Any way to stabilize a bunch of pistons

[Rodrigo]

And yeah.. I'm into that telescopic stuff, basicall i want to add a bunch on pistons on ships for whatever reason ;) on top of that i want to put like 2 or 3 pistons on top of another for some large extending arms... and a drill on top of it all too!

the problem is, and everybody should know that, it will wobble, the longer it is, the more wobbling... ive tried to put 2 pistons in paralel using merge blocks, that wouldnt help handling as it seems that the pistons and the ship werent part of a single "whole", so i tried to re-merge the pistons and the ship with more merges tricks and it was a total failure, its almost impossbile to fly anything with pistons extended, especially if theres more structures on thop of the piston, like a drill...

any workaround for this matter? pistons are cool stuff but their current is very limited to some very simple up/down lifting...

[dutt]

I read something before about using a gyro on them idk how it works something to try

[Cake for Mumm-Ra]

I'm just getting into this, too, so I can't offer any advice for ya OP.

But I'm curious about how people generally start these types of projects. Do you build directly on to your ship or station? Or do you create a new ship that you can copy/paste? If so, how do you attach the pasted telescoping parts to an existing structure?

I've seen a workshop item that was using small blocks for an extendable arm, but I can't figure out how I'd use this approach on my station that uses large blocks.

[Stardriver907]

Messaggio originale di Captein:

its almost impossbile to fly anything with pistons extended, especially if theres more structures on thop of the piston, like a drill...

any workaround for this matter? pistons are cool stuff but their current is very limited to some very simple up/down lifting...

I'm afraid for the time being it's not a good idea to fly a ship with pistons extended. The head of the piston is not part of your ship and therein lies the rub. You turn your ship this way and the head wants to go the way it's been going, next thing you know you've got a fight.

I've never actually tried it but I believe you can use pistons while moving if you are not using thrust (e.g. coasting). Change roll, pitch or yaw and you will have problems again.

If you subscribe to Mech's Mods: Gears & Things you might be able to restrain whatever is on the end of your piston with rails.

The problem with using a gyro is that, again, anything attached to the end of the piston is not part of your ship. The gyro will get power but it won't behave like all your other gyros when you attempt a maneuver.

There's a modded piston out there that extends 30 meters. I have a ship with two of those (not connected) and they are stowed before the ship moves. If you are extending beyond 30 meters you might try to consider another technique. If I were you I would take a look at those gear mods.

[MechaDraco]

I personall created a drill that utilizes extending pistons to allow the structure to drill deep into a asteroid, then bring them back in to allow for flight, How I specificially went about this was I had each piston extend slowly at first, and at the head (or butts of the next piston) I placed landing gear, as each piston fully extended, the landing gear attached to it would lock inplace against the wall of the asteroid, and this would continue for the entire drill head. I do infact have a workshop item up for this if you want to take a look at it, you can dl it and take an even coser look at it, but thats how I was able to stabalize them.

I would say with how landing gear is working in multiplayer right now, It might not be a good idea to try this on a server. Also another note about pistons, the actual body of a piston is actually very stable, however the head piece is not, the part that tends to lose control and break off is the head, even wile extended the body seems to stay pretty stable, its only the heads that ever lose their stability.

[peon]

Here is a simple design i came up with, and was quite effective. I wanted to put gyros on the pistons, but if i remember right they wouldnt fit in between landing gears, so i had to put a ♥♥♥♥ ton at the base. But it worked really damn well, so damn well it blew the power supply in my pc, i posted in a thread called "my pc restarts when i drill into a asteroid". Here are a few screenshots, not sure if i have the original save or not, i reformated a couple times trying to fix the power issue.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=374157426

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=374157482

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=374157586

The trick is, for whatever reason the landing gears have to be a certain orientation for it all to work. And you have to build the landing gear (3 rows up/down left/right) Then place the pistons, THEN place the final row of landing gears, if it wont go green you have to manually push against the stack of pistons, and it will let you place the landing gears. Now i havent tried this since before the blast door update, so there may be a way to use blast doors to build a stabilzing tunnel, but you still need landing gears to lock the pistons in place while you fly, or merge blocks, but that is really tricky, as long as the parking gears are locked, you wont notice anything while flying.
And when you start to fly at speeds greater than 25-50m/s you better lock those landing gears, or ♥♥♥♥ will start exploding xP.

