Posts by Gaxx

finally i have something that looks like a ship^^
here it is, in all its intimidating beauty.

it's 32block³ big, capable of everything around mining, storage and processing as well as "eating" everything blocking its way in 4 directions. it also takes my PC quiet some time to calculate a move

here is a picture of the function test after i had installed the last wall.

the ship had to go through a 4block thick hindrance (the plank blocks still visible at the sides) to pass the test. you can also see what it looks like when a wall is open.

after that it could be complete but i still have a lot of "beautification" to do. the interior still looks like a construction side everywhere. there's still the relocation of the command centre as well as the construction of the captain's quarter to do.

Quote from james_cochran

Nice set up you got there gaxx, just one question:

Why is this necessary? From the looks of things, you're activating the movement with redstone, so why not just add an appropriate delay based on how long you know it takes to move and wire that out. Also what's the pulse even for?

it's for synchronizing with the walls. the outer walls will be a quarry like door, looking kinda like this prototype (rotate by 90°, i messed this up the direction while monotonously placing lots of blocks)

when a wall and a drive direction is activated together, it will do this: open, move, close, move, open, move,..... and breaking everything in front of the wall while opening/closing. activating both is slower since the drive can't move while the walls are active but i don't want to move slowly when the walls are offline. that's why i needed a system capable of the modi: drive only, wall only, drive-wall synchronization.
everything in my ship does something in 1s ticks regulated by Timer. in theory a wall needs 3s to open/close and 2s to move, so my first design was by regulating everything with a counter configured as 6/2/3.
in practice this absolutely doesn't work!!!! the reason is bluetricity. the ship is big. it's normal that a motor needs to completely recharge once it moved. so the case that you have to wait 3-4 ticks before it actually moves is common. the same could happen to the walls.
another reason was a malfunction that could be caused by deactivating the walls while the drive is still active. in wall-drive mode the 3ticks of wall switch to drive, 2ticks of drive switch to wall. if you deactivate the wall while the drive is active it switches to "drive only". so while the wall is in the middle of an unknown state the drive completly resets the Counter, setting the unknown state of the wall as default. to correct that you had to manually move to the logic section where that is managed and repair it.
that's not user friendly!

in case it was hard to understand, the old system had two problems
first: the wall had several states: wall open<->wall1<->wall2<->wall closed where only "wall open" and "wall closed" are of interest but you could crash it so it would think wall1 or wall2 are important which needed manual repair
second: the drive could switch back to wall mode without having moved

the new system defines states only by actual physical states of wall or drive (redstone torches that disconnect when moved and reconnect at interesting state)
that way for the wall has only the states "wall open" and "wall closed" which prevents breaking. you can still temporary break the mechanism by deactivating the wall while it opens but that will repair itself by going into "wall only" mode and pressing the "reset button" i'll need anyway for "wall only". i don't want to explain that right here, would go away from the topic for some time ^ ^
for the drive it prevents switching to wall when ship hasn't moved without slowing down the drive below it's capable speed
the switch between both is managed by a Counter with 1/1/1

i know all that because i've build a prototype testing side simulation everything, so all that is the result of heavy testing with redstone logic.

that's a newest prototype. left is the wall logic, right the drive logic. the chicken is not part of the circuit the wires that leave the system at the bottom of the picture are part of the wall-lock mechanism, preventing the activation of a wall while another wall is not closed.
PS: a wall in a bad state with the old system would have also malfunctioned all other walls since it occupies the space the other wall wants to expand into. i think that will be obvious once i can show you a picture of the complete ship

PSS: the vast majority of all logic involved in this ship is for managing the walls. quite extensive for a feature that's not even demanded

