Realism when building the prawn suit

Darwin-Evolution

When you build the prawn suit, it drops in the water, falls for a bit, but then for no apparant reason just stops falling and stays in one spot until you get it. Now, I like that the prawn doesn't go all the way down to the bottom in case you build one over a deep area, but I feel that this needs a bit of realism to explain why it stops falling. What I had in mind was to have sort of cables attached to the suit and also to the mobile vehicle bay, which would stop it from falling all the way. Then when you enter the suit, you could simply press a button saying "release PRAWN suit" or something, and just go on at will.
Just my 2 cents.

EDIT: Another idea from discord is to not let the player build a prawn suit over a drop greater than 250 meters below.

Kouji_San

nanites

Quiet_Blowfish

Personally I think it would be good if it spawned wearing floaties and stayed right at the surface the first time (but I have views about an exosuit you can just jump in and out of underwater).

Along the same lines I find it a bit weird that after a warper zaps right me out of the PRAWN I can swim back and find it floating in mid-water. Particularly since at the time of my zapping I was giving it everything to stay airborne (waterborne?)

ZeddIsDead

I think they're trying to avoid the 'Deadman walking' scenario. If you get zapped out of your Prawn and it fell 400m below you you'd pretty much run out of O2 before reaching it.

Not to mention if it fell below its crush depth you'd be royally screwed. Especially if it had drill/prop cannon/jumpjets.

Quiet_Blowfish

Yeah there's a perennial issue to 'balance' realism with gameplay. Personally I need the balance skewed a little in favour of the former to really enjoy a game - but this obviously varies a lot between players. Hopefully they'll introduce game mechanics for the likes of me in updates. Sometimes it doesn't even take that much coding :

For example, in the case of Warper's you could get an emergency warning you're under attack (you know - alarm klaxon, flashing interior lights). This would give you a chance to hit the 'Emergency Thrusters'. The PRAWN then hovers OK, as it does now, or at least until its power cells die.

Hulkie2345

They could, in the future have a outline indicator where the Prawn suit will drop. If say you put the mobile vehicle bay over a huge drop. It will become red and stop the building process. Same could be done for the moon pool and cyclops. Elite Dangerous uses this as a guiding system. To align for docking.