Vehicle pads

The idea

A vehicle pad is placed in the world and told what kind of vehicle belongs there — a transport helipad, a fuel point, an ambulance bay. It then parks the best vehicle the faction’s catalogue offers for that role at the tier the faction currently holds, and nothing at all when the catalogue offers nothing.

That last part is the useful half. A helipad on a tier 1 server is an empty helipad. The same pad grows a light transport helicopter the moment the faction reaches whatever tier you stocked one at, with no world edit and no Game Master doing anything.

The alternative — a pad naming a specific vehicle — has to be re-authored every time the line-up changes, and a pad per tier means eight parking spaces with seven of them empty.

Authoring a pad

Place the pad prefab where you want the vehicle to appear and set:

Four more control the space the pad checks before it puts anything down, and the sign it puts up. The defaults suit an ordinary lorry bay and most pads never need them touched:

A player or another vehicle inside the clearance box holds the spawn back rather than having a truck land on them. Where the bay already holds a vehicle, that vehicle’s own measured size is used instead wherever it is larger — so the box is a floor for the case with nothing to measure, an empty bay restocking after a loss. Keep it to the bay’s own footprint: a box reaching into the next bay reads that bay’s vehicle as an obstruction and never restocks.

Raise it for a helipad, where the rotor disc is the part that hurts and no measurement of the airframe covers it.

The labels are editable-entity labels — the same vocabulary the editor’s content browser filters on. A transport helipad is VEHICLE_HELICOPTER required and TRAIT_ARMED excluded. A fuel point is VEHICLE_TRUCK and TRAIT_REFUELING.

The pad picks the highest-level match the faction has earned, so it shows the newest thing they have reached rather than the oldest thing they still have. Where several vehicles sit at the same level, it picks one at random, so a role with three options does not always park the same one.

Labelling your vehicles first

This is the step that catches people out, and it is worth doing before you place a single pad.

A vehicle prefab has two label lists. Auto labels are generated by the editor and carry only faction, size and vehicle type. Authored labels are the ones you write by hand. Filtering checks both.

The generated ones are not enough to describe a role. Every variant of a given truck — fuel, ammo, repair, medical — generates the same VEHICLE_TRUCK and nothing else. An ambulance generates VEHICLE_CAR, indistinguishable from an armed jeep on the same chassis. So a pad asking for TRAIT_REFUELING finds nothing until something is actually labelled TRAIT_REFUELING.

Open the vehicle prefab, find the editable component’s UI info, and add the role to Authored Labels. Useful ones:

Do not edit the auto labels. The editor regenerates them whenever editable entities are updated, and an edit there reverts silently. If a vehicle shows the wrong faction, fix the faction key on the UI info — the label follows from it.

Prefer requiring a positive label to excluding a negative one. A transport pad that merely excludes TRAIT_ARMED will still take an armed vehicle that nobody has labelled, and unlabelled vehicles are exactly the ones you have not got to yet. Requiring TRAIT_UNARMED means anything unlabelled is simply never picked, which fails safe.

Losing a vehicle

The pad notices when its vehicle is destroyed, deleted or otherwise leaves the world, and refills after the restock delay.

Who pays is two questions with two answers. The faction’s balance is charged when a pad buys a replacement for something that was lost, and when it pays a recovery team — and for nothing else. Everything else a pad puts down is an allocation the tier already entitles it to: the fleet at world load, a pad filling when the tier finally stocks it, a swap, a refill after a narrative op. The player who was last driving is booked for the loss against their own column, without touching the balance, so the ledger can answer “who keeps writing off vehicles” without charging the faction twice for one wreck.

A faction with nothing left waits twice as long

A charge that would take the balance below the score floor — or below whatever the tier band allows while combat ops is running — never lands in full, so without this a bankrupt faction would recover, replace and repair vehicles for free, and the emptier the bank the cheaper losing them would get.

Being broke therefore costs time rather than the vehicle. The job goes to whoever will take it at a price the faction can meet, and that outfit is slower — everything still arrives, at twice the wait:

• a recovery takes twice as long, and the message at the sign says why;
• a replacement for a lost vehicle lands one restock delay later than it should have. The question is asked when the wait runs out rather than when the vehicle was lost, so a faction that earned its way back during the wait pays nothing, and the stretch is applied once — the vehicle arrives the second time round whatever the balance has done;
• a damaged vehicle’s exchange is held twice as long. An undamaged swap is untouched: it had no wait to lengthen, and it buys nothing.

Everything the tier already entitles the faction to arrives on time — the fleet at world load, a pad filling for the first time, a swap, a refill after a narrative op. Pads with Charge Ledger off are unaffected entirely.

