.
I fear I may have taken a wrong turning with the chairing interface. Although it's difficult to put a finger on the crux of it, or what to do about it, or whether it really is a problem.
If you want
all solid jaws, or
all loose outer jaws, there is no difficulty building the track, and you can easily click the buttons to make the required chairs.
But it's becoming clear that mixing solid jaws with loose jaws in the same track raises some problems. It will very difficult to mix solid and loose jaws on the
same physical piece of rail and assemble it into the timbering base. So we may need both versions of the same chair type on a template.
Consider for example:
View attachment 5813
There is a rail break needed at the wing front rail joint. Which is fine -- it means all the chairs on the wing rail with the knuckle bend can be loose-jaw and easy to assemble into place. It would very tricky to assemble the knuckle with slide-on solid jaws. That means the blue
L1 bridge chairs should also be loose-jaw.
But the closure rails on the left are separate rails and can have solid jaws if preferred. That means the red
L1 bridge chairs need to be solid jaw.
But there is only one setting for all the L1 chairs on a template:
View attachment 5812
It seems clear that we need to specify a solid or loose jaw by reference to its position on the template, not by the type of chair. That would be a minefield of more tickboxes and buttons to implement.
But maybe it's not so much of a problem -- we could easily get what we want by splitting the above into 2 partial templates to create the chairs. All the chair settings are template-specific.
But hang on -- all the L1 chairs are interchangeable on any template. So we just need to print a stock of loose-jaw and solid-jaw L1 chairs. And use whichever we prefer in any L1 socket position when constructing the track. Likewise for the other interchangeable chairs. Is there any need to specify which type of those chairs on a template?
Answers on a postcard.
Meanwhile there are signs of progress -- here's my work-in-progress on the ZY crossing chairs:
View attachment 5814
These are the first chairs where the chair base is skewed on the parent rail. I got there in the end. Hopefully the other rail tomorrow.
cheers,
Martin.