My Big Ridiculous Flan's Mod Ideas/ Requests/ Wish List Thread :D

On our server, we've built some pretty big airports. Runways are 15 blocks/ meters wide and 300 blocks/ meters long, with taxiways and terminals and hangars... and none of it works, because planes in Flan's mod don't actually taxi properly.

If an airplane's throttle is between 0.1 and 0.19 (1% and 19%, the pre-roll range), the airplane's TurnLeftSpeed and TurnRightSpeed would automatically equal 20, overriding the plane's config, and the plane would automatically turn at that rate in-place, allowing a plane to navigate sharp corners and maneuver along taxiways. Throttling between 0.2 and 0.29 (20% and 29%), the plane would keep those turn rates, but would move forward at the taxi speed that already exists in Flan's mod.

Pushpack would be pretty simple: by pressing and holding the PAUSE/ BREAK key, the plane would slowly roll backwards in a straight line for as long as you hold it. This will allow planes to pull away from terminals and back out of hangars.

If you've ever built a scaled-to-aircraft hangar or terminal, I'm sure you could appreciate the necessity of these features

In the real world, airplanes are sort of like infants in that they require constant care and attention. This idea would add a bit of that care into Flan's Mod, tossing in a dash of realism and making people care about their aircraft a bit more than they might do otherwise. And on a server like mine, where a single airplane could pretty easily see 100+ hours of flight in a month, this would add a bit of "end game" challenge, lol.

Engines would now have durability and wear down over long periods of time. This wear would be random, using coolant and oil as modifiers; the lower those get, the quicker the plane's engines lose durability. On a multi-engine aircraft, it would be entirely possible for some engines to burn out, but not others. How cool would that be!

Oil and coolant gauges would be added in alongside the fuel gauge. Coolant would deplete at 1/4th the speed of fuel, while oil would deplete at 1/10th the rate of fuel. Planes used extensively would need to have these things checked. Oil and coolant could be added into parts packs, allowing us to use mod items (Buildcraft oil or Pneumaticcraft lubricant) in place of whatever wacky vanilla recipes were used to simulate them.

When an engine burns out, one or more random components of its crafting recipe will be needed in order to fix the engine, which could be added in using the R-key UI on a new "maintenance" tab.

In planes/ vehicles with a single engine, the engine dying would take us into Idea #4 down below. In a plane with multiple engines, the throttle would be reduced by a factor equal to the number of engines. So if your plane has two engines, you'd be capped at 50% throttle. If you have four engines, you'd be capped at 75% throttle. The other engines would then be stressed and lose durability faster by that same factor, since they're doing more work than they usually would.

One more idea here? An aesthetic rendition of plane failure. The engine could have fire and smoke emanating from the propeller point, signaling that the engine has catastrophically failed. I don't know how difficult that would be to add, but I know it would be cool as hell to see

When I'm flying, I have absolutely no idea how much fuel my plane is burning, and it's driving me absolutely crazy. When I mouse over the fuel gauge, it should tell me how much fuel my tanks are holding, in planes and in vehicles. If the oil/ coolant idea is implemented, that same numeric representation would hopefully be added in as well.

Meanwhile, the cargo page is also a bit difficult to use. It's not so bad if you have the cargo capacity of a single chest (27 items or less). It's when you need to start scrolling that dealing with cargo starts to feel like a chore, and not in a good way. I would suggest adding in tabs/ pages for cargo, rather than the scrolling feature. And if there were some method of transferring items automatically from a vehicle to a plane or a plane to a vehicle, that would be amazing too (but goes into the "wishful thinking" column).

When a plane runs out of fuel, it either gets stuck mid-air or drops out of the sky, depending on which version of Flan's you're using. I think it would make a lot more sense for the plane to essentially glide until it can't glide any longer.

Let's say you're flying at 100% throttle. You run out of gas or suffer an engine failure. Rather than the plane simply falling, it would stay aloft using "phantom throttle." The engines are still dead, of course, but the plane now glides until you add fuel, land, or crash, losing 1 point of throttle every 1 to 10 seconds. The screen might flash during this "phantom throttle" phase with a warning, and maybe even an audible beep could be heard to warn you of the impending air disaster. This would be a relatively easy solution that adds a bit of realism without being overly complicated.

