Hovercraft

[MostlyNumbers]

Figured I should finally make a post for this. You can get the mod here.

Basics:

Not quite a car, ship, or airplane.. build your own hovercraft to explore over land and sea!

The hovercraft is unlocked as green science tech, and requires plastic to build.
It's less efficient, more fragile, and slower acceleration than the car. Also unarmed. But hey, it goes over water!

By popular request, there's now a Missile-Craft!
It requires separate research (blue and black science), and comes armed with a rapid missile launcher. But keep moving, because it's pretty fragile. It may be slightly cheaty if you play on an ocean map without a swimming mod.

Good Pairings

The mod plays very nicely with a few other aquatic-themed mods myself and others have written:
Cargo Ships
CanalBuilder
Blueprint Footprint
Bridge Railway

Compatibility:

Slightly tweaks the base tech tree to remove the electric engine prereq for flying tech.
Uses collision mask "layer-12". If other mods are using the same, there might be unexpected behavior.

[Omnifarious]

One thing I'm curious about, does it handle like a hovercraft? Do you end up going backwards for awhile if you turn completely around?

[MostlyNumbers]

It has low friction, so you coast a good while, but no, drifty steering is on the (extended) to do list. It would probably be performance expensive too (every tick update)

[Omnifarious]

It has low friction, so you coast a good while, but no, drifty steering is on the (extended) to do list. It would probably be performance expensive too (every tick update)

So, it basically would really need engine support to do well. :-/ I'm guessing the engine has no support for the idea of going in a different direction than you're pointing.

You know, I don't know how easy this would be to do, but you could try to manage to use the steering controls to just update the appearance of the sprite without telling the engine the direction has changed. You could then accept requests to accelerate or decelerate and translate them into direction changes combined with speed changes.

Again, I have no idea if the engine would support that either. But, it's an idea... and it might save you from per-tick stuff.

[MostlyNumbers]

Yeah, I feel like it should be possible by making the entire sprite a "turret", but I don't know how to programmatically control turret direction. Also the missilecraft turret would no longer point correctly. And custom inputs (ie the arrow keys) don't keep firing, so you'd have to keep tapping the keys to steer/accelerate etc, which would be annoying.