Halley Placement

The whole concept of having a set number of halleys move a planet is flawed anyway.

How it should work is that for each halley you build you are providing thrust in the opposite direction towards the center of the planet. It's the directional force that should matter (which could just be displayed with a bar that you fill up as you build halleys), so if you build a bunch of halleys close to each other you are good to go, the further apart the more halleys you need, a halley on the opposite side of the planet would straight out cancel the other one.

That would be way more intuitive than it is now.

Only if they fire at the same time.

Not if you use my method for determining firing order

What if the maps themselves has markings (like metal spots) and hallys could only be placed on these spots?
The map generator could place them close to each other for ascetic apeal or it could just place them randomly. Either way, it would add a little more strategy on controlling these specific points. If the enemy controls just one of these locations, he can delay a launch.

nahh, it would cause a number of situational bugs and issues, some of which we can't imagine until we've had them.

Like what?
The game engine already creates metal spots, this is just a large metal spot with a different graphic.
The metal spots appear to be seeded and clustered together somewhat, the halley spots would be similar.
There are environmental formations (cracks and hills) that would interfere but the engine seems to avoid these places with metal spots.

i dunno.
perhaps placing halleys would become tedious because of how often the slot is being clipped by the corner of another structure as often already happens with the mass point.

Maybe the halley should be redone and made a to a rotating thruster. That would solve the issue partly.

like this (sry, crappy graphic):



The blue archs symbolize the rotational axes

Well tidally locked means that the spin of the body progresses at the same rate as that body's orbit around its primary.

They might be "thrust vectoring" engines, meaning they vent out and at an angle controllable within the halley. Meaning within an angle of margain, it can turn, and even if slowly, it can rotate to adjust it's turn.

Generally, that makes spread out halleys less necesary, but also little more immersion breaking to be spread and still work while burning against each other.

The kickstarter solution was great: The thrusters were built adjacently in a cluster, later thrusters aligned parallel to the first thruster. I don't think most players would mind if the planetoid rotated so that the cluster were in an aft direction, even if the thrusters don't appear capable of rotational thrust.

^This.

This this

This this this?

This is why I think there should be engine spots, like there are metal spots. The map generation would put all the engine spots in one area so when you want to move a moon they'd all be facing the same direction.