Need some construction help; Adding in extra pistons.

[DutchFurnace]

I've got a huge drillhead drilling a hole in the moon, and want to add more pistons for it to be able to go deeper.

Is there an easy way to add extra pistons to my pistonstack, without having to completely disassemble and reassemble the drillhead?

[Scratch]

You could extend pistons to current max, build a support for your drillhead to keep it still, separate it from pistons, retract pistons, add new ones and reconnect drillhead with merge blocks. And remember to sacrifice some lesser builds for Clang before you try this. Maybe he won’t notice.

[aaron]

i usually use a rotor for this.. you place the rotor between the piston and the drill.. then you lock the drill down with a landing gear, unattach the rotor and add extra pistons.. then you create a new rotor part and attach it. just dont forget to lock the rotor so it doesnt spin.

[NYVS]

* Could rework the design, ficusing on a singular piston; buildable guide rail for it.
In this the piston is just the vertical control as the drill head progresses down, you would need to have quite a bit of power storage, but it works quite well. Have been using for about a year now in mining ship designs to bore directly into planets (big oil rig like constructions with lots of solar panels, and way to many thrusters to be a base...).

[Jack Schitt]

I build a full on machine that uses a projector, merge blocks, and grinders to extend the drill so it goes deeper. I don't have it adding a piston I have it adding additional blocks to the arm of the drill. I got the idea from this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx05rfsqsO4

He shared the blueprint here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1688869757

You can surely add a wall of drills to it. If you're going to get it be sure to read the description text. There are other parts of it that are separate workshop items you also need to subscribe to.

My version of it has more drills and they traverse to mine a larger area. I haven't shared mine on the workshop, yet, and I'm leaning toward not sharing it mostly because I don't have a lot of free time to deal with updates and questions and complaints from people it challenges wrestling with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkZ4GgUqR-E&t=54s