Keeping up with the tier

A pad does not only stock when it is empty. It also swaps a vehicle it is already holding for whatever the current tier says belongs there, and the rule is anywhere at home, where it stands: a vehicle inside the base exclusion zone with nobody aboard is swapped in place, and the replacement appears exactly where the old one was parked.

It does not have to be back in the bay it came from. Nobody remembers which bay they took a truck from, and pulling up at the arsenal to re-gear is enough. Outside that zone nothing is ever touched, so a vehicle at an objective stays exactly as its crew left it.

A tier that falls far enough to run off the bottom of the catalogue retires the vehicle rather than leaving it. If nothing carrying the pad’s labels is available at the tier now held, the bay is emptied — otherwise a big enough drop would leave the faction driving something it can no longer field indefinitely, while a smaller drop correctly swapped it.

Asking for something else

The parking sign also offers every other vehicle the faction can field for that pad’s role — the rungs of the ladder the pad’s own draw discards. A bay holding the newest thing can be exchanged for an older one that suits the job better, and a pad whose role the catalogue lists once shows no request action at all.

It is an exchange, never an issue. Something has to be standing in the bay for there to be anything to swap, so an empty bay serving out a restock refuses. And it is free: everything on offer is an allocation the tier already entitles the faction to, and what is asked for is no dearer than what is given up, since the pad drew the best of them for itself.

A vehicle asked for by name is left alone by later tier changes, however far the tier climbs above it. The hold ends when the vehicle goes, or when the tier falls below the level that was chosen and the faction can no longer field it at all.

A damaged vehicle waits

Free stops being fair the moment the thing given up is a hulk. Exchanging a shot-up truck for a fresh one on the spot is a repair that costs nothing — and a cheaper one than driving to a repair point, which is not the shape anyone wanted.

So the pad reads the damage and holds the exchange in proportion to it, up to the whole restock delay a destroyed vehicle costs. A vehicle that is 90% gone waits 90% of that delay; one with a few scratches is swapped on the spot as before. The wait is a minimum of 15 seconds once it applies at all, and damage under 5% is ignored.

Damage is read as the worse of two numbers — the hull, and the average across the vehicle’s physical hit zones. Neither alone is enough: a truck with four flat tyres and a dead engine has a hull that has not been touched, and an average over twenty hit zones barely notices one ruined component.

Driving the vehicle away cancels the exchange. That is the intended way out for somebody who reads the estimate and would rather repair it: take it away and the wait is dropped, with nothing owed. Moving it more than 10 m from where it was standing when you asked is enough — measured from that spot rather than from the pad, because an exchange only needs the vehicle to be somewhere at base, and one left by the arsenal is a long way from its own bay while standing perfectly still.

While the wait runs:

• Asking again re-quotes what is left on the clock rather than restarting it.
• Asking for a different vehicle changes what is coming and keeps the clock — the delay is what the damage is worth, not what is being handed over.
• The pad will not swap the vehicle for whatever the tier says belongs there. It is spoken for until the wait ends.
• Somebody sitting in the vehicle holds the exchange rather than cancelling it; it serves the moment they get out.
• Something standing in the bay when the wait ends holds the delivery, and says so once.

Recovering one from the field

A vehicle abandoned somewhere on the map can be called back from the parking sign at its own pad. It leaves the map at once and reappears at the pad after a delay.

Whatever was loaded into it does not come back. The recovery team helps themselves to the contents, so a recovered vehicle arrives empty however full it was when it was left. Damage and fuel are untouched — it is the same vehicle rather than a replacement, so it comes home with the same holes in it.

Both the cost and the wait scale with distance, from nothing just past the minimum to the vehicle’s full supply price and the pad’s full restock delay at the recovery distance you set. So fetching something from the next valley is nearly free, and fetching it from the far side of the map costs what the vehicle is worth and takes as long as buying a new one — at which point players may as well write it off, which is the intended shape.

Four things stop a recovery, each with its own message:

• Closer than 500 m — you are told roughly how far away it is and in which direction, and asked to walk. Without that floor the sign becomes a free teleport for a vehicle parked round the corner.
• A friendly within 500 m of it — somebody near it can drive it home, and taking it out from under them would be worse than the problem this solves.
• It was destroyed — you are told when the replacement is due at the pad instead.
• The bay is occupied — the vehicle is held until the bay clears rather than being charged for again.

A faction that cannot afford the job does not stop the recovery — it takes twice as long, and the acceptance message says so.

A recovery is announced to everyone, naming the vehicle, who called it and what it cost.

During a narrative op

Vehicles are cleared from the pads when a narrative op begins and restocked when combat ops resumes, so the pads and any vehicles a Game Master has authored never share the map. Occupants are put down on the ground first, and the restock is deliberately held back a few seconds so the two sets never briefly overlap. That refill is an allocation, not a purchase, so it costs the faction nothing.