Space Engineers

[Eriol]

I'm wondering if you have a good supply of hydrogen already, how effective those are for landers, as they won't suffer your "Dead zone" problem.

Either way, nice tutorial. I think I'll try the "lander" one, as I like not having the whole thing built for me, but doing it myself. So that seems ideal IMO.

 

[AshburnerX]

I'm wondering if you have a good supply of hydrogen already, how effective those are for landers, as they won't suffer your "Dead zone" problem.

Either way, nice tutorial. I think I'll try the "lander" one, as I like not having the whole thing built for me, but doing it myself. So that seems ideal IMO.

Well the issue is that most players want their ships to be able to do it all (so fly in space and land) but that requires building a frankenmachine or investing heavily into hydrogen engines (and no one builds hydrogen engines for space travel because gravity drive and hyper drive work so much better). But efficiency clashes with design quite a bit.

 

[GasBandit]

I'm wondering if you have a good supply of hydrogen already, how effective those are for landers, as they won't suffer your "Dead zone" problem.

Either way, nice tutorial. I think I'll try the "lander" one, as I like not having the whole thing built for me, but doing it myself. So that seems ideal IMO.

Hydrogen engines are extremely effective. They have a huge power to weight ratio and work anywhere, but... gobble hydrogen.

As an experiment, in creative mode, I pasted my old joke Enterprise onto the planet surface and tacked 8 large hydrogen thrusters onto the sides of the secondary hull (4 on each side), and was easily able to lift the entire 4500 ton mass back into space with no problems whatsoever. Didn't have any atmospheric thrusters, and only had the hydros pointed down, was easy as you please.[DOUBLEPOST=1448209202,1448209038][/DOUBLEPOST]

Well the issue is that most players want their ships to be able to do it all (so fly in space and land) but that requires building a frankenmachine or investing heavily into hydrogen engines (and no one builds hydrogen engines for space travel because gravity drive and hyper drive work so much better). But efficiency clashes with design quite a bit.

From my limited experience, it's completely impractical to want to build a heavily armored capital ship that also can perform in atmosphere. Even the ship in my video, which I'd classify as a light frigate, needed ridiculous numbers of heavy atmo thrusters to be able to stay airborn. And those thrusters obviously don't fit inside the armor shell, they had to all be tacked on the outside where they can easily get shot off.

 

[Eriol]

I haven't played any length of time since they added hydrogen thrusters. I can see getting back into it a bit now, as there's a number of interesting new things to try.

As for "breaking atmo" something tells me that a combination of fewer atmospheric thrusters, and some hydrogen to get you "out" may be the ticket, and then navigate in space with regular ion. But that's my thoughts, as I haven't tried it at all.

Basically, for X number of large-large hydrogen thrusters, how long can you go against the gravity of the planet per tank full? How much/long does it take to mine that much ice? I guess I'll find out in the future!

Edit: and for the record, I find it weird that you don't need oxygen tanks to run the hydrogen thrusters with, as well as hydrogen. That's how it works... usually. Or an oxidizing agent period. But hey, that may be going too far for fun.

 

[PatrThom]

that may be going too far for fun.

You know, they never have answered the question of how you're supposed to poop in your suit.
I guess that's just how you fuel the jetpack.

--Patrick

 

[GasBandit]

Well, that didn't take long.



It only goes up ~5km, but as a proof of concept, it works pretty well. Apparently, however, there's a 20km limit on how tall an object can be, so you'd have to be creative with connectors and whatnot to build a full size 40+km one.

 

[GasBandit]

Well, dammit, doing that planet tutorial gave me the Space Engineers bug again. Speaking of bugs, it's still hella buggy. Alpha as fuuuuck. But, anyway, Here's what I did.

I started a new Star System map in survival, and landed my atmospheric lander close to, but not right on, a lake. Turns out that's about 1km away, but whatever. I started tearing down the lander and building the base, and simultaneously scouting the area.

It's another new day on Planet GasBandit.

After a couple days of scrabbling, my base is nearing completion.

