Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Space expansion and the BLL
ack, what's with the triple post...delete the other two please..(i cant edit yet 
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Kenton
I'd like to see BLL function, but not quite in that manner - maybe have it assist in starship construction as you say, in addition to giving it real "cargo" function.
I'm hoping that we will be able to have large cargo holds in our ships. That way a merchant could stock up on their home planet and then deliver to several planets without having to restock.
The way it works right now, you'd still have to have tons of empty personal inventory space just to move the items from the ship to the vendor. In that case, you might as well just empty out your inventory/backpack and do it manually and forget using any sort of cargo hold altogether.
A BLL could be used to transport things from a cargo hold to a vendor's stockroom, for instance. Say, 50 items.
This is the type of function I think people crave - being able to move a large load from one place to another. Place limitations on it so it isn't simply exploited as casual storage - i.e. make it so you can only take a group of items from point A to point B - like from a factory to a bank, or to another factory. Make it so you cannot manually extract items, and you must extract all the items at once. Further restrict it to only factory crates, and you've pretty much eliminated most casual storage "exploits" while giving industrialists the ability to transfer large amounts of materials they so badly need.
By using a "closed" system like this, they can finally elimnate the useless dragging and dropping it takes to do multi-factory (or even single factory, for that matter ) runs that include subcomponents in the schematic, or having to dump and empty your traditional inventory every time you want to stock up a vendor.
BLL's are a golden opportunity to interact with some of the "storage facilities" that architects are clammoring for as well.
BLL's need some really useful functions to justify the huge cost in named resources and factory parts. What exactly is it doing with all those identical manipulator arms?
AO