This is just my name for it, as opposed to a ‘Carousel Hangar’ which is what I’m currently using on the Admiral Hipper. The two types are meant to accomplish the same thing, allowing for this type of plane storage:
There are 32 Cosmo Tigers on this thing
This is a centrifuge style hangar, with a big long cylindrical structure running through the middle. This sorting and storage unit is a lot more complicated than it looks, especially in the context of Space Engineers. Frankly, I don’t even know if something like this can be built both practically, and with any real stability.
Not that I didn’t try something similar myself.
My carousel style hangar looks similar from the outside, but it’s a lot simpler, and consequently, a lot more limiting.
The carousel set up here relies on two rotors at either end of a central column. They spin in opposite directions to give a stable clockwise or counter-clockwise spin to the whole assembly.
Connected to the central piece are four arms. Each arm has a rotor on the end that rotates the platforms the fighters use. They can maintain a specific orientation no matter where the column is in its rotation.
It looks great and it actually works for storing and sorting the fighters. Launching and recovery is also very simple and can be managed by just one operator (assuming the launching/landing fighters have pilots or AIs).
The problem with this system is its foundation. Assuming you’d want to put the carousel more amidships, you’d have a serious issue. There are only two ways around the carousel to any areas of a ship aft of it. You can either go above, below, or around it, or you can set up a retractable bridge to one of the four quadrants between the arms, IE: Even more moving parts to worry about.
For that reason, this carousel approach works best if it’s at the very back of the ship, right in front of the main drive.
The Alternative
The alternative to the carousel style is the centrifuge style. The upside to that approach is that you have a central column that never moves. You can use that to move people and material through the hangar without having to go around the whole thing. That means the ship doesn’t have to be as wide in this section, or you can save that extra space for other things. The downside is it’s a lot more complicated and has to be a lot bigger to work.
Requirements
I tried building a centrifuge style hangar in my head a couple of times, and from what I can tell, the minimum for required special components for something potentially stable on a ship would be the following:
Control Panel
Control method (either scripts or a bunch of timer blocks)
2 roughly circular outer tracks (additional or alternative inner tracks optional)
8 wheels (1 at the front and back of each platform section)
5 connectors or 5 merge blocks (4 on the ship and 1 ‘catcher’ on the subgrid or the inverse)(8 connectors works better for alignment)
4 rotors for the platforms (8 might be more or less reliable)
This might not be the only way to do it, so let’s just call these ‘Phee’s Requirements,’ as I honestly have no idea how to implement something like this without a tracked system.
It’s not just curiosity that has me thinking about this. While my carousel hangar works just fine, I wouldn’t want to use it on a carrier since it would negatively impact the entire design of the ship. Like I said before, you have to go around the entire thing or build a retractable bridge to get around it. Having more of these exasperates the problem.
On a carrier this would be especially annoying, since it can only carry eight fighters. A carrier would need more than one carousel for a better compliment. While a carrier could use multiple stowing methods, I don’t really see the point.
That’s why the centrifuge approach is so interesting. I can’t say promising, but definitely interesting.
A Nightmare Scenario
As much as I like the idea of a centrifuge style hangar, it’s a complete nightmare scenario, both to build and to operate. Not to mention the whole thing might come out of alignment if you so much as look at it the wrong way.
A tracked system on a ship isn’t a subgrid that holds its own subgrids, not while it’s moving and completely disconnected. It’s an independent grid with its own subgrids, snuggly riding along the inside of another, much larger moving grid.
Engineers plan and Klang laughs.
That’s probably the moral of this story. The chances of this hangar ‘module’ becoming misaligned are high. The difficulty in programming the wheels it would need to move properly goes well beyond what I know how to do at present. The fighters a system like this is designed to carry would add so much weight to an inherently delicate system that it might not work at all if fully or unevenly loaded.
It really is a nightmare scenario.
Even so, I’m going to be looking into ways to fully replicate the Yamato’s rotating hangar bays. My carousel comes about halfway but can’t do what that hangar does. I don’t know if it’s possible, or even worth the PCU and block requirements, but it’s worth finding out one way or the other.
Conclusion
The tracked system might be a dead end, but the fact that I even thought of a way to make one at all reminds me that there’s a third option. There’s always a third option. There’s always a solution.