I use some basic rovers to get around, mostly. Also I use them to "ferry" power out of the batteries of the lander and into the batteries of the base. Breaking down the batteries no longer gives you the power cells back, to add insult to injury. And at the beginning, especially, power is hard to come by, so you scrape for every KWh.

The rovers are a simple but versatile design. I primarily use them for transportation at this point, and since a connector can hold about 30kliters on its own, I haven't needed to install cargo bays yet. So right now there's an added solar panel flat on the back, but as I need more cargo space and less solar power, I can swap that out for medium cargo bays pretty easy. They're outfitted with antennas and downward facing ore detectors, so I can drive them around looking for ore deposits.

I tried messing with Programmable Block scripts to get the solar panel array to continually realign itself to the sun as it traverses the sky, but it only ever "kinda" worked at best. Finally I just lined it up myself one day at dawn and then started the horizontal rotor going at 0.0083 RPM, or 1 revolution every 2 hours. The day on this map is 2 hours long, so it more or less keeps it lined up... I still have to fine tune it every other morning or so.

At this particular time, I'm going to go make a run for some iron. I found an iron deposit about 2 km away. I limited the speed on my rovers to 120kph, any faster than that and I have found you risk glitching out and falling through the world into oblivion.

I had to build some leveled parking at the minehead since it is on a slope so that the rover won't roll away while I mine. There's no parking brake.

I drilled a tunnel diagonally down to the ore so I don't have to use my jetpack to get in and out of the mine. Jetpacks require hydrogen fuel now, and while you can refuel them from a carried hydrogen bottle roughly 10 times, you have to shut off the jetpack to refuel it.

At the bottom of the mineshaft.

Generally I go mining at night. You can still build and stuff during the day, but it's just easier to see things during the day. But in any case, by the next morning, I've got the primary base structure enclosed and everything torn down in the lander except for the last 3 batteries, which I'm still discharging.

I've also built a small basic atmospheric craft which carries an ore detector, which I call the Mineral Scout Flyer. You might notice every cockpit on my rovers and on the MSF has a vent on the nose set to depressurize... if you don't do that (and don't have an oxygen system attached) you will suffocate in the air-tight cockpit.

I've learned the hard way that ore deposits tend to be under patches of "darker" land, where the grass is darker green or the brown grass is darker brown. Knowing that now, it's faster to look for ore from the air than just driving around randomly in a rover. You just fly around looking for dark patches on the ground, then descend over them until you detect the ore and then mark the spot on your GPS. Before I knew about the "dark ground" trick, using the MSF was actually very inefficient. To detect ore, I'd generally have to fly lower than 20m, which means trees are a real menace and thus I had to fly slowly to avoid them. Also, a full battery charge lasts 3 days in a rover... I wouldn't trust the MSF more than 30 minutes in the air. Flying is power-hungry.

I then expanded the vehicle parking bay to accomodate both rovers at once. Make for more convenient recharging/unloading.

I run a script called "Scrolling Inventory and Status Report" in a programmable block to output information to these LCD screens in front of the base's control chair. Makes it easier to tell what's going on at a glance without having to root around in the guts of a control panel.

Damn you, space engineers. Just when I thought I was out, YOU PULLED ME BACK IN.

 

[GasBandit]

 

[AshburnerX]

I really need to devise some kind of angular shaft drilling machine using rotors and pistons for planetary mining. It doesn't SEEM hard in my head, but I actually need to try it out.

 

[GasBandit]

I really need to devise some kind of angular shaft drilling machine using rotors and pistons for planetary mining. It doesn't SEEM hard in my head, but I actually need to try it out.

The major problem with drilling on planets I've run into so far is the stupid voxels only updating once every 5 seconds problem. Drilling is hella slow and time consuming (which means energy consuming).

 

[AshburnerX]

The major problem with drilling on planets I've run into so far is the stupid voxels only updating once every 5 seconds problem. Drilling is hella slow and time consuming (which means energy consuming).

I built a very basic slant drilling rig in creative to test the idea of doing a drilling buggy. There are a few problems with this idea.

