Logic-charged jump drive problems

    Valiant70

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    I was trying to create a warp cruise feature for a ship so my fingers wouldn't get tired on long FTL voyages, but I can't figure out how to charge the drive at a normal rate. Any clock I connect it to charges it obscenely slowly. Is there a secret to this?
     
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    Not that I know of. Auto-charging does the equivalent of a single mouse click every 0.5 seconds.
    As I recall, someone came up with a way to overclock the logic, but I'm not sure that would be useful in this case.
    I would be happy if some one posts something proving me wrong.
     
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    Hey Valiant,

    Try using a ship core propelled through area triggers. I've tried it and it's faster than a clock.
     
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    Jaaskinal's publically-available logic drive is a pretty serviceable example of a logic drive done properly. Actually reaching the same charge rate as a manual jump drive is very challenging, but this model is reasonably fast, compact, and works well for the stated purpose of long FTL voyages (as does any competently-built chain drive). The key is rail clocks and some cunning usage of flip-flops. The finer points of such a clock go over my head, though.

    These days jump drives have an internal cooldown which theoretically limits the logic charge rate to about the same speed as manual charging, but reaching the maximum frequency has eluded all designs that I've seen. Charge speed isn't a big deal for current-day logic drives anyway: the ease with which they're inhibited rules out combat use, so they are relegated to long-distance travel at high speeds (as they should be). Furthermore, any charge time for long-distance travel can be ruled out by logic which charges the drive while docked to a station.

    Hope this helps somewhat.
     

    alterintel

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    I put together a short 12 minute youtube video going over some of the nuances clocks for chain drives here
    I've since figure out how to get the charge time down to 52 seconds, and I show off a couple of other ideas to.
    you can download the chain drive that Jaaskinal made here]

    Good Luck :)
     
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    I tried to replicate your results with Jaaskinal's chain drive but it always took more than 3 minutes to charge, the more test clocks I added to my test ship the longer it took. After doing some reading of the WIKI I came to understand the mass of the ship including docked entities affects charge time. On a large enough ship the 27 jump drives of version 1 may not be enough to have a continuous jump capability.
     

    Ithirahad

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    Skaire, remember that the drive was created before they nerfed chain drives so that they can't charge incredibly fast. You won't be able to achieve the old charge times, but I suppose you can always just hook up more modules to all the computers.
     
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    I tried to replicate your results with Jaaskinal's chain drive but it always took more than 3 minutes to charge, the more test clocks I added to my test ship the longer it took. After doing some reading of the WIKI I came to understand the mass of the ship including docked entities affects charge time. On a large enough ship the 27 jump drives of version 1 may not be enough to have a continuous jump capability.
    The thing is, there's a definitive maximum charge time for a 1-module jump drive on an arbitrarily large ship, and it gradually approaches 46 seconds as mass increases. It can't surpass that approximate point, though, due to how the equations work. This is one of the reasons that chain drives work so well, in fact; they offer significant travel speeds to ships that would not ordinarily be able to achieve such without a huge number of modules.

    As to why Jaaskinal's drive isn't performing to expectations, I'm uncertain. Is your power regen adequate? I don't remember how much it drains, but it is possibly suffering repeated outages. Same thing for total power capacity. Beyond that, I'm afraid I can't help, as I lack the time or energy to properly investigate.
     
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    Personally I shall rue the day that Auto-charged jump-drives become the least bit serviceable. The whole point of jump-drives to me has been that one MUST drop-tools on clicking other things to make it charge. Effectively a ship has to disengage (at least where it's main weapons are concerned) so it can charge the drives, doubly so if an interdiction field is going strong and draining the system at the same time.

    It means you can only charge one at a time, as well. Convenient as some things may be, they interfere with other elements of game-play, and I would not wish anyone to have to write exceptions for these conflicting interests.
     

    Atheu

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    I have a very basic circuit for a logic (chain) drive with a built-in redundancy/anti-lag function. Fairly easy to make, everything is controlled by the inner ship remote. (the spare rotator on the side, controls the rail-clock) (Can be compacted down more than it is in the image I have it expanded to show how the circuitry is linked)



    EDIT: I'm not all for the large drives, due to the size and space they take up, I can easily make something that can fit within the same space, and be able to travel a lot further, at the expense of a little charge time. Plus if the core pops off the drive still works. All you have to do is replace the core when you get to where you are going.
     
