October 9, 2017

Rotator Hub


Alrick Fons, and his team of engineers at Centauri Spaceworks has designed a special hub.  Unlike normal hubs, it can rotate to change the angle between the two docking ports.  It has a full 180 degrees of rotation.   The two docking ports can form an angle as small as 90 degrees, or as large as 180.  Hopefully this part will be manufactured by Nooleus and added into the game.

Due to the rotation mechanism, this hub does not have any cargo storage.

The rotation is controlled on the power panel.  In addition to having an on and off switch, it has a left and a right button that will change the orientation of the docking ports by holding them down.

The hub with the smaller number of modules is the one that rotates. If there are two modules on one side, and four modules on the other side, the side with 3 modules is the one that rotates.  It needs at least one module attached to supply the power to rotate, since it doesn't have any internal storage space for a battery.  It can rotate a maximum of 6 modules before it becomes to heavy for the motor.

Changing the orientation takes power.  Normally the rotator hub uses 10 power.  However, when rotating the power consumption increases.  It uses 30 power if one docking port is open.  If both ports are docked, it uses an additional 50 power per module on the smaller side.  In the example with three modules on one side and four on another, it would use 200 power to rotate.  There are three modules on the smaller side, 3 × 50 = 150.  The module uses 30 power for itself so that brings the total to 30 + 150 = 180 power.  It maxes out at 330 power when the modules have too much mass for it to rotate without burning out the motor.