If Idea #7 were implemented, throttle could be replaced with speed.

I think I can safely state this as a fact: everyone who has ever used Flan's mod for civilian/ commercial purposes would likely agree that dealing with cargo in planes/ vehicles with a large cargo capacity is a serious pain the butt.

This idea would add two features to the mod. The first is passenger-specific cargo. Passengers would have their own R-key UI and cargo slots specific to them. This would allow for carry-on luggage being stored in virtual "overhead compartments." This is handy on big airliners and whatnot.

Meanwhile, seats could also be designated as "cargo access points," where anyone sitting in that seat has access to the plane's overall cargo UI. this allows several people to unload a plane at once... handy on servers where planes are used for moving cargo around the world.

This is a brief one: car horns and sirens added to vehicles as an optional line in the config, which would require pack creators to add sound effects to their sounds.json and sounds folder. I realize the troll factor might be high with this one, so maybe a "DisableHornsSirens = False" option could be added into the master config for server ops who want to disable it?

Currently, the "speed" meter in Flan's Mod Plus is pretty confusing. I don't think it works quite right, unless I'm doing something incorrectly (and we all know that's definitely a possibility, lol). Assuming it's being improved upon, I had an idea of how that might be done in a neat way.

With this idea, throttle would now determine the rate of acceleration, while vehicles and planes would be given a MaxSpeed variable. To feel a bit more realistic, speed would be a measure of how many pixels you can travel per second (PPS), rather than blocks (BPS). We all know that one block = 16 pixels. The vanilla sprinting speed of a player is 5.612 BPS, or 89.792 PPS, or 20.2032 KPH (kilometers per hour), or 12.553686 MPH (miles per hour). In vehicles and planes, the PPS value, or even just the BPS value, would show a realistic speed variable that players can easily and quickly wrap their heads around.

Setting a MaxSpeed variable in a config based on one of these figures would allow content creators to base their speeds on something real and tangible, while allowing players to understand their speed better. It would help server ops/ admins create speed limits in certain zones, like cities. And it makes the throttle more useful for determining how quickly a vehicle or plane could reach max speed; a race car might get there very quickly, whereas a slugglish old pickup truck might take a while to get moving. Also, it's more fun to have a number sitting there that you can look at and gauge the performance of the vehicle or plane you're in.

Okay, this one is a little far-fetched. I realize that (A) I might be the only person with mega-farms that would need this, ( it's probably wicked complicated, and (C) nobody else might find this to be cool. But this idea would add functional crop dusters, fuel trucks, fire trucks, and aerial firefighting planes/ "water bombers" to the game, so I kinda have to at least mention it, don't I?

This would basically allow for vehicles and planes to hold millibuckets (mB) of liquid, just like Buildcraft, Railcraft, or Immersive Engineering tanks. Fuel trucks and vehicles like that would suddenly be able to work properly, but more importantly, this idea could incorporate a "sprayer feature" in the config that would allow vehicles/ planes to "spray" those liquids via particle/ smoke effects.

Imagine a "Miracle Grow" solution made from bonemeal and water buckets. You fly your cropduster plane over a field of crops, press the bomb button, and automatically bonemeal all of the crops and grass in a 3x3 radius where the bomb would otherwise land. Or imagine flying a water bomber holding buckets of water, and dumping that down on a forest fire or lava pit. And for you murderous killer types, you could load up a plane with lava and cause lots of fires down below, destroying whole villages in ways napalm just don't cut it.

Firetrucks could have a "stream" instead of a "spray" that shoots water over distance. The higher your arc the stream, the further the stream goes, up to a cap of, say, 64 blocks away (that's a totally made-up number I pulled out of nowhere).

