Best way to duplicate redpower machinery (frames and motors)?

[wolvenmoon]

I'm working on airship engines on my server. and they're, of course, fairly complex. Stacking a ton of inchworm engines into a small box is rather difficult. One of the things I want to be able to do is copy and paste the engines - via legitimate means or otherwise - to tweak them and compare changes, as well as rapidly prototype different airships.

I also sort of want to be able to do things like teleport airships into mystcraft worlds and things like that. Unfortunately, worldedit isn't copying redpower machinery correctly, it screws up rotation and last time I tested it with frames (on a Tekkit lite server), it ignored the frames entirely.

What's the easiest way to duplicate redpower machinery, barring by hand?

If there's no easy way to do an entire airship, I want to at least get the engines copied. Are there any blocks that a turtle can not place? Are turtles able to place redpower wiring?

 

[wolvenmoon]

I keep trying to find this through Google...and coming back to my own thread. Anyone have an answer?

 

[Peppe]

Turtles and deployers always place in the same direction, so they won't be able to copy something easily. Buildcraft used to have a machine to save a blueprint of any area and then deploy it again. Believe it was disabled because it could duplicate inventories.

For your engines what are you looking to do?

I don't know about copying, but rather than the most compact design I usually strike a balance and keep the engine placement fairly simple. Once you have placed them enough you get used to what the opposite side of the arrow looks like and what direction it will go when you can see the meter looking side.

Also for testing I would keep it extra simple and use only the visible sides of the motors.

 

[wolvenmoon]

On the engines, I'm looking to get a compact, omnidirectional* engine that I can use for pretty much any application. I have one that fits in a 4x4x5 area sans the wireless controls, but it still takes a lot of time to assemble.

I found the builder and thought my problem was solved. Apparently it's causing massive world corruption, rather than just duplicating inventories. If it's the latter case, I don't quite care if it can duplicate inventories - I run a small private server and would rather save the time!

 

[dlord]

Only thing I can think of is programming a turtle to build it with your materials.

You may still need to reorient the frame motors though, as misc peripherals don't have an option to combine a screwdriver with a turtle. But at least you can automate the building process, which is tedious.

 

[wolvenmoon]

Has anyone already made a program that would do this? Maybe a turtle program that, say, has one turtle tearing the machine up, then other turtles, piece by piece, placing down whatever block the other turtle just broke?

My current plan was to do something extreme, like make a redpower 2 frame conveyor belt, divide whichever engine design I ended up going for, into slices, then automatically building the slices using RP2 deployers and storing them in a warehouse, and manually adding in microblocks and rotations. But, that's going to require AE to manage keeping everything supplied.

 

[Fuzzlewhumper]

Well, not making one myself, but - it could be done.

Just with a basic turtle, a miner, a generator, coal, drill, od scanner, and mining pipe (oh and a chest).

The drill can be inserted right after placing the miner
The pipe can be inserted through bottom
And heading to the opposite side of the driller, the od-scaner goes in.
Then backing up one step placing a generator and then putting the turtle under the generator and placing coal.
At that point, the miner just needs a chest to put the items in (turtle could place that).

Now for the problems.
Can it tell when the miner is mining?
Well, with the turtle under the generator feeding it charcoal, if you leave a mining pipe in its inventory, it can compare to see if there is still a pipe in front of it. So it can.
Can it tell when the miner is at bedrock? Hmm, well, I don't think the miner retracts automatically, so how did direwolf20 check for that? I've never watched his video on this, so I'd recommend checking out his solution to that one. Though, it may be something like have another turtle on top of the miner (need two turtles now unless ya want to have 1 running back and forth to check) have it try to feed pipes into the top of the miner. If it does, then you know it's still digging down. Check again in 60 seconds or so (maybe longer or shorter based on what you power the miner with). But as soon as it doesn't take more pipe, that's when it's time to suck out the pipe and wait for it to draw the drill back up.

Then dismantle everything, and move x number of blocks forward and repeat the process.

Probably instead of the generator, thermal generator and lava or possibly mfe (if you use misc perf and use a crescent wrench turtle, but then you'd definitely need two turtles - one with a pickaxe to break stuff, and the other with the wrench). Probably with wireless modems so they can talk to each other, and probably would want to have it save its state to disk in case of a server fail or client crash.

It's possible ... Someone may even be writing it this very moment.

P.S. - MFE is way out, ... BOOM
So, bat box + re-batteries if ya wanna do that instead ... though, the coal test I ran using a generator was 64 coal got me down to y 32 from y 77. So, two stacks using the 5x5 scanner (od scanner) would be adequate.

 

[wolvenmoon]

I'm slightly confused. We're on about redpower frame contraptions, not IC2 miners, here! Though we're looking at using turtles to duplicate redpower machines.

 

[Fuzzlewhumper]

Oh my bad, I actually went beyond the frame + miner thingy direwolf20 did.

So, someone wants a turtle program capable of duplicating their whole frame contraption over and over? Gads.

Heh, makes me wonder if ya can have two mining turtles with 0 fuel. One destroys the other and places it in front and that one in turn, turns around destroys the turtle and turns back to place it ahead. On and on and on. Inch worming turtles.

But that wouldn't be very useful in itself. Ya would probably want it to do stuff too. Biggest thing to consider is how the turtle would place a block and then proceed to place items into the block it placed. As with the miner in my example, ya have to dance around it to the different sides to fill it with the stuff it needs.

Oh, a turtle can place an engine (let's say stirling), place coal in it, and while it can place a lever it can't flip the lever ... at least I don't think it can. So the turtle would need to place a redstone torch or just emit a redstone signal of its own to activate the engine.

I probably still don't understand what your doing though. Sigh. Was fun playing with my turtle today though.

 

[Peppe]

Oh my bad, I actually went beyond the frame + miner thingy direwolf20 did.

So, someone wants a turtle program capable of duplicating their whole frame contraption over and over? Gads.

Heh, makes me wonder if ya can have two mining turtles with 0 fuel. One destroys the other and places it in front and that one in turn, turns around destroys the turtle and turns back to place it ahead. On and on and on. Inch worming turtles.

But that wouldn't be very useful in itself. Ya would probably want it to do stuff too. Biggest thing to consider is how the turtle would place a block and then proceed to place items into the block it placed. As with the miner in my example, ya have to dance around it to the different sides to fill it with the stuff it needs.

Oh, a turtle can place an engine (let's say stirling), place coal in it, and while it can place a lever it can't flip the lever ... at least I don't think it can. So the turtle would need to place a redstone torch or just emit a redstone signal of its own to activate the engine.

I probably still don't understand what your doing though. Sigh. Was fun playing with my turtle today though.

You are talking about totally different contraptions...

OP was asking about frames and frame motors -- nothing about mining or direwold20 inspired machines. He wants to design an 'engine' -- 6 way frame motor in one place, save the design and then deploy it/copy of it wherever he needs it.

 

[wolvenmoon]

What Peppe said! Deploy/copy it wherever I need it! Because my airships will be going into dangerous mystcraft ages and not being equipped with large numbers of nukes to rain death upon other players which may occasionally destroy the airship.

 

[Fuzzlewhumper]

Now I know how all those scientists felt when told to make the A-Bomb.

 

[NyanChicken]

Step 1: Open Canvas Bag
Step 2: Put Frames in bag
Step 3: Make tons of them