Another mod suggestion: oriented gravity and ship building

[sen4mi]

Starfield depends heavily on artificial gravity, this is not only within the ships but for interstellar travel.

 

But it has ladders, with no gravity assist for vertical movement within ships.

 

One alternative approach, of course, would be some sort of elevator system or transit tubes. But ... before Bethesda released the game Prey, there was another game with the same name, that among other things did some interesting things with gravity.

 

I don't think all of the features of that game would make sense for starfield, but I would like to see the ability to rotate modules such that gravity pointed in some other direction. This needs a bit of work for figuring out how the first-person transitions would work, but - worst case scenario, if no one can figure out animations and camera angles - we could have little portals to connect different parts of the ship.

 

So... anyways... this is the mod concept: introduce additional orientations in ship builder and some suitable connectors - either angled transition pieces or maybe power-hungry portal/elevator attachments.

[thefabulousfink]

I think we are probably going to have a lot of ship mods once the Creation Kit comes.  I would love to see grav lifts, or the ability to build ring habs like in 2001.  Hell, I would be happy with a simple ramp or staircase instead of using ladders all the time.

[snoopy102]

Having differing gravity is probably not possible with a mere mod. That's something the game engine can or can not do or support. I learned a bit about that when I followed Star Citizen where ships actually can have differing gravity zones, most (in)famously the MISC Hull series of ships which was greatly delayed because of this particular feature. 

Maybe it's possible to have something like a 0 G elevator but that would probably have to be it's own 1x1 ship part, not something that can be added to other modules.

[DocClox]

It would be fun if you could dial the gravity back to 0.1 or so. Then you could go drifting through the ship like astronauts on the ISS, which would fit nicely with the NASAPunk theme, but still be able to stand or sit down.

[sen4mi]

There's a "party ship" where in a conversation you can have them turn off ship's gravity.

 

And there's an in-game power where (if I understand the description right) the player is supposed to be able to temporarily reduce the pull of gravity in a small area. It's like the first power you get (but it doesn't actually seem to do anything, yet, and maybe I have not understood what it is supposed to do?).

 

So... it seems to me that there must be some support for variable gravity already implemented in the game engine. But maybe future game updates will change something about this or add to the effects we can currently achieve.

 

(But I haven't seen anything to suggest that the direction of gravity can be manipulated, so that would be a different kind of issue.)

[DocClox]

I still haven't found that party ship, but there's another one where the gravity turns on and off every minute or so.

 

So we know it can be turned on and off. What's not so clear is if you can change how strong the field is. Can yoyu set it t o50% as well as 0 and 100, or is the "on" level baked into the cell at design time?

 

The power is Anti Gravity Field, and it creates an area in front of the player where gravity is turned off, so everyone floats upwards and flounders around. It doesn't have much range and it's hard to gauge the area of effect. Try it next time you have three or four spacers clumped up and too close for comfort.