An "Age of Engineering" Space Station

Ieldra

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Apr 25, 2014
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This is a mobile space station I made while playing the "Age of Engineering" modpack. This was possible thanks to Advanced Rocketry, and it was something I've thought to build one day ever since the first space-based mod came out for Minecraft. This post will contain some first impressions, more screenshots with details will come in further posts. I'll also add commentary.

Screenshots are hidden in spoiler tags for those with slow connections.

A first impression: the station consists of seven connected spheres, of which five are arranged in a wheel-like pattern. There is a large sphere containing an artificial ecology (which might need some more work) and another medium-sized sphere below I had to add because I needed more space. There is also an additional smaller sphere for my personal quarters.
Since this station is mobile and has a warp drive (research Advanced Rocketry for details), I thought it might need a shield to protect it against meteorites while travelling. That's what the large green shield is for.
603_Panorama1.jpg

The view from below:
603_Panorama2.jpg

and from above so one can see the structure:
603_FromAbove.jpg

And an aft-front view:
603_Panorama3.jpg

The station has many solar panels of different kinds (=mods) to supply it with basic power (there's also a fusion reactor for high-performance tasks like duplicating items with the Atomic Multiplier from the Calculator mod, which you'll see later):
603_Solars.jpg

This part contains the quarters (sorry for the texture bug, the Invictus Universal Modded resource pack has had this bug for months) and the ET nanobot beacon which makes it possible for me to fly without any equipment and continually regeneration health. It also makes it so I don't have to eat.
603_Front.jpg

The view from the shield. Since redstone logic looks out of place here, I just connected the power here, and added a switch to a power cell further back the chain:
603_Shield.jpg

This part has two of the mining machiness which play a big part in making the station independent from planetary resources. The void resource miners makes many different non-ore blocks, and the void ore miner in the second shot makes ore blocks. The orbital laser drill from Advanced Rocketry (the thing with the transceivers, I clad it in steel sheetmetal to make the surrouning logistics look less odd) is not independent from planets, but it mines what is there from up here, so that I don't need to leave the station.
Also in this shot: the rocket I must use should I want to visit a planet or moon I haven't visited before (repeated visits go by teleport), and an observatory, both from Advanced Rocketry. I thought a space-based observatory would be good idea, but the mod maker didn't take that possibility into account: since it is never night out here, the observatory never opens.
603_Front2.jpg

603_Miner.jpg

This is what I call the EcoSphere. I put some plants and animals around an artificial lake in here and attempted to make it look somewhat natural, in reminiscence of the old SF classic "Silent Running" from 1972. Unfortunately, the ocelots (I have a spawner for them, just like for almost everything else) keep dying on me.
The thermal evaporation towers might look a little out of place, but I need them to make fusion fuel.
603_Ecodome.jpg

This spartan-looking room is the "bridge", if you can call it that. You're seeing the warp core and the warp controller as well as an RFTools screen that controls the shield. It also provides a good view of the station since it's located in a separate dome on top of the central sphere.
603_CoreBridge.jpg

A space station needs a name. I thought this sounded nice. The motto is adapted from a commentary by Johannes Kepler on Galilei's "Nuncius Sidereus", in which he envisioned space travel as early as 1610. The translation is "I do not fear the vast emptiness", as Kepler envisioned there would be people of that kind as soon as ships existed "suitable for the winds of the heavens".
603_Dome1Name.jpg

Some commentary on how this was built:

99% of this station were built without using the creative powers you acquire at the end of the "Age of Engineering" pack, and with one exception (the IC2 molecular transformer is powered by three quantum generators) its continued operation does not depend on such powers. My goal was to build a station that's as independent from planetary resources as it's possible to be with the rules of the pack without using those creative powers, too, and I think I have succeeded rather well. The only thing I can think of I can't acquire more of without leaving the station is Forestry bees of pristine stock.

For full disclosure, I'll mention a few cheats and some changes I made to the pack:

(1) I cheated with bees. I have little patience with RNG troubles and thus bee breeding by vanilla Forestry rules is so utterly non-enjoyable for me that I cheated, first by cheating some mutating frames in and later by adding Gendustry. Also, while it *may* be possible to run bees from different biomes on my station in alvearies (no idea if the climate changer blocks give you enough variety), it would've taken up more space than I was prepared to spend just for bees.
(2) The spheres the station is made of were built by the RFTools builder, but the shield couldn't have been since at least in RFTools 5.93, which is in the pack, the builder can't make domes flipped by 90 degrees into the vertical, and the attempt to upgrade RFTools resulted in crashes on world loading. So at some point, I added OpenBlocks for its building guide, made the flipped dome of shield blocks, and removed OpenBlocks again.
(3) In its config, I set Advanced Rocketry's method of calculating vacuum containment to 3 (="volumetric/experimental multithreaded") and increased the radius to 64. There have been no adverse effects from that. The experimental method appears to be working well.
(4) After technically finishing the pack (by acquiring the required creative power, liquid, gas and item elements), I enabled Joule/RF conversion. I wanted to include a Mekanism fusion reactor, and there would be no point in building it if it couldn't output as RF since that large amounts of Joules are never needed.

