Raise of hands, how many here still hit the docking bay ever so slightly while in a behemoth the majority of the time?

I'm not sure I count since I pilot so crappily. But here's a hand

I don't fly Behemoths, so I wouldn't know.

Who cares?

Every time. Come to think of it, depending on how many drinks I have had, I can barely manage to dock my Rev C.

It's usually easier to go to B-8 and let Strat flare me to death, respawning is infinitely easier than docking.

I think he wants slightly larger docks

How about docking autopilot?
I would love to see say.... 6 moths standing in line at 150 m from Sedina D-14 waiting for their turn to get auto-piloted to dock. :D

bojan ftw! :D

Aye, though orienting the moth perpendicular to the dock seems to reduce the number of scrapes a lot .

I just turbo in, if I crash, no deal :P

/me raises hand

To be fair though, it's been proposed multiple times that we need larger docks. I *think* they might be coming with Capital-class ships "Soon"(TM) as there have been questions of how players will interact with stations while on board cruisers and the like.

If you bump your moth, fly a smaller ship. I personally can usually manage to land a moth full of sunflares at 60-80 m/s without a scratch

That being said, I like the autopilot landing idea. It should deifnitely still be possible to land manually for emergencies, though. Perhaps a small faction loss for manual docking, or a somewhat large faction loss (20-50) for docking manually when there are others in queue. That's small enough that it's still better to attempt an emergency landing rather than get blown up or whatever most of the time, but large enough that there's a good reason to use autodocking.

It's already incredibly annoying to dock a large ship when a convoy is arriving because they take up all the docking slots for a while, autodocking should help solve that issue, along with adding a bit of additional scalability to the game (if we ever have several thousand people flying around the stations will be far too crowded to support manual docking all the time without a significant number of accidents).

That being said, this needs to be done once the economy works correctly, the ships work correctly (PC capships etc), and other major issues are worked out.

If anything, I would reverse that ladron. Small faction loss for using automatic pilot.

We don't want to turn this into a pseudo-EVE controlled system where the computer runs the show. Besides, if you're landing a Behemoth anyways, you can probably handle a small faction loss since completing a Bulk Proc Mission will easily makeup for it.

We don't want to turn this into a pseudo-EVE controlled system where the computer runs the show.

Hey, if these guys want to be helpless and vulnerable -- just like when warping out of a sector -- while docking, I'm ALL for it. Collecting cargoes is much easier when they're right at the station, after all.

An automated docking system would make sense for capital ships, as has been mentioned here by Antz. As the good doctor says, the time of vulnerability is critical, and so perhaps there could be multiple zones from where automated docking procedures can be initiated, with a linear time penalty for increased distances (the aligning might provide enough of a naturally incurred penalty, eliminating the need for an artificial one).

Stations do not need such a thing, in my opinion, but if it were to be implemented for both, I'm sure it would be optional, like in the Wing Commander game series.

I used to... but, I find if I take the Moth in side ways its a much better/easier fit.

autopilot docking could be a good option, as long as there's an option to do things the good manual way if you're getting shot at. Real life pilots fly airliners on boring autopilot, until things get too interesting for the autopilot.

Also some sort of external docking arms would be cool for very large ships, sorta like terminals.

I've never ever hit a dock while docking a moth (or a 7 million kg Maud for that matter).

No wonder traders can't fight. Can't even dock right...