PSSS: sry for the wall of text as answer

my ship is coming along very nicely, so i thought i should show my status so far since it's a little after half-time for the schedule i gave myself.
up to now i've installed everything necessary for a mining ship (drive, mining section, processing section, storage, generator, sorting system) and that's what it looks like

this beauty contains nine miners in total and since i found out that you can extract and insert the mining drill from one side (the right from where you placed it) i was able to build a system which controls them all by pressing a lever! the final size once everything is finished will be 32block³. as off now it's only 26block wide since the outer walls are missing (adding three to every side). i think it's also noteworthy that the lags this thing causes by moving aren't getting any worse after a certain size
the big, unidentifiable construct below the roof is the drive core. here a closer look at it

in addition to moving the ship it also gives of a redstone pulse every time it moved. that made the whole construction fricking complicated, since i'm not just moving a motor which moves the rest. to attach a redstone torch i had move a frame with a motor which moves the rest. while experimenting with framemotors how to do that i learned a lot about motors and figured out, that the motor behaves like a repeater. in easier terms: when the motor is connected to more than one frame it will not stick to both when one frame is moved. also: if motor 1 on frame 1 tries to move frame 2 with motor 2 and motor 2's upper side is connected to frame 1 nothing will move. both cases are a huge problem!!!
i circumvented that problem by building in a third motor. this motor activates with delay when the drive gets deactivated and makes sure that the drive always resets to state 1 and never stays in state 2. if one direction would stay in state 2 you would "lose" the 2nd motor when moving into the opposite direction since motor 2 doesn't connect to the moving ship (look the first problem i described). in state 1 the the small frame is connected to the upper side of motor 1
state 1: on redstone pulse motor 1 moves small frame with motor 2
state 2: on redstone pulse motor 2 moves ship with motor 1
i know it sounds complicated but that's the result of four days building and scapping several prototypes which included a lot of screaming and despair
that's also a reason why i'm posting this here in case someone else wants to build a drive like that.

on a side note: i think that a drive system which gives a signal whenever it has moved can be very useful for many constructions. i will need it to synchronize the outer walls with the drive.

what's left now is: building the outer walls, installing wall logic and connecting it to drive logic, build captain's quarters.
the outer walls will be damn big! as i said they will be quarry walls capable of eating through everything when activated. i already designed the logic to synchronize walls and drive (user friendly and breakproof!) but installing everything is a complete different story.
as you can see in the picture there's still a lot of free space below the roof. that's probably where the captain's quarter will be.
if i'm having enough time left i'm thinking about relocating the command center below the roof. that way i could make it elevatable so you can look outside while..... driving and retract it if you want to "move through something", but that's optional.

wish me luck that everything works out as i planned!^^

Quote from james_cochran

Not sure why the pictures aren't showing ^ ^ ^ they did when I was writing it.

doesn't matter, we can still see the links and use them manually^^
since my design needs a more complex drive system (it gives of a redstone impulse whenever the ship has moved) i've build many prototypes to get what i want, but the idea to move the first motor from the side instead of from below never occurred to me once
nice idea.

Quote from icedfire

To Gaxx:
" since you can't put a panel onto a already connected side of the frame"
You can it is just not easy. Make the block how you want and then use a frame motor to slide it into place. Takes a bit more effort but I did it a number of time when building my ship (mostly I just built what I wanted to and then moved the ship till the new frames connected where I needed them to).

i thought about that too but this method is way to slow and the effect is to low since it isn't the main isolation. i also don't think it would make that much of a difference. it would only be used on the inner frame cage and that part always gets completely destroyed even when build with blastproof stone
i mainly use this method when placing frames with glass panels/covers for obvious reasons

Hi all,
my first post in this forum, be gentle
my spaceship is far from complete and i don't think it will be within a month or so (damn uni!) i'd like to post what i already have and what i'd like to do
first, when i read this

Quote from Alblaka

-The spaceship does not need to be able of altering it's environment in any ways but the miners. You don't need it to be able to eat through mountains, nor does it need to be capable of terraforming something into a flat landing area.