Screenshots with more details will be forthcoming. I'm also open to questions and comments.
 
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Ieldra

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Apr 25, 2014
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Some impressions of the "autocrafting sphere".

This is my main autocrafting setup - these are mainly setups for one-block machines, but it's probably the biggest AE2 machine processing setup I ever made. This room alone uses up more than 64 channels. Also the draconic crystal at the ceiling serves 39 machines - I actually needed the draconic version here - and that's without the Mekanism and IC2 machines. A handful of of the "interfaces", especially on the Mekanism machines, are actually conduit facades. I thought things looked better that way.
603_Dome1TopOverview.jpg

This facility makes quantum-entangled singularities (thanks to RFTools Control autocrafting these was not so hard) and the various pure crystals required by AE2.
603_Dome1Singularity.jpg

These drives are mainly filled with 1k-cells for miscellaneous stuff. Mass storage is done with drawers. Behind that, the two automated Atomic Calculators in their docking stations exist mainly to make End Diamonds. The conductor mast does work in space, oddly enough.
603_Dome1Drives.jpg

There are many machines that require power served by the Draconic wireless crystal...
603_Dome1Powerlines.jpg

...but these Atomic Multipliers have their own dedicated crystal connections under the floor. The wireless crystal doesn't have enough throughput to resupply them with power as fast as they use it up. The two interfaces between them export Calculator circuits. You can't pipe items to be duplicated in the Multipliers, but you can pipe in the circuits they use up. Counting filters make sure that one circuit per type is used, so you won't run out of any single type easily.
603_Dome1AtomicM.jpg

In the lower half of the sphere, this is my AE2 computation centre. You are seeing the controller setup in the centre, behind that the extra giant crafting cpu I made for the creative stuff, and left and right 32 molecular assemblers connected to 64 interfaces. Almost all of the interfaces are full. I think I may have around 15 empty spaces for autocrafting recipes left.
603_Dome1CompCentre.jpg

The controller. Two separate controllers control the backbone network and the main network, connected by a quartz fibre so that they can both draw power from the same source, but remain separate regarding the data as required. The backbone network transports the channels of the main network through P2P tunnels, so I need only one cable that connects the different domes. The cables of the main network are color-codes so that I can find their respective counterparts at the other end more easily. This controller setup can provide 512 channels. At the moment, about 160 of them are used.
603_Dome1Controller1.jpg

I got annoyed with the slow speed of the alloy furnaces, since in AoE you need veritable shitloads of EnderIO alloys. So I made this setup of 32 perfectly (!) synchronized alloy furnaces. The secret to perfect synchronization is counting item filters (every furnace gets a one-recipe set of ingredients per type) batch processing, (every AE2 recipe pattern is set to make 32 recipes of alloy ingots instead of one) and speed upgrades (you need enough speed upgrades that the conduit draws 32 items together out of the crate below the interface. Because of the counting filter, it will then equally distribute them to the furnaces in one action). The limits of the setup: The filters have only 10 spaces, so the number of recipes in one of this 32-furnace setups is limited to recipes using 10 ingredients between them. It is possible for recipes to share ingredients, but not in different numbers. So I can make pulsating iron, electrical steel and conductive iron since they both need one iron, but not stainless steel since that requires 3 iron per recipe. I'd need another setup of this kind for that, but fortunately I don't need the excluded items in nearly the same quantities.
603_Dome1Alloying.jpg

This complicated-looking setup was used to make the five gases required for the creative gas tank. It is now retired since I have a few creative gas tanks stored just in case, but my station functions well without them.
603_Dome1Gases.jpg

The Tech Reborn fusion reactor I needed to make the helium plasma that went into....uh, I actually forgot, but it was important enough to invest quite a bit of work. Unfortunately the reactor is bugged and can't serve as an energy source. In the background the Rotary Condensentrators that make lithium gas from the liquid output by the thermal evaporation plants attached to the the Eco-Dome. Transport is by Mekanism's Quantum-Entangloporter. Normally, I would use dimensional transceivers in preference since the 'porters are significantly slower *and* harder to make (not by much, but they need transceivers as ingredients in AoE), but I had to transport gases here.
603_Dome1Fusion.jpg

Here's the power core with the attached pylons. There's one power line (done by draconic crystal) per sphere that goes through the glass shafts above the ceilings of the corridors made up by the station's "spokes".
603_CorePowerOut.jpg

There's still a bit more to come for those who might be interested...
 
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Tehrsbash

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What is that metallic block you're using for the majority of the base? It looks awesome
 

Ldog

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Jul 29, 2019
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Wow! This makes me want to give Advanced Rocketry a (more serious) try. Very cool.