pushing the asteroid slowly. No luck there just collision damage.

But sometimes when I did the attempt to push an asteroid it just instantly blinks away to a nearby location.

[Shrooblord]

Ah, yes, physically pushing objects is a bit wonky in this game. Turns out the code that safeguards against teleglitching/telefragging accidentally gets a bit sensitive about the fact that two Entities are sharing a location in space juuuust a little too close together. It takes over and puts either you or the asteroid a safe couple of meters out of both of your bounding boxes.

 

Kinda sad - I'd like to be able to create a ship with dozer blade-like appendages and use it to push large things out of the way and clear some space in a dense asteroid field. Imagine building a tunnel of asteroids towards your Station's docking port, the Station itself encased in a thick shell of rocks. Now that's got some flavourful design right there.

[BAMcSH_]

I noticed whilst using some force turrets the other day that stationary asteroids seem to be shelved by the server, and when you begin pushing them it takes a moment before the server catches up. I would estimate this to be an optimization decision, but could be wrong.