After the Trapisonda Curse... - Ships stuck while salvaging

[Kamo]

Since I'm now using bigger "war scavenger" ships to salvage, I'm getting more and more problems with salvage: despite the recent improvement on AI (they can now back away), my war scavengers keep getting stuck, especially the new naonitegrade Magic Kappa-class (which is star-shaped and has twice as much thrust as brake so she crashes easily into things), so I gave her name to the new "curse", though I've also seen my mighty Hotaru flagship get stuck ???.

The scene is always the same: ship flies towards wreckage cloud, gets a piece but gets around others, then tries to salvage a piece out of her firing arcs, rolling back and forth in total immobility :(. Maybe they should also try turning when stuck, and/or ignoring wreckage that is too small to damage them meaningfully.

 

I wonder if it's because they do not have backward thrusters so they cannot go backward, causing them to get stuck in a loop of "backing away too slowly".

I may experiment on it tomorrow, and eventually add miniature back thrusters to all war-scavengers if it's the case ::).

[Sandworm]

The main problem is in the script for salvaging, small pieces of wreck with no material value are complete 'invisible' to salvagers. This can be changed easily, but doesn't outright solve the problem. To completely solve the problem we need to 'cheat' just a little and delete small objects around the salvager when it gets stuck.  I'm doing some work on the salvage script to fix that and travel speed and a few other things that bug me. Will post when done.

[Kamo]

Effectively, it is the case. Back thrusters did nothing to free the salvagers from the curse, but the bit of wreckage they get stuck on seems to always be 0-worth. I added them though.

The bit is invisible to the salvaging script, but visible to the collision avoidance, so it never gets rid of it (or worse, the collision avoidance "asks" the salvaging script to "avoid" the bit for which the script finds no match).