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    I have a very basic circuit for a logic (chain) drive with a built-in redundancy/anti-lag function. Fairly easy to make, everything is controlled by the inner ship remote. (the spare rotator on the side, controls the rail-clock) (Can be compacted down more than it is in the image I have it expanded to show how the circuitry is linked)
    Well, I'm quite useless at logic, so I tried to set this up as a test, but although I get to were it states jumpdrive not charged, that's all what happens. ;)
    What am I missing here? Could you draw some arrows on the links? Maybe I've hooked it up wrong...

    Greets,

    Jan
     
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    I have a very basic circuit for a logic (chain) drive with a built-in redundancy/anti-lag function. Fairly easy to make, everything is controlled by the inner ship remote. (the spare rotator on the side, controls the rail-clock) (Can be compacted down more than it is in the image I have it expanded to show how the circuitry is linked)

    (image snipped)

    EDIT: I'm not all for the large drives, due to the size and space they take up, I can easily make something that can fit within the same space, and be able to travel a lot further, at the expense of a little charge time. Plus if the core pops off the drive still works. All you have to do is replace the core when you get to where you are going.
    Could you upload that to community content as shown so we can BP build it and see how the logic links
     

    Jaaskinal

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    Well, I'm quite useless at logic, so I tried to set this up as a test, but although I get to were it states jumpdrive not charged, that's all what happens. ;)
    What am I missing here? Could you draw some arrows on the links? Maybe I've hooked it up wrong...

    Greets,

    Jan
    If it says that, you're actually doing it right. The "Jumpdrive not charged, hold left click to charge" message means that some jumpdrive on your ship had charge added to it. Now, it takes something like 1,500 charges for a single block. It looks like the clock on Atheu's contraption is ~2-3Hz, meaning it'll take 500-750 (8-12 minutes) seconds to charge a single block jump drive.
     
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    Personally I shall rue the day that Auto-charged jump-drives become the least bit serviceable. The whole point of jump-drives to me has been that one MUST drop-tools on clicking other things to make it charge. Effectively a ship has to disengage (at least where it's main weapons are concerned) so it can charge the drives, doubly so if an interdiction field is going strong and draining the system at the same time.

    It means you can only charge one at a time, as well. Convenient as some things may be, they interfere with other elements of game-play, and I would not wish anyone to have to write exceptions for these conflicting interests.
    Unfortunately for you, then, logic-drives are already serviceable. Hell, they're even balanced at this point in time. Now that the "overclocking" exploit is fixed, they can't charge faster than is manually possible, and they're very easy to inhibit with even the smallest of systems (2 blocks will out-drain most logic-drives). Logic-drives, in their current state, are simply a convenient system for shortening travel times, and they are well-publicized enough that everyone can benefit from this, if they wish to. Personally, I find this current state quite civilized. Fast-travel doesn't cause any harm, and, in fact, serves to make conflict or other player interaction more readily possible.

    EDIT: I'm not all for the large drives, due to the size and space they take up, I can easily make something that can fit within the same space, and be able to travel a lot further, at the expense of a little charge time. Plus if the core pops off the drive still works. All you have to do is replace the core when you get to where you are going.
    "Able to travel a lot further" is not true. Just about any well-built logic drive is able to travel continuously once initial charging is complete, assuming sufficient power generation. For yours to travel constantly, it would require a significant number of jump drives attached to the output; this number probably brings it close to, or greater than, the size of a compact and fast-clocked model such as Jaaskinal's own.

    As to anti-lag, it's fairly easy to hook an unstable 0.5 second clock into a circuit which restarts the rail clock if it is not working. That will cause it to be on whenever the sector is loaded, and that's about all there is to do in terms of "anti-lag"; the rest will sort itself out whenever the server stops shitting itself.

    Admittedly most rail-clocked logic-drives won't continue functioning if the core is shot off, but that's a fairly simple indicator that one is in combat, and a logic-drive won't get you out of combat anyway, if the enemy bothered to bring any sort of inhibitor at all.
     

    Master_Artificer

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    Aka logic drives currently are great for civilian vessels, but because of how easily neutered they are, fair poorly as the main drives of warships.
     
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    If it says that, you're actually doing it right. The "Jumpdrive not charged, hold left click to charge" message means that some jumpdrive on your ship had charge added to it. Now, it takes something like 1,500 charges for a single block. It looks like the clock on Atheu's contraption is ~2-3Hz, meaning it'll take 500-750 (8-12 minutes) seconds to charge a single block jump drive.
    Well, I realized that later after downloading, if I remember correct, your small chain jump drive *.sment from the community content page. ;)
    And yes Atheu's clock has a 'normal', or default speed. I like how that small chain jump drive has a nice compact design including a speed up clock for faster loading of the jump computers.

    Greets,

    Jan