Streams and sprays would not cause water-buildup; this wouldn't be the same as using a bucket on a block. It would be a particle/ smoke effect with the same properties as that liquid. For instance, a water spray or stream would put out fires. A miracle grow spray would make plants/ trees/ grass grow faster. A lava spray/ stream would set things on fire. And vehicles could store liquid, interfacing with BC pipes and tanks and whatnot, which would allow moving those things around to be a whole lot easier. If you play with those mods, you already know that they can be a real pain sometimes.

Again, I know this is probably the least-realistic of everything on this list, but I had to suggest it. I think it could be a lot of fun someday!

Another of the loftier ideas, this would allow us to play music discs in our cars/ vehicles. The sound could be heard by all of the passengers. Pretty cool to have on servers with custom music discs, I'd reckon

I've seen others suggest this before so I'm sticking this down near the end of the list, and just adding my voice to the chorus: the ability to lock the driver's seat so that only the car's/ plane's owner can drive/ fly it. Alternatively, all of the passenger seats could also be locked individually, or all seats could be unlocked. Another option would be to lock the cargo of a vehicle/ plane so people can't steal your precious cargo. This could be done through the R-key UI.

Have you ever piloted a lengthy flight? I'm talking 20+ kilometers? In some planes, that can take a pretty long time. I've actually gone on a four-hour flight in Minecraft... it wasn't easy. It might be cool if a passenger seat onboard a plane could be designated as a copilot's seat. By pressing a "pilot switch" key, the pilot can give control of the plane to the copilot. The copilot could press that same key, OR the pilot could press it a second time, to give command of the plane back to the pilot. The co-pilot would have full R-key UI access and be able to see speed, engine durability, cargo, and more.

Another of the simple ones, this feature would allow for a pilot to press a button, locking the plane into its current speed, heading, and altitude until the button is pressed again.

For a more complicated system, you might implement MapWriter or (preferably) JourneyMap waypoints. The plane would always bank at the same rate, but would climb, maintain, and set a heading for each waypoint in a string of waypoints. The pilot would need to manually takeoff and land, but this would simulate an ILS flight path. A new "ILS" feature would be added to the R-key UI, allowing you to pick waypoints and add them to the list.

Should anyone try to tackle the trailer functionality, here's an idea that might help make it work smoothly.

Vehicles would have a designated "HitchPoint" where the trailer is connected/ disconnected from vehicles and rotates. It functions as the "front" of the trailer. This allows trailer parts to be disconnected from vehicles and attached to other ones, which is particularly handy for tractor-trailers ("big rigs") and towed artillery. Any vehicle with a trailer built into it can detach its trailer and hook up to any detached trailer with a button press.

To simulate turning, trailers would adopt the handling of the vehicle they're being pulled by directly at the HitchPoint, so that the front of the trailer behaves like the front of the vehicle pulling it at the hitchpoint, and the rear of the trailer behaves like the rear of the vehicle as well. When reversing, the trailer's rear does the opposite of what the vehicle's front does.

For instance, if you were moving straight forward, the trailer is also moving straight forward. If you turn left, the trailer will turn left when the vehicle's hitchpoint begins to turn left, but the rear of the trailer wouldn't begin to turn until its rear-most wheels would turn if the entire vehicle were a solid entity. When reversing, the hitchpoint reverses the behavior of the trailer, so, if the vehicle's rear is turning right, the trailer's rear would turn left.

That all makes sense in my head. I hope it makes sense to someone other than me here, lol.

Adding potion effects to tools would allow for more realistic/ more fun healing tools. For instance, you might create morphine, which heals the player it's used on but also administers nausea. You could do some pretty creative stuff with your tools if they had potion effects!

Hitboxes would have a "hard" variable added to them, just as they have health. If a hitbox is "hard," it means a player can walk on top of that hitbox and cannot pass through it. I imagine this is pretty complicated and that's probably why it hasn't be implemented, but it would be neat if we had that. I could see this being especially useful on passenger airplanes, and with loading those planes as well (you could create a ramp leading into a plane, or make a stair car to get passengers up into planes without taking fall damage, etc.). Stick this one in the "wishful thinking" column for sure, but it would be pretty neat I think, especially for those of us who try to make aircraft to a reasonable scale with interiors that could actually be moved around inside of.