Need advice about my elevator issue

[Woomination]

As the title suggest, I am kinda stuck with my elevator setup at the moment for a survival mode I am playing on.

The elevator makes use of a small grid 4 points (Aka 4 pillars) connected wheel suspension setup but the issue I have is when I want to move it. I can't do it but when I apply an override. The wheels are working perfectly fine and usually with a lot of force (20% propulsion is already enough to go extremely quick). I have tried a lot of things and even a gyro is attached to the elevator to keep it stable during the trips, Also moving the control seat (which will be exchanged for automation once I get it to work) doesn't change the problem either. The elevator when I manually want to apply power to the wheels does go crazy (Lights flickering on/off and the remote controls did the same thing)

The idea of the elevator is to make multi-story base possible and I wanted to force myself to learn more stuff but the elevator has me quite hard stuck on it.

[Quazy]

sounds like your trying to use more energy then you have for the power you want to put out. shutting other systems down to get enough torque to move?

[Woomination]

I got 7 small batteries installed with 24 wheels and 4 inset lights

[Oparator Stalker]

I don't know what kind of elevator Your trying to build, but Lights flickering on/off and the remote controls doing the same thing is like what Quazy stated, your have a high energy demand draw. This can be confirmed looking at the power bar to the lower right, when sitting in the control seat or remote control usage(I think). it should be Full 100% in red. So 7 small batteries may not be enough for the demand. You may want to consider dropping a reactor down to see if it helps, and only drop what you need until that issue is resolved. You could use more batteries, but you need a way to recharge them, they will drain. So you need a device to recharge them, which goes back to the reactors. If you use the solar panels/hydro engines, you will need to make sure there is enough of them to provide power to the grid power demands AND recharge the batteries.
Just to Note; One reactor puts out more than one solar panel or hydro engine as well as the battery.

[Quazy]

yup. i guess they modeled the power draw for the wheels like a actual electric motor. they take 100% at 0 rpm. and reduce in draw as the rpm increases. so once u get moving your fine. they dont draw to much.

IRL the fix for this. is a capacitor that can dump enough juice to get the wheels moving.

ingame the fix is either.
1: add more batteries or a small reactor.

2: use a event block. set it to turn off some of your wheels power usage when not moving. and turn them back on once u start. or some kind of flicker system that will give your elevator a little time to boot up.

3: use a piston and landing gear system to walk you elevator up and down. they can be done with 2 pistons, 2 landing gears, 1 timer, 1 event, 1 sensor. and maybe a little more depending on how u want your I/O to work. but you can set these to move at exact distances and speeds. (sry not really a fix but its my personal preference for a boon or elevator)

PS. if you decide to do the piston system. you only need a single rail for them to run on. and pistons have a very slight offset in 2 directions so you can make a very tight noncollidable guide out of plates around the rail, if you need that stability.

[Captain Canard]

I'd love a picture of this elevator, it would help with ideas.

[Jack Schitt]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3030780799

Problem solved? Or do you want to build it yourself?
Building a wheel suspension elevator like you're doing is probably one of the more difficult designs to attempt. Using pistons as the lift mechanism in a manually built elevator design is a bit easier, we just have to figure out how to put the pistons together in a physical group in the least amount of space under or above the elevator cabin. I might have a blueprint of that somewhere....Space Engineers YouTube Creator "Splitsie" released a piston elevator tutorial video a few years ago that's very good.

I'll find and link that video for you if you'd like to see it and try doing your elevator that way. The mod I posted above is the absolute easiest way to get a reliable elevator for a station in our games as fast as possible so we can move on to other things.

Note: The mod I shared is not intended to be a space elevator or be placed on moving vehicles. It's intended for stations. It's limited to 9 floors, 200 blocks maximum. It doesn't work in vehicles because it has loose parts that bang around go boom.

[Dan2D3D]

Hi, have you tried the example shared by SE Dev Aragath ?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1541738441

A player sent me one he made using 4X Aragath's example merged together and it was working very well when I tested :
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3254421903
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3254421752
Note
4x is heavier and needed upward thrusters to stop the elevator when going down because it was "crash landing" without thrusters.

[Captain Canard]

Originally posted by Jack Schitt:

Or do you want to build it yourself?

That's what makes the game fun IMO, solving problems ourselves. Now when things don't work out like I expect, due to bugs or unexpected behavior, then I'll start asking questions. I think the OP is like-minded.

[Jack Schitt]

Originally posted by Captain Canard:

Originally posted by Jack Schitt:

Or do you want to build it yourself?

That's what makes the game fun IMO, solving problems ourselves. Now when things don't work out like I expect, due to bugs or unexpected behavior, then I'll start asking questions. I think the OP is like-minded.

I kind of gathered that too which is why I said that the way I did. I'm the same way. I tried all kinds of designs with all kinds of different blocks for years trying to manually build an elevator. I got some of them to work but a large majority of them failed in some way or another. Mostly because the hardest part is getting them to be stable and reliable.

If the game had cables and ropes making an elevator would be so much easier to do!

[Captain Canard]

Originally posted by Jack Schitt:

I kind of gathered that too which is why I said that the way I did. I'm the same way. I tried all kinds of designs with all kinds of different blocks for years trying to manually build an elevator. I got some of them to work but a large majority of them failed in some way or another. Mostly because the hardest part is getting them to be stable and reliable.

If the game had cables and ropes making an elevator would be so much easier to do!

The best "higher than two stories" elevator I came up with uses pistons with mag plates to "walk" up or down a shaft, using wheels solely as guides. That or just have a thruster on the bottom to go up or down, lol.

[Jack Schitt]

Originally posted by Captain Canard:

Originally posted by Jack Schitt:

I kind of gathered that too which is why I said that the way I did. I'm the same way. I tried all kinds of designs with all kinds of different blocks for years trying to manually build an elevator. I got some of them to work but a large majority of them failed in some way or another. Mostly because the hardest part is getting them to be stable and reliable.

If the game had cables and ropes making an elevator would be so much easier to do!

The best "higher than two stories" elevator I came up with uses pistons with mag plates to "walk" up or down a shaft, using wheels solely as guides. That or just have a thruster on the bottom to go up or down, lol.

That was probably my best result trial too, pistons and magnetic plates that walked up a wall.
The hard part with that design for me was how to get it to stop on each floor at an exact place reliably, which was resolved with sensors.

[Soupster]

How tall is the shaft? I've had success with multistorey elevators using pistons, although it was in 0 G.

[Captain Canard]

Ironically many two-three story IRL elevators use basement pistons to raise and lower them (I've seen them first-hand).

[Oparator Stalker]

Originally posted by Dan2D3D:

Hi, have you tried the example shared by SE Dev Aragath ?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1541738441

Hey that looks like the Elevator from the wmv used at the menu screen...

[Oparator Stalker]

Maybe I made a mistake on that pic, but I am not sure, I thought I seen that unit on the menu wmv. I know the Corsair or what ever it is called, is...