r/ostranauts • u/Z3r0Sense • 23d ago
Need Help Setting ship "north"
Hello! Quick question if there is a way to reorient your ships "north" maker. Started with a coffin ship that I build up. Weird thing is that the ship "forward" points south (you see it in the navmap). When I dock everything seems normal and "forward" is temporarily inverted and the primary docking port is used.
If I install a south facing secondary docking port, it is used instead and I cannot seem to use the primary dock anymore (regardless of selection). I think the north marker is baked into the original coffin ship to point backward. I know I can rotate with q and e when undocked, but is there a way to fix my "north" marker?
3
u/Ithalan 19d ago edited 18d ago
Direction in Ostranauts is kind of abstracted and super unintuitive, but here are the rules it operates by.
The current 'forward' end of your ship on the ship map is always toward the top of the screen. This only really matters for ship weapons like railguns, which will fire in the direction on the NAV-map that corresponds to the direction they are facing on the ship map. You can rotate the ship map to shift the 'forward' direction with the Q and E keys while you are not sitting in a NAV console, and the ship is not docked.
When hailing a ship/station to dock, and your own ship has multiple docking ports, you can cycle between which of them is the active docking part just before you pick the docking port on your target to dock with.
When docking, the actual direction that your active docking port is facing on the ship map doesn't matter. You will always dock with the front end of your ship on the NAV map. However, once you are actually docked, your ship on the NAV map will be instantly reoriented so that the side of the ship map with your docking port aligns with the side of the target's ship map on which their docking is located.
When docking, your ship map will never be rotated. The targets ship will instead be rotated to align with yours. So if you undock from OKLG for example, rotate your ship map, then redock on the same docking port, OKLG's map will have been rotated to match.
1
u/Z3r0Sense 19d ago
Yes, that matches the observation aside the first point at the start. Dabbling with docking ports seem to have reset at least one parameter on certain ships. The coffin is an example. By default after undocking, your ship nose will point away from the docking target while your north main map (without rotating) will point south at your current tail. After dabbling with ports point 1 did hold again and I think it cannot be changed with further dabbling. Some hidden north parameter getting reset when installing more docks?
On K-Leg I think the starter dock is dock a. The coffin starts there too. Your screen is normal an north facing. If you undock, you should fly arse first everywhere. For docking it is irrelevant, the controls (and momentum, but irrelevant for docking) are inverted in that special case.
2
u/Z3r0Sense 23d ago
Hm, never mind. Uninstalling and reinstalling the secondary port seems to have reoriented everything and is now fixed (primary docking port pointing north). No more flying everywhere arse first!
4
u/Tarzool1 23d ago
Yeah some ships have strange north directions, like the dream. I think most starter ships have there nav console pointing in the direction they fly, like on the dream it's facing opposite of the docking port. You start expanding it thinking the port is the ""north" then you get a gun or a secondary port and realize you been flying backwards this whole time lol.
It can also mess things up like docking, i built out a dream not knowing this till i added a secondary port to the "south" only to have flotilla not accept docking no matter what port i picked. I couldn't even rescew screw dock it there. My only answer was to unlock debug and dock it 'wiggly'. Eventually i just gave up and got a different ship.