About the removal of Attachment Plates

mrchip

Well-known endo
Joined
Feb 25, 2020
Messages
50
#1
Attachment plates are really useful.
It roughly comes down to these scenarios (Please comment if you can think of a scenario i missed, examples are also welcome):
  1. Connecting beams that do not touch
  2. Connecting beams at "unconventional" angles
  3. Ease of building sections of your frame without being forced to align perfectly or use a workaround
  4. Special situations where you need to connect decorative elements, and attachment plates are the smallest and unintrusive part*
  5. Special aesthetic / creative purposes where you take advantage of their small size / deliberately industrial look.
Here's a couple examples.
A frequent scenario, is when people work with unaligned frame sections, or 30 / 15° beams, and there's the classic moment where you try to join it back to the main frame and it just doesn't align. Lost count of how many times a screenshot like this has been posted in the #ship-design channel with a caption along the lines of "pain".
While it may feel unsatisfying to leave a gap, attachment plates at least make it possible to easily deal with such a situation, and the frame is probably hidden behind plates anyway:
1622820432993.png


Here's an example of two adjacent beams being used to make a freeform angle:
1622820945257.png


Here's another freeform angle with two beams on top of eachother:
1622821100863.png


Off-grid unsnapped connection:
1622821323687.png




Here's the important bit, the main takeaway from this thread:
What makes the current Starbase building system so amazing is that you combine multiple of these, and still get away with a valid frame.
This enables A LOT of creative freedom that just isn't there in any other building game.
There are workarounds, but they are frustrating to work with, and cannot compete with the compactness of attachment plates.
While it may be theoretically possible to make a weld connection between an isolated set of 2 beams, ships are more than an isolated set of 2 beams! So the extra space and parts taken by such a workaround may often make the difference in the buildability of an idea.



The workarounds.
Let's pretend attachment plates have just been deleted from the game, and all the above examples are part of a ship we made. How can we fix it?

1) Realignment
For off-grid connections, you may be able to solve by moving that entire off-grid section a little (about 1-2cm), going to the weld tool, and seeing if it lets you weld. If it doesn't, retry. Welding creates a small collision cylinder centered on every snap point to determine if beams are in contact and weldable. This works perfectly while your beams are snapped together, but creates problems otherwise:
1622823745745.png


This is the maximum distance that allows welding. Basically, it has to touch.
1622820748094.png

Which leads to the second, and most frequent workaround:

2) "Attachment beams"
Where there used to be an attachment plate and a bolt, you now add an extra beam, and welds.
Remember that due to how valid welds are considered, there are limitations and significant trial and error in finding a beam, position, and rotation that will be accepted by the weld tool: especially when connecting rotated frame sections in multiple points, it can be challenging to make everything align.
1622826440583.png


And here's the rest of the previous examples, re-solved with "attachment beams":
1622826574801.png
1622826610159.png
1622826744627.png
1622826879302.png


Remember, all these examples feature only 1 building problem at a time. Real ships will often combine them



Other uses.
So far, i only covered things related to using attachment plates in their intended way: to connect beams.
It turns out the small form factor is quite versatile for plenty niche and creative situations.
We do have ducts now, that have similar form factors, but their texture and the fact you can't paint the blue outside can be an issue.
1622826966772.png
1622827006436.png
1622827029274.png

Image 1 has a few plates as an aesthetic element, Image 2 has a plate to allow bolts to cross an empty gap that can't be filled by any other part, Image 3 has attachment plates being an aesthetically non-obtrusive way to make a connection to a series of 15° tilted plates.



Alternatives.
What's important to remember here is - we technically don't care about attachment plates, we care about the things they let us achieve. Any alternative that allows all of these things, is completely fine.
A simple way to solve this would be to make welds A LOT more loose. Make them a 30 cm diameter sphere that can connect to things that aren't directly touching the beam. Give them visuals. Or not.
To solve only frames, there could be a "glue" item that adapts its shape to fill a specific gap, but i seriously doubt that is easier to implement than fixing any bug / exploitability of attachment plates.
We could just get a reworked new part that is basically an attachment plate, but for some technical reasons it's easier to make it a completely new part rather than fixing current attachment plates.
To be honest, i don't really have many ideas.

I just know that removing them - and not adding a proper replacement - will significantly worsen the shipbuilding experience for anyone that doesn't use a simple orthogonal building style.
 
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