i just thought "that's a great idea" and so i'm trying to build a Cube thats capable of exactly that while fulfilling all other requirements and wtihout Redpower Control. not because i think its not a interesting mod, i just don't want to learn another coding language^^

by now i have the drive core, the processing section and the reactor section, which means i still need a storage, mining and logic section (logic for the outer walls)

first the drive core

its the same 6-directional drive by TeamPantsMadness most people use by now, so no magic here. as you can see i connected normale redwire with the drive core which goes down into the command centre. every direction has a timer/toggle latch component. that way the craft moves into one direction when you press a button in the command centre and stops when pressed again. i'll probably set the solar panels higher later on since there are some holes due to my redwires. icedfire also mentioned some problem with the drive core running out of power. i can imagine the that and will try to make some changes later.
in the end: it moves!

second would be the processing section

i tried to build it small, which is the reason why you can't see much. it's basicly a 6macerator section above and a 6furnace section below with two separate chest-entries for both and a sorting machine between them. it's capable of processing every ore, can grind coal to dust, melt sand to glass and refine iron to ref. iron. i also made it so that cob. stone --> stone and stone --> cob. stone --> sand --> glass. if i have some room left (a cube is huge) i'll maybe add something fancy like a diamond make and something that grinds copper/tin bars to bronze, but that's totally optional.

and the last section i managed to finish by now: the reactor section

this thing was a project..... the funny thing with reactor chambers is the fact that when you TEST IF THEY CAN WITHSTAND THE EXPLOSION you have to rebuild everything, no matter if the test failed or succeded. as every reactor it consists of several layers. in the middle is the 3*3*3 reactor with 5chambers. you have to exchange one chamber and a waterblock for frames. every frame everywhere is as much as possible covered with a obsidian panel or cover! obsidian cover/panel aren't as strong as real blocks but they're still strong enough to withstand TNT, so i use them. since you can't put a panel onto a already connected side of the frame it's not perfectly armored, but the frames are not the main isolation.
the 5*5*5 cube is a simple frame cage.
now comes the important part! the 7*7*7 cube is a obsidian frame (i'm talking about the frame of a cube without sides) with waterblocks as sides. in case you don't know, waterblocks can dampen an explosion enough so that an obsidian/blastproof block behind them doesn't break.
the 9*9*9 cube consists of exactly that, obsidian blocks next to the waterblocks. it also contains the outer frame cage which holds the obsidian blocks. the waterblocks are hold by the inner frame cage (u know the 5*5*5 cube).
the only weakness is the connection between the inner and the outer frame cage and (as always) the cable. it's also the part where the cable comes out of the chamber. as you can see in the picture that's also the side where i put the entrance. the frame motor removes a part of the obsidian wall and can also put it back.
if i get the declaration correct the reactor itself is a MKIII reactor, which takes 4cells for 6mio EU each but it needs a long time to cool down after that and due to the missing reactor chamber it's close to maximum (the cooling cells are at 8200heat, which should be about 82% heat) so there is a possibility that it might explode if you won't give it a short break.

at last a picture of the prototype of the main project

that's one side of the cube. a little brain fart of mine caused to mess up the direction, please rotate it by 90° in your head^^
it will work exactly like a redstone quarry, split in the middle. the problem with something like that are the corners. block breaker only work into one direction, so you can't really make a perfect cube. i solve that problem by leaving the corners empty and extend the side of the direction i want to travel into this empty corner. this way it's possible create something that can move into 4 directions. a cube that can do this for 6 directions would be possible but you would need a more complex mechanism which includes moving the plattforms in 4 instead of 2 directions. i'm not doing that for several reasons.
first: it's to complex. it's possible but it makes the mechanism for every side more complex. it would also slow down everything. this thing is very slow. it needs 2s/block without this and 8s/block with activated walls. there's also the possibility to work with extension and retraction, but that's just crazy
second: i need those sides. on top i have the solar panels for my bluetricity needs. at the bottom i have the mining mechanism.

as i said in the beginning: this will take AT LEAST a month until it's finished. there's still storage (including global sorting), mining, logic and hull to be done. i'm quiet opticimistic though since everything i have now is tested as movable and as far as i know movable objects are closed under "connection" (i wonder how many people will get that joke )
my main concern up till now is: when this is finished the command centre will be kinda in the middle and you will see nothing from there....... have to think about that.
it's will also be kinda huge, i'm estimating something over 30*30
mfg Gaxx