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.

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.

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.

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 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.