The Praedian Records

Space Engineers: Centrifuge Hangar?

by Phoenix | Apr 30, 2022 | Blog, Space Engineers, Star Blazers

What’s a Centrifuge Hangar?

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:

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.