- Like you said, the drills are slow. This means you usually end up moving the rig instead of drilling because the voxels aren't updating.
- It's basically impossible to store enough pistons onto a rig to get more than 10m down without it becoming impossible to power the thing with solar or overloading the suspension.
- You sort of lift up the front end of your buggy when you first drill with this sort of design. You need landing gear or something on the front to create a more stable platform.
- You sort of need to drive the machine forward while drilling to get... *ahem*... "maximum penetration". This tends to snap off the drill/piston assembly (though as one piece, not the weird two part thing we used to get).

There really isn't that good of a work around for this. You'd need to build a platform on the ground to get around most of those issues, which isn't a TERRIBLE idea (mine with the platform, unload into a buggy for processing at main base) but is far less... elegant than I wanted. *shrug*

 

[Eriol]

Spoiler

One thing I think you're missing gas: handbrake. I'd never played around with rovers before, and I didn't know that it defaulted to "on" and thus I was somewhat frustrated when they didn't seem to be able to move at all. Eventually I figured it out, but I think it's worth mentioning in a caption or whatever.

And on that note, is there a hotkey for the handbrake? That'd be great, but I couldn't find it. I may be dense.

 

[AshburnerX]

One thing I think you're missing gas: handbrake. I'd never played around with rovers before, and I didn't know that it defaulted to "on" and thus I was somewhat frustrated when they didn't seem to be able to move at all. Eventually I figured it out, but I think it's worth mentioning in a caption or whatever.

And on that note, is there a hotkey for the handbrake? That'd be great, but I couldn't find it. I may be dense.

It's the same as park for landing gear, P. You really need to do this whenever you're stopping on ANY sort of incline, but remember this only stops the wheels from rotating. It doesn't give you the grabbing power of landing gear, so you can lift or flip your machine by accident if you are careful while using pistons and rotors.

 

[GasBandit]

I need something like this for my rovers, I think.

 

[PatrThom]

The foley work really makes it.

--Patrick

 

[AshburnerX]

I've done something like that with rotors and blast door blocks, but I guess now that pistons are stronger it would be easier with those.

 

[GasBandit]

 

[GasBandit]

After many a day of scrabbling around in the dirt on the earthlike planet, I managed to cobble together the resources to make a ship that could clear the gravity well on hydrogen propulsion, and even make it to the moon.


"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth ... put out my hand, and touched the face of God." - John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

"For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards..."

"...for there you have been and there you will long to return." - Leonardo da Vinci

Aaand shortly thereafter, my game crashed as I was building my moonbase. Aaaand I hadn't saved since lunar approach. DOH. So I flew in again, this time deciding on a different landing spot - I chose a tall mountain/hill as close to the north pole as I could reckon. The polar regions of the moon are covered in ice - which makes for a very handy fuel source when your primary mode of transportation uses hydrogen for fuel. Also, the sun is always more or less up - it circles around you close to the horizon, which makes a solar array a lot more economical because it will collect energy all the time instead of becoming useless at night.

Turns out, if playing on a planet is a challenge, playing on a moon is easymode. Gravity is there but only 0.25g, which means it isn't punishing, and you no longer have to muck around with rovers. Even the thirsty hydrogen engines of the ship I got here in are fine, especially with all the ice lying around. The ship has its own oxygen generator (which also generates hydrogen), so I can refuel it anywhere there's ice... I just whip out the hand drill, break off a few chunks of ice, and stuff it in the cargo bay. The oxygen generator does the rest, and refills the hydrogen fuel tanks.

Reduced gravity means everything is fast and easy, mining, building, whizzing around in your jetpack, the only single difficulty is that now you have to monitor your oxygen levels... but again, all the ice at the polar cap makes refilling oxygen a breeze. I may not even need to bother with building oxy farms.

