Talk:List of Stations

Re: Starbases

There are a number of inconsistencies I've noticed across a large number of "Station" pages that I would like to correct

• Stations are actually called "Starbase" in-game when you hit tab while on a Starbase. Ultimately I think we should change the category and template over to that name which would provide a good migration point by creating a new template with all of the features below called Template:Starbase with a Category:Starbase. This would help differentiate between the Category/entity itself and Starbases which are called "Station" (as opposed to "Port", "City", "Ship", "Facility", "Platform", "Fort", "High Port", et. al.) I think this is part of why none are called "X Starbase" so they could internally use this differentiation as well, but that's just a hunch, i.e. Starbase was their generic term for all of the above.
• The term "Lobby" is used to describe the area in-game which is called "Main Deck" (visible on the arrow cursor on any door leading to that area)
• The term "Market" is sometimes used in place of "Bazaar" which is what the in-game area is called (visible on the arrow cursor on any door leading to that area)
• The terms "Docking Station" or "Docking Bay" or "Hangar plaza" are sometimes used in place of "Hangar" which is what the in-game area is called (visible on the arrow cursor on any door leading to that area)
• The operator of stations is not always listed as one of the official Factions (sometimes it is a lore term, or something verbatim from the Docking Message which is not specific like "Jenquai Hierate"). This should always be an official faction because it has game mechanic implications on what prices players can buy and sell at depending on the level of their faction with the operator. This should be corrected and the template changed to make these links to the new faction pages.
• The indentation levels of the headings are all over the place; it seems that some editors aren't aware that =, ==, and === are all different things (and that mediawiki specifically recommends avoiding the use of the top-level heading)
• Ideally the template could validate some of the fields and generate an error category for template instantiations which don't match one of the values (i.e. like it does with Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls), I need to look into this as there have been quite a few cases where loc_sector and loc_system are swapped (Mouli).
• The Station template includes the information on which terminals are present, but most pages list that redundantly anyway, most commonly to include the level of jobs available; this could be improved by replacing terms_jobs with terms_lev_jobs which is either 50, 75, 105, 135, or 150 to indicate the max level, and then blank or not specified means there is no jobs terminal, and 0 could be a jobs terminal with no jobs. We can then generate both the info box and the terminals section from the template (or decide that it doesn't need to be in both places by simply changing the template).
• To make this template easier to manage I would propose that it's divided into multiple templates for different sections of it, and then have one master template, i.e. the actual Template:Starbase which combines each of those, e.g. Template:StarbaseInfo, Template:StarbaseTerminals, Template:StarbaseNpcs though the ability to do this may be limited by our desire to duplicate information in multiple places on the page. For example if we want the Terminals to appear in both the InfoBox and a Terminals section, then those need to both be part of the same template in order to avoid duplication. EDIT: I've since learned that there are multiple good reasons not to do this (which is why {{Item}} is the 800 lb. gorilla it is), not least of which the drawback I already mentioned within. This will be nothing compared to {{Item}} so making it one template is a non-issue. The tradeoffs with {{Item}} may eventually force me to consider breaking it up anyway, but I would do it internally so from a user-perspective there is still one template, but internally it would break out various pieces into separate ones. There are still good reasons NOT to do that as every additional template call adds more overhead and there is a limited depth of template calls possible which does not fail gracefully and indeed does so silently (so things that should have been transcluded just disappear).
• I'm curious if it would also be possible in Template:Starbase to lookup information from the NPC pages, and populate all their vendor info there. So for each NPC we could just generate a parenthetical after the link with a summary, like "Mission Giver, L1,4,5 Component Vendor", etc. That may be beyond the capability of templates, but I will look into it. Overall this seems better than the InfoBox since you can see the name of the NPC which sells each which is typically what I care most about. It would be nice to not have to duplicate all that information on both the NPC and Starbase pages if at all possible. My current thought is that it may be possible to create a tree of templates which contains a sort of tiny database of all the vendor information for each station which could then be used on different pages.
• If we added coords as parameters to Template:Starbase we could generate the entire copy-pasta initial description line, e.g. Located in [[{{{loc_sector}}}]] sector, [[{{{loc_system}}}]] system, at location ({{{loc_x}}}, {{{loc_y}}}, {{{loc_z}}}) and operated by the {{{loc_opertr}}} faction.
• If we then add custom_description, docking_message, and notes into the template as well we could just generate the entire page.
• Now we're thinking with templates!
• Other things to consider (below) are how to handle seasonal NPCs (like Donny Elfman, maybe that's the only one?)
• As hinted above (put this down here because I could not make these code blocks indent and show properly to save my life) the NPCs could also be included in the template in order to solve the above issues with different naming of categories (i.e. have the template generate more of the page), e.g. for Azmundi Maru, something like:

| npc_hangar_1    = Rashid Bandy
| npc_main_deck_1 = Omaka Kasinagi
| npc_main_deck_2 = Kayen Silva
| npc_lounge_1    = Trini Ben Shaddah
| npc_lounge_2    = Mouhammud Shamalyiah
| npc_bazaar_1    = Ahab Al Battani
| npc_bazaar_2    = Liu An Su Song
| npc_bazaar_3    = Wayens Menas
| npc_bazaar_4    = Croyden Marco

and it would then generate the page:

==NPCs==
===Hangar===
*[[Rashid Bandy]]
===Main Deck===
*[[Omaka Kasinagi]]
*[[Kayen Silva]]
===Lounge===
*[[Trini Ben Shaddah]]
*[[Mouhammud Shamalyiah]]
===Bazaar===
*[[Ahab Al Battani]]
*[[Liu An Su Song]]
*[[Wayens Menas]]
*[[Croyden Marco]]

Codemonkeyx (talk) 22:44, 17 October 2023 (UTC)