Drill Problems

[Roqarr]

is there any way to fire up a drill mounted on my ship without the whole thing shaking violently and swinging everywhere?
Tried to build a drill arm, but the piston flails wildly and i drilled my own ship to pieces...

[simarsenault]

I tried that too and it turned pretty bad. My ship was doing backflips and 360s. Went back to a normal drills array :P

[WeirdBeard]

Get some heavy armor plating on your ship, It makes it more stable.

[Nightwing]

Atm, pistons are too unstable for use.
I'm designing a drill that uses an old-fashioned mechanical arm for that very reason.

[Malkevin]

Pistons are very wonky at the moment, you'll need some sort of stablisation system to stop it flailing wildly everywhere
(Take a look at my shaft miner for inspiration: *NOTE: the thruster arrangement at the moment doesn't work since the last update, they'll now burn off each other.... very annoying*
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=295411887)

Alternatively you can cover your ship entirely in drills.... who cares if it flaps about when it'll just drill into the wall.

Another idea I've not yet tried is to increase the mass of the ship signicantly with mass blocks.

[Nightwing]

The mechanical arm I'm planning on will more than likely work by using a suspension wheel that has a lever coming off of the axle, linking to a transfer arm that changes the rotational motion of the wheel into the linear motion needed for a functioning piston.

[Gekkibi]

Originally posted by BLUETAC Nightwing:

The mechanical arm I'm planning on will more than likely work by using a suspension wheel that has a lever coming off of the axle, linking to a transfer arm that changes the rotational motion of the wheel into the linear motion needed for a functioning piston.

No need to use wheels. Use landing gear. You can lock the piston in place when not needed, thus minimizing the wrath of the Kraken. Crank-driven pistons can be made more stable now when you can support it from all 4 sides without using an extra rotor as a shim. However, they require 1.5 times the length of the stroke, even more if you're adding a piston skirt.

[Hackerman]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=279334770&searchtext=mechanical
Heres a video to making an extendable arm.

[Tal Maru]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=298925378
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=298925359
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=298925343

25 drills
100m extension
100% stable during 10 test drills
Fills 3-4 large cargo containers per deployment

[Namdoolb]

Using multiple pistons in a parallel arangement *should* limit the range of motion experienced by the drilling array by virtue of multiple anchor points.
(This is untested, but is in theory, sound.)

It's possible to use Merge blocks to join multiple pistons between the same pair of grids. (I have a rudimentary guide on how to do this on the workshop for anyone who is unsure of how to achieve this.)
It's been my experience that using multiple pistons you experience a massive increase in stability.

[Malkevin]

Do those work now?

I tried that with the Mark 1-B but it just tore itself apart, but that was before the patch-before-last which improved pistons dramatically

[Namdoolb]

It's worked for me multiple times on both small and large pistons.

Here's how I'm doing it:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=298117839

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if we could change the direction of one of the drills it would stabalize better

[Vayra]

When I built my drilling ship with an array of 9 pistons, it was pretty stable. Even the wonky pistons realigned themselves upon reversing back and forth, while they appeared to be broken.

Artificial Masses will help stability, heavy armor will reduce jitter and shaking of the whole vessel, and landing gears can guide as well. Thrusters + inertial dampening will also keep the whole contraption relatively well in place.

Multiple pistons are really a good solution to most instabilities, and make sense as well. My 9-piston mining vessel just moved as a solid whole along with the drill head, so just those 9 pistons were enough support to keep the drill and the whole ship in one piece.

[Nightwing]

Originally posted by Gekkibi:

No need to use wheels. Use landing gear. You can lock the piston in place when not needed

The whole reason to use suspension wheels is actually quite simple: It would allow me to extend/retract the drill bit at the press of a button without having to fiddle with keybinding for velocities...

[STORM]

What I found useful is to balance your thrusters. If you put 2 thrusters to the back (for forward) place 2 for reverse, same for up/down/left/right/left-side/right-side in all corners of your ship. This balances your ship quite well.