[dga8705]

You could do something similar to what MechaDraco is talking about with wheels/suspension. Depending on the shape of your drill head, you could have the wheels just inside so that they touch the walls. The suspension of the wheels should balance out the motion, in theory.

As for flying, I would say just make sure your ship is stationary while deploying this. That shouldn't be a problem if you are just flying up to an asteroid, stopping, deploying the drill, retrieving the drill, and then flying off again. Landing gear to lock it in when it is retracted would help as well.

As for gyros, I'm not sure if it would work, but maybe gyros and some thrusters to stabilize side to side movement. Also, I think you are on the right track with multiple pistons. I am building a 3d printer station that uses probably 50-60 pistons all attached to a single frame, and each of those has 15 pistons stacked on it to get the height I need. Merging them together properly takes some experimenting. Here's how I did it.

1. Build your base platform.
2. Put a single piston on it(or however many pistons long you want it to extend).
3. Extend pistons.
4. Build a frame atleast 3 thick on the end of said pistons, leaving space for merge blocks. Remember you'll probably want to remove merge blocks at some point so make sure it is thick enough to remove both merge blocks, and still be attached.
5. Build the rest of your pistons. Do not extend them yet.
6. Put a block, then a merge block on the end of the pistons. If you want to have conveyor capability, use a conveyor and then merge block.
7. Slowly extend the pistons, 1 at a time, or at least staggered. If you have multiple pistons try and merge to the upper frame at the same time, it won't work. Extend one, wait 5-10 seconds, then do the next. It will take a while if you have lots of pistons.
8. Once all your pistons are connected, fill in the blocks so that the lower block or conveyor is connected to the upper frame, and then remove the merge blocks.

And you're done. Like I said, it takes alot of time, even in creative. That said, as long as you don't switch the direction on the pistons alot, it makes for a pretty darn stable structure that has alot of force(I made one that would drag capital ships into a grinder bay without even slowing down).

[Rodrigo]

well, thanks for all the replies,

I play on survival so took a while to build the systems, neverthless... i failed kinda miserably, the gyro seemed to have no effect whatsoever to stabilize it... at leas tin my experience, then again, i tried a double / quadra piston merged with merge blocks, while they will not bend so easily even if theres 2 or 3 on top of each other, the ship cannot be controlled anyways... then once again, i hate to have to trick the game into it...i suppose theres nothing i can do to make flying with a 2-3 piston arm on my ship, even retracted the 'weight' of them not being part of the ship will always fight the ship motion and render flying impossible... and i had huge plans for big ships with retracting missile bays / wings...

keen would kindly take a keen look into this?

[Freemann]

if you want long pistons, you should use the mod "piston pack", it provides a 35m long piston ! far more stable than 3 pistons on top of each other ;-)


http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=327627089

[Lancewise]

I have a 7 piston long drilling machine with a 3 x 3 drill head (9 Drills in total). I placed a Gyroscope on top of one of the drills and checked the override control box and adjusted the yaw and pitch (.30 Yaw & .30 Pitch are my settings). ***Note this is a planetary not in space***

[ZombieHunter]

I thought the new physics overhaul would fix this but sadly the new physics doesn't seem to be much different than the old. I can still get killed randomly going through doorways. If I am on a moving ship and press T to get out of the command seat my guy is flying instead of on the floor. Then if I turn off the jetpack bad things happen and he goes flying into a wall and can literally become a bomb and destroy my ship....just like before. There is still tremendous lag when an object collides with terrain or another object (worse). My space stations still have some velocity even though dampers are on and I have thrusters in all directions. Station still rolls a bit and the dampers don't detect it. The speed limit of the world is still ridiculously small given the context of the game.

Your build options on moving ships are severely limited due to piston craziness. My advice is not to use them on moving ships. For stations, stationary stations that is, they are fine. But don't put them on anything that can move b/c bad things happen fast.

I don't see what was fixed with the new physics. It seems to me it is the same or worse than before.

On a positive note it is possible to walk around a moving ship without having weird catch up issues happening - I recommend transitioning from jetpack to floor in a tight enclosed area to prevent smashing into a wall at a million miles an hour. It is also possible to carry other small ships inside hangars of big ships as long as their landing gear are locked.

For doors and such I recommend using the pre-built hangar door 'pods' b/c they have no issues at all.