Exploration: Allow to drop fuel and repair kits in space to share them and/or create remote "caches"

[sernana]

Exploration: Allow to drop fuel and repair kits in space to share them and/or create remote "caches"

How about this:

- allow to drop fuel caches and repairkits caches to be dropped just about everywhere in space (well, maybe no in/neaby stations etc)
- those caches should be persistant after leaving a place they stay put
- they *could* be subject to degrading with time like those mining rocks...

This would allow to:

pros:
+ create remote "support" places for explorers which would be built up before going further into space fe: do several runs with those support-goods to a remote location, drop them there... and then venture forth from there further into space and come back to resupply...
+ groups could share the burden to keep the places "filled" with needed goods...
+ the **location** of those caches would create a **secret**: others would maybe be interested in finding them by sneaky following others to their caches and "steal" things from there
+ the owners (it could be a group effort to create and keep the caches supplied) would probably try to keep the locations secret and try to shake off potential followers

cons:
- technically this is not an easy thing to do in an procedurally generated "world" which disappears when not "visited", but I guess there is already a layer of fixed, non-procedural data put over the proc-gen stuff so the caches could be handled in that layer... (obviously i have no idea of the inner workings of the ED proc-gen stuff

What do you think?

 

[igor37]

I like the idea. I think it should be some kind of repair robot, which means it can only be used once it got ejected from the cargo hold, and with a restriction(like the ship should be powered down/in silent running mode while repairing) it would be impossible to use it in combat situations. The hull repair effect should scale down with the size of the ship(so it's still much cheaper to repair on a station), and as an emergency repair kit for subsystems like thrusters, life support or sensors it would be nice.