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Helios MPD-2x4 Merge Pump Drive [superseded]

A simple and ridiculously overpowered "thruster" that works everywhere and for free. The most interesting thing about it is that it delivers a fixed acceleration independent from your ships mass, i.e. it gets more powerful the heavier your ship is. Also it does not apply a torque like grav drives do.

The MPD-2x4 Merge Pump Drive™ is a type of clang drive utilizing a very weird exploit with merge blocks. When two merge blocks, one on the main grid, one on a subgrid, are linked (they glow yellow) and you then push them apart laterally, they will stay linked and an acceleration is applied to your ship, depending on how fast they are pushed apart. Because the subgrid has to be mounted on rotors to archieve a small offset between the merge blocks, this force also pushes the ship to the side. This effect can be counteracted by simply adding a second mirrored one. Stacking 4 merge blocks, the maximum with one piston, quadruples the acceleration.

I got the idea for this drive from a reddit post, which used a rotating arm instead of pistons.

Building it in survival is kinda tricky, as you need to build the subgrids separately and then attach them to the rotors.


-Blocks: 85
-PCU: 2711
-Mass: 25.2 t
-Acceleration: 96.5 m/s² or ~10g (while pushing, half of that on average)


-Place it anywhere on your ship (leave space for the extending pistons)
-To toggle it on and off simply trigger the timer block (called "Timer Block Merge-Pump-Drive")


-When mounting several on the same ship, any single timer will toggle all drives
-Want a continuous drive? Place one, trigger timer twice, place second one and your good to go
-You can remove the casing, but don't place any full blocks above and below the middle merge blocks