Winches are Necessary

Space witches are a really good idea.

Broomsticks an all, turning heavy armour into light armour, cats and stuff.

Wait, I need to put my glasses on.... oh dear.... winches are a good idea too. =)

I do want some mechanism for automatically re-orienting a ship or vehicle that flips over, because that happens like 90% of the time without making the ship or vehicle extremely wide or putting engines/wheels on pylons far away from the body of the vehicle. It's even worse when you try to land something like the atmospheric bullfrog, it hits the safe-zone area and then immediately flips, as these don't have enough engine power to right themselves on a planet.

A rope is very much needed in this game. So many frequently requested features and improvements are dependent on having some sort of flexible connection between grids. It is an obvious missing piece in this physics engine and the game.

Let me just list some ideas I see all over the forum that are related to this:

• Cables. Connect 2 grids with a flexible cable. Connect a player to a machine with a cable. Transfer power and communication. Imagine a ground station composed of multiple buildings. You could put them all at different angles and connect them with cables instead of having an antenna on each building. All grids connected with cables could be shown in the terminal as if they were connected with a connector block.
  Imagine having multiple lights around your base or a mine. Why use batteries and micromanage them all separately if you could just connect them all with cables, like we do IRL? Cables are very useful. Their physics could be very simple: no collision or entanglement, just a max distance and a simple spline renderer.
  
• Flexible conveyor tube. IMO this is what we should use to pass items between subgrids instead of routing conveyors through hinges. There can and should be rotors, pistons and hinges without conveyor ports, so their design is not limited or compromised by them.
  Also, imagine a welder ship connected to a bigger grid with a flexible tube, so you can have a giant stock of components while keeping the welder ship flexible enough to weld and repair things. Or a welding arm design using compact and lightweight mechanical blocks and a frame, while still covering a much bigger working area. Engineering possibilities are endless with this kind of flexible tube for moving items.
  
• Ofc, a winch. This could be used for all sorts of elevators instead of complicated and clangy setups with multiple pistons, especially when it comes to longer distances and multiple stops. All sorts of ship-embarking mechanisms, door opening, cargo lifting and lowering mechanisms, landing party designs for a dropship, a proper crane ffs. And that's just the obvious stuff. Combine it with other mechanical blocks and you can make much more complex mechanisms.
• Flexible docking connectors. This one is also huge. So many interesting designs become possible if a docked ship can still move a bit instead of being rigidly connected to another grid. Perfect for docking at an angle or in tight spaces. The connecting hose could twist and flex, allowing for a much bigger angle difference between the grids.
  Again, you could have a welding/grinding ship or drone connected to a bigger grid with a flexible connection, allowing instant item transfer while keeping the ship itself small and lightweight.
  
• Harpoons. Give me those once we have oceans. I want to be a real pirate ffs. Handheld harpoons would also be cool. Imagine a landing party descending from a dropship, each using a personal handheld harpoon. Mandalorian-style gameplay ffs.
  Tug spaceships and debris. Space piracy would have a whole new dimension.
  

All of these examples are things we were honestly waiting for from a new Space Engineers game, much more than boring and repetitive contracts or whatever else.

A game with "engineering" in its name should be embracing these concepts more than anything.