I left Planetfall Base guarded by 4 gatling turrets and 2 missile turrets (as I expect its antenna might attract pirate attention), but I can't build missiles because there's no platinum on an earthlike planet. I also need platinum to build ionic thrusters, which use electricity but don't need any other fuel. I'm hoping to find some on the moon. If I don't, I'll have to go looking for an asteroid, and that could be time consuming. I'm likely on the moon until I can build a large ship, one capable of carrying a jump drive - the flight here in my small-form-factor H2-powered transport craft took over half an hour at max speed of 100 m/s. I don't want to go looking for asteroids that way, with no way to get home quickly.

And despite the patch notes saying otherwise, they have NOT in fact fixed "falling through the earth" OR the mining speed problems, just FYI.

 

[GasBandit]

And if anybody cares, here's a detailed look at the transport ship I used.

Even 3 hydrogen tanks aren't enough to get safely to the moon - I had to conserve fuel on the way up (turning the inertia dampeners off, then pulsing the big thrusters up to keep velocity moving upwards around 80-90 m/s) and still was down to about 10% fuel when I finally got out of the gravity well. This was mostly because of all the supplies it was loaded down with - enough materials to build a new base. Very heavy. Fortunately, I also brought 100,000kg of ice in the cargo bay, so once I got the ship moving in the direction of the moon, the oxy generator was able to take the long flight time coasting with the engines off to convert some of the ice into hydrogen and refill the fuel tanks.

The battery lasts about 9 hours from a full charge, given that hydrogen thrusters don't use much electricity, but just to be on the safe side I tacked on 4 small nuclear reactors as well, to make sure it can recharge itself from uranium. Worked out pretty well.

Once I got to the moon, I also stuck on a downward facing ore detector, for obvious reasons.

 

[GasBandit]

Tryin' something... a little different now.

Got some mods. The above, the Tungsten female player model, is just eye candy.

I also got the Enhanced Cockpit Concept mod, so that I could have some LCD readouts that were actually useful in my cockpit.

That makes it a lot easier to track my hydrogen useage without having to hit V to look at the "number of lights" on the sides of the tanks, or go into the K control panel (obscuring my view of everything) to page down through the list to check that way as well. It's really worth it. Naturally, that means I had to also stick on a programmable block running MMaster's Automatic Configurable LCDs script and a timer block to push the "run" button each second because the programmable block scripting API doesn't allow for self-executed recursion/looping.

Platinum, as it turns out, is pretty rare even on the moon. It's usually way down deep as well, and to top things off, the veins are super thin pancake disk shape so that even with precision drilling with a hand drill, you're going to get twice as much stone as you are platinum.

Regardless, I managed to get enough to tack some ionic thrusters onto the outside of my transport. Which is good, it was starting to get tiresome to have to stop to wait for the generator to make more hydrogen every couple minutes. How the hell this thing got me off the surface of a full 1g planet I have no idea. I guess I wasn't doing much "hovering" in that endeavor.

Now the real work can begin - gathering enough resources to build a capital ship which can support a jump drive for a trip out into the asteroid belt.

 

[AshburnerX]

Platinum, as it turns out, is pretty rare even on the moon. It's usually way down deep as well, and to top things off, the veins are super thin pancake disk shape so that even with precision drilling with a hand drill, you're going to get twice as much stone as you are platinum.

Regardless, I managed to get enough to tack some ionic thrusters onto the outside of my transport. Which is good, it was starting to get tiresome to have to stop to wait for the generator to make more hydrogen every couple minutes. How the hell this thing got me off the surface of a full 1g planet I have no idea. I guess I wasn't doing much "hovering" in that endeavor.

I really, really want one of two things:

- I want to be able to program a container/connector combo to sort all the stone I dig up into a predefined container so I can just carry an extra container/connector to dump stone as I dig it up. Basically I dig until it's full, then just jettison the container into a waste site. I think you can do this with mods (and maybe a programming block) but it should be a default option.
OR

- I want SOMETHING to use all this stone for. Let us grind it up for concrete to make blocks for bases or something.

Also, I kind of wish Uranium power sources created toxic waste you had to dispose of (or at least it was an option to make this happen) and that radiation was an actual issue.

 

[GasBandit]

- I want SOMETHING to use all this stone for. Let us grind it up for concrete to make blocks for bases or something.