The goal isn’t to do something I think is impossible. I’m not out to prove anything. The goal is to replicate one of the more interesting aspects of the newer version of the Space Battleship Yamato.
With most of our backend systems being worked on at the moment, we thought to share some sneak peek, a preview of the multiplayer that will be available in 0.9.0.
Just a small sneak peak of Vermillion’s multiplayer testing. For a team of six, they’re doing an awful lot awfully quickly. Here’s hoping they can get multiplayer working well in general, not just the PvP or PvE side of things but all across the board.
May is going to be a lot crazier than I expected. I’m sensing a pattern here. I might have to put almost everything on hold. I’m looking at a possible internship if I can get my situation in order fast enough. It certainly beats what I’ve been doing. Because of that it’s shifting from my top priority to my only priority until I’ve got a better feel for things.
I’ll have to put a few things on hold for the next month or two, or only poke at them sparingly. That includes things like Fleeing Victory and the Space Engineers stuff.
The daily posts here will continue as always because of course they will. This isn’t hard anymore, it’s just overcoming my own nitpicks with what I’m writing about.
As for next month’s book, I haven’t decided yet but I’ve definitely narrowed it down. It’s either going to be Dark Force Rising or Dune.
The RGZ-95 ReZEL has arrived at long last. Ever since mobile suits from Gundam Unicorn started showing up in the game, I’ve been waiting for this moment. Now that the ReZEL series has its first member in the GBO2 roster, the others aren’t far behind. I haven’t been this excited since the Zeta Plus series arrived.
As for the basic ReZEL itself, I’ve always liked this unit. I prefer the winged versions like the Command type or the Type Cs, but the basic unit is sleek, beautiful, and deadly. I always pictured the ReZEL as something we would come up with in the real world if we decided to build robots instead of planes. I’d say it’s the equivalent of an F-15A. (The RGZ-95C can be the F-15C).
Anyway, I was seriously blessed to get this thing for only 15 tokens. That means I can save the rest for the next ReZEL that shows up (or more likely the Delta Plus since that’s a very real possibility now, too). I’m betting the order will be: Commander type (Support) and then the Type C(GR) (Raid). That will nicely round things out … and then things will quickly get shaken up again as the Defenser variants show up.
We only had about a four day advanced warning for this update, which I actually appreciate in hindsight. Having the anticipation boil over for weeks was painful last time. Anyway, let’s hop right into it.
Space Engineers – Space Engineers: Most Wanted – Steam News
Hello, Engineers! Our newest release is here! YOU, our community, are the inspiration for this release. We have reviewed your feedback and from it, created a collection of new additions based on your requests.
Most Wanted
This was a community requests update where Keen focused on adding blocks and features to the game that had been on the backburner for years. We didn’t get everything we’ve ever wanted, naturally, but to say they filled in a lot of missing pieces in the engineers’ kit would be an massive understatement. There are a lot of standouts here.
New features include:
A camera overlay (bye bye crude MAC gun LCDs)
A ‘weldless’ armor skin
A corrugated metal skin
New blocks include:
New Armor shapes (S + L grid, Light + Heavy, 10 shapes, 40 blocks total)
T Junction Conveyor (S + L grid, 2 blocks total)
Round Windows (S + L grid, 4 shapes, 16 blocks total)
Small advanced rotor (S grid, 1 block)
Conveyor Converter (S grid, 1 block)
Half Cover Wall Mirror (L grid, 1 block)
Plushie Engineer (S grid, 1 block)
Ladder Shaft (L grid, 1 block)
Reinforced Conveyors (S + L grid, 3 shapes, 6 blocks total)
Keen also did something clever and updated older DLCs. The sale they topped it off with is from their site specifically and not Steam, but with the Steam keys it’s only a little extra work.
This was tough, but in terms of what I’ll actually use the most, I’ve got to hand it to the following three additions.
Ladder Shaft
This one’s subtle but vastly improves the look and feel of any grid you add it to. It’s also nice to use these instead of passageways because not only is climbing an option in emergencies now, but there’s also guiding arrows and a platform to step off onto in each shaft. These are a must for large ships and a very welcome addition.
