Made a Retractable Turret covered behind a door

[JinM]

Do you guys know The Expanse, a tv-series from 2015? There was an amazing scene at the end of s01e04, where the one guy activates the turrets of the fighter. And then pew pew pew all the the baddies get wrecked in the hangar where the fighter just wants to take off. I wanted to have exactly this machineguns rising out of my ship. So thats my first proof of concept I worked on for like 3 hours now.

The AI activates after the turret is fully extended and does not move before, and when it has moved back into the ship again the doors closes and the turret gets "deactivated" again (via the door blocks and remote controled logic, look here if interested: How to toggle a turret on or off via remote - my solution)

attention, big gif:

Spoiler

reference pictures:

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Pictures of the turret:

 

[terra mining corp.]

very nice design

 

[Calhoun]

Hey that's my gimmick!

 

[JinM]

Well then link that for reference, so everyone can compare each others technologies, learn and improve. Your signature might change over time:
Eternal Vigilance Shipyards, 5th post

Anyone else have some nice retractable turrets?

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I made one way back when rails were still in development. I have plans to do more with this design, I want to make a ship that has only retractable turrets but I am kind of waiting until we get the ability to auto center them.

Spoiler

 

[alterintel]

I made one way back when rails were still in development. I have plans to do more with this design, I want to make a ship that has only retractable turrets but I am kind of waiting until we get the ability to auto center them.

Spoiler

And the ability to transfer moving entities from one entity to another would be icing on the cake.

 

[Calhoun]

And the ability to transfer moving entities from one entity to another would be icing on the cake.

Indeed. I want this for my station.

 

[JinM]

And the ability to transfer moving entities from one entity to another would be icing on the cake.

Are you sure you can't do that allready with pickup points? It's a radius of 1.5 isn't that enough? Just by letting them slide from one rail to the other.

I made one way back when rails were still in development. I have plans to do more with this design, I want to make a ship that has only retractable turrets but I am kind of waiting until we get the ability to auto center them.

But that means you have to wait like at least 3 months or even more. I would not wait if I had a nice idea.

 

[hzzzln]

And the ability to transfer moving entities from one entity to another would be icing on the cake.

And the "create docking from blueprint" button.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

Are you sure you can't do that allready with pickup points? It's a radius of 1.5 isn't that enough? Just by letting them slide from one rail to the other.

The big problem with that, is it isn't a smooth transition. At all.
Seriously, if you haven't done so yet, ride in a pod using such a transition. Do it more than once even.
And then do it on a server under even a little bit of load. (y'know, there be a major battle going on somewhere else in the galaxy)

They can be used, and I'm certainly trying to use them when it'd make sense to do so, but you cannot rely on the first rail "releasing" it's cargo in the same direction each time, even when the cargo is an identical clone of the last cargo.
(minor issue: this means you must have "extra" void-space around the transition, so the cargo won't clip through the walls. of course, it will eventually release so wrongly that it clips into the rail it just released from)
Oh, and if you're really un-lucky, the cargo won't drift away at all, and will just clog the system.

(and pray to god you aren't moving when your cargo needs to transfer to the second rail, it will screw up, and fly off into space)

The next big problem comes from how the game imposes that 4 second delay before re-docking. That delay isn't supposed to matter when the rail is what releases the cargo (as opposed to the cargo releasing itself by firing it's docker) and yet it somehow does actually matter.
(cargo keeps failing to catch on the pickup point, even when the rail properly releases it, and the cargo's docker flies directly through the pickup block)

And don't even think of using shootout rails to "make it" release in the same way every time, that absolutely catches the 4 second re-dock delay, so you'd need about 100~ish meters before the pickup point.
(it is a good idea for multi-section stations though, or even multiple stations "aligned" well enough)


All those cons are why, on my Carrier ship, I'll be faking cross-entity transfers, via unrelenting abuse of the green rail, and a logic room sufficiently large as to make the entire rest of the build seem simple.