Ship joints are now available allowing for rigid connections between ships. Ship joints can be placed anywhere on your ship and will automatically link to another nearby joint on another ship. Once joined the ships are linked together at one point but up to three total connections can be made between two ships to form a completely rigid connection perfect for a monstrous combined ship.
The two types of joints, alpha and beta, can be used to propagate steering input across connected ships. When an alpha joint connects to a beta joint, all normal steering input on the ship with the beta joint is ignored and the steering input of the ship with the alpha joint is used instead. Alpha/beta connections are ideal for rigid combination ships and beta/beta or alpha/alpha connections are ideal for non-rigid combination ships like trains or other towing configurations.
Ship joints will snap if under enough force or if a joint ejector is activated. When building combined ships, be sure to spread out the joints for the most stable connection. If the joints are giving you trouble and you suspect a bug to be at play, please be sure to post the ship and a screenshot of the ship along with your report. Remember that joints are simple physics interactions and cannot benefit from the many simplifications applied to ships such as propeller torque reduction and center of lift adjustment. A ship in two parts will behave different than the same ship in one part.
Join us on Discord for public playtests Friday at 12pm ET, Saturday at 3pm ET, and Monday at 7pm ET.
1.17.0
Major Features
- Added ship joints.
Minor Features
- Added beam mounted variants of the flak cannon, lance cannon, and quad cannon.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed the connection face cross hatching for the square rudder being wrong.
- Fixed weather sometimes causing errors and degrading performance.
- Fixed the lever steering wheel not responding to ascend/descend input.