Check this out - make concrete blocks using gravel.

- I want to be able to program a container/connector combo to sort all the stone I dig up into a predefined container so I can just carry an extra container/connector to dump stone as I dig it up. Basically I dig until it's full, then just jettison the container into a waste site. I think you can do this with mods (and maybe a programming block) but it should be a default option.

Actually, I think you can accomplish that in vanilla using a conveyor sorter, a projector, some welders and a grinder. Just have a small conveyor sticking out below or to the side a bit attached to a cargo pod, with a conveyor sorter pointed that way saying to move all stone that way. When it gets full, power up the grinder to cut the conveyor and drop the cargo bay, then activate the projector using the ship's original blueprint and turn on the welders to automatically rebuild the missing cargo pod and conveyors.

Also, I kind of wish Uranium power sources created toxic waste you had to dispose of (or at least it was an option to make this happen) and that radiation was an actual issue.

I've always thought that doing enough damage to take a reactor below redline should cause a massive explosion provided that:
A) the Reactor was online and functioning at the time it dropped below redline
B) the size of the explosion should scale with the amount of uranium in the reactor.

 

[AshburnerX]

Check this out - make concrete blocks using gravel.


Actually, I think you can accomplish that in vanilla using a conveyor sorter, a projector, some welders and a grinder. Just have a small conveyor sticking out below or to the side a bit attached to a cargo pod, with a conveyor sorter pointed that way saying to move all stone that way. When it gets full, power up the grinder to cut the conveyor and drop the cargo bay, then activate the projector using the ship's original blueprint and turn on the welders to automatically rebuild the missing cargo pod and conveyors.

Why would you cut it off? Just build on a connector on the far end and a connector to the rock storage tank, then pick it up like it's a docked ship. Then when you need to dump, you fly to the dump site and release the container series. As long as the dump site has a gravity field (ether naturally on a planet or an artificially created one), the containers will drop cleanly and stay where you left them. Using a grinder just makes it likely you'll start grinding away ship parts you actually need.

I may just need to try and build this myself later.

I've always thought that doing enough damage to take a reactor below redline should cause a massive explosion provided that:
A) the Reactor was online and functioning at the time it dropped below redline
B) the size of the explosion should scale with the amount of uranium in the reactor.

I don't think nuclear reactors work that way... but it should totally trigger a meltdown that COULD cause an explosion like that if you don't ether dump the fuel rods or fix the reactor quickly. Really, I think we need stuff like heat management for this kind of thing.

 

[Eriol]

Or maybe they're just using a nuclear technology OTHER than the "light water reactor" that is commonly used today that does NOT blow up when damaged? Like Liquid Salt or something?

Also a lot of designs even now produce SIGNIFICANTLY less waste (essentially, they "nuclear burn" the waste further, rather than leaving highly radioactive waste) and thus the whole thing about lingering radiation, not so much, or at the least far FAR reduced.

 

[GasBandit]

Why would you cut it off? Just build on a connector...

Heh, an old habit from multiplayer. In the current netcode, flying around with attached connectors is dangerous and can cause explosions. When you fly around in multiplayer, you fly around with 1 grid and 1 grid only, or you will regret it.

I don't think nuclear reactors work that way...

Heh, very little of this game "works that way." The sun revolves around the planets (but the skybox remains still so the sun REALLY DOES look like it is moving), thrusters with no reaction mass, hydrogen thrusters with no oxidizers, gravity based propulsion, the list goes on and on.

 

[PatrThom]

Dangit, Gas. Stop making me want to play this game more. I'm trying to cram all my game time into Blizzard since next week is finals.

--Patrick

 

[Eriol]

Also I 2nd the comment about conveyor sorters. They work beautifully, both for categories of things, whitelists, blacklists, "pull all" (or whatever the option is called) and so on. They did it "right" IMO with a minimal of fuss.

 

[AshburnerX]

So I tried out my "dump containers" idea. Doesn't work like I want it to for several reasons.