Reinforced Conveyors
The best thing about these conveyors isn’t that you can build on top of them, or combine form and function, but that they have an airtight seal on one side. I’ll try to demonstrate this in future builds because it’s a real game changer on more compact ships that need a lot of ‘tubing.’
That’s not to say being able to build directly on these isn’t a big improvement, not to mention form finally meeting function where conveyors are concerned, it’s just that my builds in particular are going to get much more efficient internally with that partial airtight seal. It’s going to be very nice going forward.
New Armor Shapes
We’ve had access to blocks like these through mods for ages, but being able to ditch those mods and keep the blocks is a game changer. That’s one more mod off the list, and much smoother armor transitions for vanilla builds.
I’m still waiting on the elongated blocks, because then the insane builds Sundae used to make will be extremely close to vanilla when they’re remade, but for now, this is great progress.
Honorable Mentions
Catwalks and Rails
Frankly, the only reason this isn’t a favorite is because I haven’t had a chance to experiment with them in depth, but I could tell just by looking at them that a lot of gaps are getting filled here in particular. The old version of the Prinz Heinrich would have made extensive use of these new catwalks and railings, so I’m going to see if the new version I’m mentally drafting up can’t do something similar.
Round Windows (Including the Half Windows)
These can bring a lot of style to a building or a ship depending on how you use them. The half windows might make for good forward or aft observation areas that shouldn’t be overly exposed. They’d also work as regular windows with a bit of a bulge. I like the half windows because they let you make narrower windows like you’d see on something like the Enterprise D from Star Trek, just … rounder.
Diagonal Half Windows
I have very specific plans for these somewhere down the road. That’s why they get an honorable mention here. They won’t work on the Hippers since I have the bridge and observation area designs nailed down already, but for other factions like the Greater Terran Union or the Imperial Royal Navy? Definitely~ More on those factions when I get to work on at least one of their ships.
There were plenty of other blocks in this update, I just wanted to touch on the ones I’m personally most interested in right this moment.
Bug Fixes
Not to be overlooked, there were plenty of bug fixes in the update as well.
There’s only one on the list that I’ve personally experienced, that issue with small grid armor panels. It was annoying to try to deal with them on the Cosmo Messers because the game tended to ignore them when performing an action on the block you had the cursor aimed at, instead performing that action on the block beneath. This led to painting issues, accidental deletions, and so on. So I’m glad that won’t be an issue going forward.
Current Builds
I haven’t had a look at the Cosmo Messers yet, but they could definitely benefit from the reinforced conveyors. Some of the extra plating on the outer hull is used to cover up conveyor junctions so being able to remove those should both improve the appearance and lighten the weight. Doesn’t hurt the processing load, either.
The real gem with this update is the Admiral Hipper. I not only worked some of the new blocks into the design during the stream, I was hit with such a wave of inspiration that I managed to implement some other cosmetic changes I’d been considering for a while.
Blue + orange beats blue + red; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
The exterior pics here are already out of date since I’m still actively working on this, but here’s how the Hipper’s coming along.
It wasn’t easy convincing myself to remove the extra large shock cannons from the Hipper, but I feel like the first ship of the class should have a more balanced armament. She has two medium sized coilguns now instead of one large one, so her firepower, while extremely forward biased, is still quite strong. Other weapons scattered around the hull are mostly for defense and whittling down small grids.
Hipper’s capable, but I don’t want this hull type to start getting extremely well armed until the Prinz Eugen and the Lützow hulls are built.
On that note, here are the planned hulls for the Hippers:
Admiral Hipper (Heavy Cruiser)
Blücher (Marine Assault Cruiser)
Prinz Eugen (Strike Cruiser)
Weser (Assault Carrier)
Lützow (Strike Cruiser)
Mainz (Light Cruiser)
Most of these are a long ways off, but this update is really helping me iron out some problems I was having with the design, particularly in the performance department. I’ve got a lot of remodeling to do, but things are looking up.
Closing
That was the update for the most part. I was on the Youtube stream since I forgot Twitch was a thing. It was fun to see well known builders chime in and occasionally do so myself while updating the Hipper in the background. Keep up the good work, Keen, and thanks again o7
