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Esteemed-Innovation / Esteemed-Innovation

The Esteemed Innovation mod for Minecraft focused around steam power tech and innovative content. Formerly known as Flaxbeard's Steam Power.
https://modrinth.com/mod/flaxbeards-steam-power
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
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Item Transport solution #310

Open elifoster opened 9 years ago

elifoster commented 9 years ago

Overhead conveyer belts that carry robotic arms to carry individual stacks of items. The robotic arm will slide along the conveyer belt until it reaches the end, then it will drop the stack in the ending container. An item will be used to set the start and end containers for the arm, like the item that does so with the Item Mortar.

Flaxbeard commented 8 years ago

Misc ideas:

Pneumatic tubes, perhaps use capsules to encase items and/or liquids, steam shoots them around. Likely difficult to implement into current pipes due to the way that pressure works, but maybe.

Conveyors, low steam cost but mostly horizontal. Rail-like inclines.

Divineaspect commented 8 years ago

Feedback on Top Idea: Brass tracks which could also be used by minecarts, instead of conveyor belts would fit more with vanilla, and thus with other cool mods. It also opens the door for steam powered booster tracks, and track limited (or minecart riding) mobs whenever automatons/robots happen.

Feedback on Flaxbeard's response: Pneumatic tubes, could they be fit into the same block as a steam pipe? ala EnderIO? If not, how is this any different from just setting up tubes of whole glass blocks and using fans and vacuumes.

Horizontal conveyors are commonly done, if you added the ability to process blocks while on them, such as the Smashers smashing them, I think that would be very madscience / steampunk.

Flaxbeard commented 8 years ago

@Divineaspect I was hoping they would function in existing steam pipes though that may be difficult. Valve pipes etc would be that much more useful - just pressurize one end with a boiler, flip open a valve pipe leading to the destination, steam pushes item to the end.

At the robot arms idea - this is somewhat what I was thinking for farm automation, overhead monorails that could be used for various machines (though not transport as it would be expensive).

Divineaspect commented 8 years ago

well presuming capsules and existing tubes, what about creating sending and destination stations which hook up inline with pipes, and just teleport the items for Steam based on distance with dramatic clanky noises? Not tracking the location of the items path should make it less system resource intensive, and turns the opaque steam pipes from a liability in verisimilitude, to an asset.

Flaxbeard commented 8 years ago

That could work, yeah. How do we determine the direction of steam flow in a system, however? That's going to be difficult.

justicesays commented 8 years ago

Do we need to determine a "steam direction"? I would have the sending station induce an "overpressure wave" in the steam pipe, and the item gets pushed along with that (maybe in one of the capsules used to preserve items, or a similar capsule without the "no-despawn" , which would have to be supplied and sent back along a return route). You can configure the sending station to use a certain amount of overpressure, which corresponds to the distance you want the item to go, but if you set it too high and the ambient steam+overpressure is too high then the pipe bursts. The "pressure" sets how many stages to count along the pipe network looking for receiving stations. There are a few considerations to handle here 1) If the item encounters a junction, it favours going straight, otherwise it turns randomly (but cant go back the same way it entered the junction) 2) If it encounters an open (leaking) pipe it drops as an entity (maybe in a capsule, but this runs the risk of a big buildup of entities if something goes wrong!) 3) If it runs out of distance (due to looping or too long a path) there are a number of things you could do. a) small Steam explosion at that point on the network and item drops b) Item "jams" inside the pipe/block it was passing in, sat in a special one item inventory and prevents steam/objects passing through until removed (with a maintenance tool perhaps). c) as a) but attempts to find a nearby pipe/burst disk rather than affecting tanks/blocks with the explosion. d) Item melted (destroyed) by prolonged exposure to high pressure steam. 4) If you process all instances of the senders step wise in a loop you could detect if items "collided" in the pipes (multiple senders) , and do 3a or 3b etc. with both items. 5) on reaching a receiving station the item is pulled out, if the receiving station is full then either 2 or 3 could be applied. If you were using capsules that have to be sent back, you would have to figure out how to get those into both the capsule and the sending slots of the sending station (and out of the receiving station on a different path to the items that were sent).

The processing can be split over several ticks if necessary by having the steam build up for the overpressure wave, naturally this takes longer for a higher pressure (longer distance)

elifoster commented 7 years ago

(From google documents)

Pneumatic Item pipes

These wonders of glass (or something else that is opaque, cannot be copper or iron since those are already fluid pipes) send items shooting around. On their own, they connect to hoppers, and can only send items to outputs which are not higher then they appear.

To send pipes upwards, impellers are required, just as they are with fluid pipes.

Item pipes facing down with no other route or a block blocking the path will drop items, like a dropper

Pneumatic Item Station

When connected to the item pipes an item station allows you to use a redstone pulse to send an item to another station at the cost of steam from this station. Stations recieving redstone signals at the time a package is sent are bypassed by the package.