Today I thought of a way to allow transfer of cargo via a rotator. I gave my idea a try tonight and had better success than I expected.
Normally you can't connect a rotator to a storage block, but what I did was use a rail basic to setup the connection and then logic to swap the basic for a rotator. Suprisingly the connection stays live.
This example demonstrates the storage transfer.
It's not a complete design, but you could complete it to be a full automated miner with a little bit more logic.
Put anything in the storage on the rotating docked entity and the storage on the host entity will pull it across.
- UPDATE -
2017-03-26
I loaded up my single player decided to tinker with this ship some more and found it had lost it's connection between the rail and storage. I ran more tests and found a few things;
As a work around you could create access ports to these rails and the storage transfer blocks. Keep them close so you're not space walking or whatever long distances.
Normally you can't connect a rotator to a storage block, but what I did was use a rail basic to setup the connection and then logic to swap the basic for a rotator. Suprisingly the connection stays live.
This example demonstrates the storage transfer.
It's not a complete design, but you could complete it to be a full automated miner with a little bit more logic.
Put anything in the storage on the rotating docked entity and the storage on the host entity will pull it across.
- UPDATE -
2017-03-26
I loaded up my single player decided to tinker with this ship some more and found it had lost it's connection between the rail and storage. I ran more tests and found a few things;
- I see that this happens intermittently, Can't see a definitive pattern yet.
- You can reconnect as long as you reset the rail back to a basic. Sometimes this doesn't work straight away.
- Once reconnected it works continuously for the time you are using the ship.
As a work around you could create access ports to these rails and the storage transfer blocks. Keep them close so you're not space walking or whatever long distances.
