Rough concepts for Mining Boat, "Boat Stations", & small/large Transport Boats
With water pathfinding now resolved, and Amphibious Vehicles already in existence, I strongly suspect some form of this is already in development, but I will suggest it nevertheless. I think these ideas are particularly viable because many of their subsystems have already been built into the game.
1) Deep Mining Boat:
- One of the dumbest, most immersion-breaking aspects of late-game mining is the need to fill oceans to gain access to materials underneath. Amphibs can only mine to height -5, but some deposits are much deeper.
- Aesthetically, this watercraft could drop some kind of industrial equipment on a cable down into Water.
- It can inherit the pathfinder of Amphib Excavs, but be unable to pathfind onto land (and maybe be a bit larger). It can also just be assigned to regular Mine Control Towers (or whatever system those get replaced with by then), but will only pathfind onto tiles accessble from water.
- It could either have its own inventory, or work with transports boats like excavs with trucks.
2) "Boat Station" (if you do it for real, use a better name lol, but "cargo dock" is taken)
- Kinda like a train station.
- Land side: has transport ports for belts or Linked Storages.
- Water side: instead of having rails for trains, cranes hover over water to grab stuff from boats (just like current Cargo Docks)
- Has modules like a train station.
- Has red/green sliders for associated cargo types, which calls boats to balance invetories between different Boat Stations when needed.
3) Small Transport Boat (water truck)
- Can dock with a single module at a Boat Station.
- Can been assigned to MTCs and service Deep Mining Boats (if it doesn't have its own inventory)
to be continued in comments
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19 May
FireflyHighlighted comment
4) Large Transport Boat (water train)
- Could be a barge with a head that has propulsion, but can selected be given more segments of cargo holds (like a train).
- Could also just be existing Cargo Ships retasked for domestic use, since those already have segments.
- During docking with Boat Stations, each segment can be serviced by a different module (like a train).
- They are bigger, so maybe they could require scheduling, and could only service associated stations.
Transport watercraft should have much lower operating costs than land vehicles of the similar size & capability. In terms of immersion, this is realistic as water transport is massively more efficient per unit mass than land transport of any kind. In terms of gameplay, this can be balanced against the fact that digging canals or even smoothing coastlines is generally more costly than laying rail.