Allow you to import craft into orbital VAB's.

[Strawberry]

This is a suggestion that's hard to explain, but I think its intuitive if shown. Let's say you are a simple man who wants to make a large solar electric space probe, you have two issues though, you don't have an orbital colony advanced enough yet to make an entire spacecraft from scratch, and the spacecraft needs so much scaffolding that you can't send it up in one piece. You can do a lot of tedious orbital assembly to get the scaffolding you need.. but this presents another option. All you need to send up to get the spacecraft you want is this (pretend the XS fuel tanks is metal storage).

From there you dock it to an orbital colony, and from the orbital VAB interface, you can choose to import a spacecraft. Once imported into a colony, the entire spacecraft shows up in the VAB. Here you can move it around as much as you want. In this case, your orbital VAB is the lowest level, so all you need is scaffolding. You break the spacecraft in two, use the metal in the storage to make a bunch of trusses, then use the solar panels already there and attach it to the sides. With all that said and done, you now have a spacecraft like this that you were able to send up in a much smaller package then if you were to assemble it orbitally traditionally. 

The ability to do this seems like it could enable a lot of really cool designs when it comes to things like solar panels, radiators, and radiation management, and it would add a way to modify spacecraft "on the fly". The ability to do this would also be very nice for things like taking advanced engines on spacecraft and moving them over to other spacecraft.

 

Edited June 18, 2023 by Strawberry

[CiberX15]

So is the idea to allow bringing materials up to orbital ship yards? I was under the impression that that was already an intended feature. My impression of the base building mechanics was that you could build a base either in orbit or on a planet. That base could then build new craft so long as it had the resources to do so. The resources could then be supplied either manually by flying a ship there, mined and processed on sight (if you're on a planetoid), or they could be delivered autonomously. In any case my understanding is the ship building component just needs resources, it doesn't care where they come from.

Now that I say that though I'm not 100% where I got my mental image of what that feature is supposed to look like. So I could be way off...