Can I deliberately disable an engine?

[happy2pester (OP)]

I have a large, heavy ship, that I am trying to tow into place with a tug. We'll call the large heavy one Ship A.

Ship A has a basic engine, and some fuel, so that it can move around in the vicinity of where i plan on leaving it. However, I need to use the Tug to get it into position - Ship A only has a small amount of fuel, and is very heavy. When I use the Tug to tow Ship A into place however, the Ship A uses up it's fuel, and very shortly starts interrupting my game with Out Of Fuel events, preventing me from actually towing it into place

The Tug is definitely connected to Ship A, and has plenty of fuel in it. Is there any way that I can disable the engines on Ship A, so that it will stop burning fuel, or do I just need to keep on spamming equalise fuel orders every time it runs out?

[Bandus]

I have a large, heavy ship, that I am trying to tow into place with a tug. We'll call the large heavy one Ship A.

Ship A has a basic engine, and some fuel, so that it can move around in the vicinity of where i plan on leaving it. However, I need to use the Tug to get it into position - Ship A only has a small amount of fuel, and is very heavy. When I use the Tug to tow Ship A into place however, the Ship A uses up it's fuel, and very shortly starts interrupting my game with Out Of Fuel events, preventing me from actually towing it into place

The Tug is definitely connected to Ship A, and has plenty of fuel in it. Is there any way that I can disable the engines on Ship A, so that it will stop burning fuel, or do I just need to keep on spamming equalise fuel orders every time it runs out?

Have you confirmed that the task force Ship A is part of has no orders? If so, also try setting the speed for task group that Ship A is part of to 0.

[happy2pester (OP)]

The Tug grabs ship A, by going to the Ship A TG and using the grab specific ship command. It then shows up on my end at least as part of the Tug TG

[TheDeadlyShoe]

there are two possibilities i believe:

you can manually apply damage to the ship in the Ships screen, but this is random and may blow up the ship

you can unlock and edit engines out of the class, then look at this particular ship again in the Ships screen.  This will update this ship to the new class configuration. As long as you do not look at the other ships in the class in the ships screen, they will not update to the new design.  Re edit the class to have engines when your tug reaches its destination.

[happy2pester (OP)]

That just seems kinda cheaty to me doing it that way

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Naw. You want them to turn the engine off, but they can't due to game limitations. You're just working around it. 

[sloanjh]

Naw. You want them to turn the engine off, but they can't due to game limitations. You're just working around it. 

TheDeadlyShoe kind of skipped a step in answering your question.  The answer to your question is "no - Steve hasn't gotten around to fixing this issue yet."

Lots of people (myself included) have run into it before, and it just doesn't make any sense the way its coded up, so most people think this falls into the category of "things to be fixed in SM mode".  You'll find a lot of those in Aurora, since Steve is only one guy and there are higher priorities on what he wants to put into the game, and the design intent is to work around them in SM mode if necessary.

I'm going on about this because a lot of people post "I don't ever want to use SM mode to do anything, because that would be cheating", and this is a good example of how that's a misguided approach.

John

[happy2pester (OP)]

Yeah, that's fair enough - I don't like using SM mode for general things, because I do think that's cheating, but I can see it being a good workaround for issues like that.

[Paul M]

I mean there are times when it is cheating but there are many times when it is not, a couple of examples:

1.  up to 6.4 there is no way to refit your PDCs.  The refit command works in terms of expending minerals, construction resources and time but doesn't do anything.  So at least one solution is to use SM mode to delete the old and add the new when the message "refit completed" shows up.

2.  I made a mistake and needed to use SM mode to move a ship containing a team from Earth to Alpha C and then moved the ship back.  I had no other way to put the team where I wanted them. 

Correcting mistakes that you made is the biggest use I have for the SM mode.  Especially when the mistake is from lack of familiarity then I see no problem.  It isn't like a real military logistics service would forget to load missiles on a ship before a combat mission or that the crew of the ship wouldn't notice this detail and so on...but you the player can easily not see that sort of thing.  For most of these kinds of considerations I consider how likely it is to happen in real life.  If the answer is negligably likely then I have no problem using SM mode to correct the issue.