Outfit Pod
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[edit] Overview
This pod type is used to modify the ship parts of a vessel or to transport ship parts to another base. It is probably one of the more complicated procedures in VGA Planets 4, but with some knowledge and experience, you can achieve what you are hoping to accomplish.
[edit] Stats
Pod Power Supply: 40
[edit] Procedure
In general, you will put a loadout of ship parts into an outfit pod then set it to dock with a ship. The ship doesn't need to have pod bays for an outfit pod to be able to perform its job, but the pod does have to belong to the same player of the ship. The pod and ship need to be in the same point in space. A player must capture this pod to be able to use its functions on that player's ships. Capturing isn't necessary when the ship is set as the dock target (by the pod's owner) and the ship has pod bays available. In this case, the pod will dock with the ship and transfer ownership automatically.
To begin loading an outfit pod, go to the Base / Pod Pad tab and select the Outfit Pod button. Once launched, an outfit pod will have the control options to Dump Old Parts, Move Old > New, Upgrade Ship (Swap), and Push Parts (Add). These controls are described below. An outfit pod can only carry one type of engine and only one shield. Armor is always added to a ship, not swapped.
[edit] Select Template
You can make the process of selecting what to load into the outfit pod for a particular ship by using a ship template; however, this process is optional. Press the Select Template button to begin selecting a ship as a template. If you are outfitting a ship that your race doesn't start with then find it in the list provided; otherwise, press the My Hulls Only button to narrow down the search. Once you have selected the hull, press the OK button. Once this is complete press the button next to Template on the Outfit Pod screen. Until you exit the VGA Planets 4 client, this template will remain, so in the future if you are outfitting another ship of the same hull then you can simply click this Template button again. You are now ready to select a ship parts loadout that will only fit into the ship hull that you have selected as a template.
[edit] Push Parts (Add)
The more simple approach to modifying ship parts is the Push Parts or Add procedure. If your ship is completely missing some ship parts, then new parts can be added to where there are none. For example, if you build a ship without generators and you determine that you need some on there now you can put the generators into an outfit pod, dock it to a ship and add them. Any open slots for generators will be filled by those in the outfit pod.
[edit] Upgrade Ship (Swap)
Upgrading or swapping parts out of a ship is a more complicated process. Existing parts will be swapped with those in the pod. In addition, any slots with missing parts will have the parts in the outfit pod added, which functions exactly as above. The main complication appears when swapping point defense, large weapons, small weapons, and generators. The slots that you put these items in the outfit pod correlate to those stored in the code for the ship. The weapon list on the Ship / Data / Weapons page consolidates and reorders the weapons so that you cannot determine their proper slot location. You can only truely see how these items are stored in a ship by exporting the CSV files for your game and viewing the Ship.csv file. The numbers that are in the columns for these items correlate to what the code recognizes each item as. You can translate these use the programming page. So you need to load the outfit pod properly to properly swap out the parts that you expect. The below example shows the results of an outfit pod swap. The player may have wanted to add the new large weapons and small weapons to the ship, but didn't get what they wanted.
Slot Outfit Pod (begin) Ship (begin) Ship (end) Outfit Pod (end) PD1 PD2 PD3 PD4 PD5 PD6 PD7 PD8 PD9 PD10 LW1 Sand Caster Pulsed Phasor Cannon Sand Caster Pulsed Phasor Cannon LW2 Sand Caster Pulsed Phasor Cannon Sand Caster Pulsed Phasor Cannon LW3 Pulsed Phasor Cannon Heavy Laser Pulsed Phasor Cannon Heavy Laser LW4 Pulsed Phasor Cannon Heavy Laser Pulsed Phasor Cannon Heavy Laser LW5 Pulsed Phasor Cannon Heavy Laser Pulsed Phasor Cannon Heavy Laser LW6 Heavy Laser Heavy Laser LW7 Heavy Laser Heavy Laser LW8 LW9 LW10 LW11 LW12 LW13 LW14 LW15 LW16 LW17 LW18 LW19 LW20 SW1 Xenon Beam Plasma Gun Xenon Beam Plasma Gun SW2 Xenon Beam Pulsed Laser Xenon Beam Pulsed Laser SW3 Pulsed Laser Pulsed Laser SW4 Pulsed Laser Pulsed Laser SW5 Pulsed Laser Pulsed Laser SW6 Pulsed Laser Pulsed Laser SW7 SW8 SW9 SW10 SW11 SW12 SW13 SW14 SW15 SW16 SW17 SW18 SW19 SW20 SW21 SW22 SW23 SW24 SW25 SW26 SW27 SW28 SW29 SW30 GEN1 GEN2 GEN3 GEN4 GEN5
In some situations it is best to fill an outfit pod with cheap items that you will swap out everything on the ship with, land the ship parts at your base then send a new outfit pod with the proper loadout to the ship to swap again.
You may also be able to use parts that you don't actually want to load onto the ship to fill slots temporarily while designing the outfit pod then remove them before launching it to put parts in their proper slots. For example, if you want to skip large weapon slots 1 and 2 and put PPTs in 3 and 4, then you should be able to: I need to test this.
- Put Heavy Lasers in slots 1 and 2
- Put the PPTs in 3 and 4
- Remove the Heavy Lasers
- Launch the pod
When parts are swapped, the old parts are put into a separate storage area in the outfit pod called "Old", which can be accessed from the Control tab of the pod by pressing the Old button. You can land the pod at a base to recover the old parts or you can use the control Move Old > New to put the parts into a position to outfit another ship or perform other functions. You can also use the control function Dump Old Parts to get rid of them completely, but in most cases you will just land them or self-destruct the pod.
[edit] Moment / Duration
Outfit Pods that are set to "Upgrade Ship" or "Push Parts" are processed along with transfers. This will allow you to modify a ship that has no pod bays that is set to move away from the pod this turn. The earliest it can occur is just before warp chunnel and fast-hype. The latest is at the end of movement, so it is also possible to rendezvous with a pod during the turn and perform an upgrade on the fly.