- It's considered a separate mass even if it's connected, which means it WILL drag down your ship in any sort of gravity field unless you build stabilizing thrusters on it. These aren't TOO bad when your building ionic ones in space but it sucks if you want to do it in atmo. It's also more waste.
- You also need to power it if it's separate or the connector and thrusters will not function. That means strapping on a battery or a reactor, which means dumping expensive battery parts or uranium. I guess you can recover these but that sort of defeats the point of dumping.
- Its actually sort of hard to get it to eject the stone into the dump container... it's simple when you have factories draining it but just shunting it was more than I could figure out.

So what @GasBandit suggested might be a better idea: just build it off of your ship in such a way as to easily sever it with a grinder and connect it in such a way as to allow a sorter to dump the stone into it. It eliminates all three problems: it runs off the main power rig until you need to dump it, you don't need supporting thrusters, and you can easily transfer the stone through the network. You just need to replace it manually when you're done or build a projector and run through some assemblers.

 

[GasBandit]

I've been working on gathering materials on the moon, especially platinum. But I also suicided back to check on my Planetfall base, and found that once again the grid between the two rotors for the solar array had vanished from existence, letting the solar panels fall to the ground, but also curiously enough, every single ship or rover that was attached to a connector has been moved in a random direction, still technically "attached" to the connector but clearly not in a position where it should be - one even "attached" while completely moved over an entire connector-width.

Also, 3/4ths of the wheels are missing from my rovers' suspensions now.

Buggy fuckin game.

 

[AshburnerX]

I've been working on gathering materials on the moon, especially platinum. But I also suicided back to check on my Planetfall base, and found that once again the grid between the two rotors for the solar array had vanished from existence, letting the solar panels fall to the ground, but also curiously enough, every single ship or rover that was attached to a connector has been moved in a random direction, still technically "attached" to the connector but clearly not in a position where it should be - one even "attached" while completely moved over an entire connector-width.

Also, 3/4ths of the wheels are missing from my rovers' suspensions now.

Buggy fuckin game.

I like to imagine there's some bored, pissed off Space Teenager that is just fucking with your base while you are gone because it's funny. The only thing missing was for him to spraypaint dicks everywhere.

 

[PatrThom]

I like to imagine there's some bored, pissed off Space Teenager that is just fucking with your base while you are gone because it's funny. The only thing missing was for him to spraypaint dicks everywhere.

Next Space Engineers update: "Removed Herobrine."

--Patrick

 

[PatrThom]

Cyberhounds?
Really?

--Patrick

 

[AshburnerX]

Cyberhounds?
Really?

--Patrick

It gets worse: they explode for some fucking reason. These should be the kind of thing you deal with when attacking a pirate base, not something that randomly spawns. At least make ones that DON'T explode so it's not always a fuck fest.

 

[GasBandit]

Well, thankfully they re-patched the patch to let us turn off the cyberhounds.

Over the weekend, I finished the creative-mode design for the capital ship I'm going to build to get me out into the asteroid belt, blueprinted it, switched back to my survival game, fixed the detached solar array on my planetary base, reconfigured its LCDs and power useage so it should still be fine to get by on batteries and a fixed-position solar panel, then suicided back to the moonbase to start work on my lunar space elevator so that I can build the big ship in zero gravity, hopefully with the help of a small welding craft (I don't think I need a full fledged Bob the Builder). Problem is, the design calls for 27 large ion thrusters (6 aft, 5 fore, 4 port/starboard/ventral/dorsal), which is gonna take a hell of a lot of platinum.

 

[GasBandit]

Great gobs of goose shit. I just did the math and it's going to take about 2.08 million kg of platinum ore (about 800,000 liters) to finish the ship I designed. On the moon, I consider 20K Liters of platinum ore to be a particularly rich strike, and I've only found two so far, and I had to look *hard* for them.

I may need to rethink this.

It might be a better intermediate step to instead build my standard large drilling ship first, which has much less in the way of thrusters (as it weighs much less), and strap a jump drive on it somewhere, and maybe make a scouting run out into the asteroids for some platinum that way.