Rocket Refueling Automation

[playerthesecond]

Did some some liquid oxygen refueling automation based on RS-trigger counter schema

Command capsule sends 0101 during lauch/landing sequence to automate bunker doors (actually 1010 but who cares)

To refuel rocket with liquid oxygen it should be in landed stance only. so this schema transclates 01010101... to 00010001... on the output.

I hope it'll be useful for everyone.

 

 

[AMBLCO]

Good job for doing the automation but I think that you could make it more compact if you are using bunker doors to cover your rocket by using a buffer gate linked to the automation for the doors. If you aren't using bunker doors you aren't using any drywall which means you can just use a pipe with lox going over the input for the fuel, pump lox and then let it go back in the tank. At this point in the game you have all the power you want so a continuous 240w doesn't matter.

[playerthesecond]

240W is matter, because my aim is to make my base as autonomous as possible.  and if i going to pump lox continously, i will loose much more due to heat loss in ceramic pipes in some places,  i cannot  get rid of this factor completely.

[FenrirZeroZero]

8 hours ago, playerthesecond said:

240W is matter, because my aim is to make my base as autonomous as possible.  and if i going to pump lox continously, i will loose much more due to heat loss in ceramic pipes in some places,  i cannot  get rid of this factor completely.

You can with isulation instead of ceramic

[biopon]

5 minutes ago, FenrirZeroZero said:

You can with isulation instead of ceramic

You can with igneous too, at least for LOX. And ceramics works the same way for H2.

Make an infinite fuel loop. No need to re-pump it. This was part of my ghetto LOX box for petrol rockets:

Use radiant pipes inside the box and just put the pump output on it.

At the rocket, do this:

Ignore all the petrol pipes. The LOX hits the oxidizer tank intake and loops around to go back to the box to be cooled back to a safe temp.

Zero need for complex automation or expensive materials. And the supercoolant AT (which barely runs) only costs 100-120W to operate if you cool it with a turbine at 200C. It's cheaper than a pump.

Use ceramics if you want but for LOX it's not really needed, unless you get into some hot areas with the pipes. TBH I ran igneous through 3 rocket bays like that and never had pipe damage even during takeoffs and landings.

For the hydrogen rockets I did away with the loop and just ran insulation, but you can totally keep it simple with ghetto materials if you want to.

Not that there's no fun in making complex automation.

 

[FenrirZeroZero]

Also a good way. I use Isulation for the last pipe segment from my liquid tank to the rocket.

That way i don't even need loops. (I also reuse the co2 from the rockets so i have to shield the lox anyway)

[DRAKCORE]

Could save on a lot of insulated or ceramic pipes but just limiting the liquids to 1L or less so heat won't be a issue, if you can wait a little longer to refuel the rockets. Could also automate refueling of specific rockets with a hydro sensor, memory toggle and a few and gates. If over x stop pumping into the room, pump into rocket when it is present, and resets when rocket is no longer present or is detected when coming back.

[Craigjw]

I really don't like looping my fuel constantly. so I have made all of the complex automation for you.

Here is a simpler auto-refuel automation, this requires that the fuel is looped back to the tank.  If there is a meteor shower, it won't launch.

The Scanner signal is negated, when the ship lands, an ON-to-OFF edge is detected, which starts the refuelling.  This does not detect an OFF-to-ON signal edge during take-off. 

This works, because the not gate is affected before the and gate and therefore the AND gate fires when the signal changes from on-to-off, but not the converse.

The edge signal sets a toggle, initialising fuel transfer, when the rockets are full, the fuel returns to the tank and is detected by the element sensor, which resets the toggle.  The NOT signal on the reset just ensures that the toggle state is consistent when another rocket also sets the refuel signal.

 

If you are refuelling multiple rockets, just use this setup leading into the toggle input, similar in configuration to what I have used on the left side logic.

Here is my auto take-off & landing automation.

Right side

Left side

]

The auto-launch enable/disable is there to disable takeoff if the rocket is being modified.  The bunker doors override ensures that the bunker doors won't open, note that this does not stop the rocket launching when this switch is set to off.

The launch filter is set to how long it takes for the bunker doors and gantries to close, I use 35s.  You can set this filter higher, depending on how long it takes for the fuel to return to the tank, however, this does not stop a rocket refuelling when another rocket  is landing.

I edited some of this is sandbox to make it more presentable, as the complete setup is too large to show comprehensively.

Here is an overlay of my entire setup to give you a better idea of the overall picture of my setup.

[playerthesecond]

17 hours ago, Craigjw said:

The Scanner signal is negated, when the ship lands, an ON-to-OFF edge is detected, which starts the refuelling.  This does not detect an OFF-to-ON signal edge during take-off. 

Really good job. But where is the difference between landing and take-off signal? ON-to-OFF signal appears twice - during landing AND take-off. (OFF-to-ON also appears twice)

[Craigjw]

1 hour ago, playerthesecond said:

Really good job. But where is the difference between landing and take-off signal? ON-to-OFF signal appears twice - during landing AND take-off. (OFF-to-ON also appears twice)

The NOT gate is processed by the CPU at an earlier time than the AND gate, it's a very crude edge detector. If the not gate should come after the wire splits to the other input to the AND gate, it detects the 0-1 signal instead.  I've probably got one or more of these wrong in the example I've shown.  I guess a buffer could be added in there somewhere to ensure that it's definitely the 1-0 signal, but that's more complex.

You are correct, it seems at least one of my rocket bays refuels on take-off too, I've not payed attention to the others.  I'm not too fussed about that to be honest, more so that the rockets gets refuelled and the fuel isn't being cycled constantly.

[playerthesecond]

15 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

You are correct, it seems at least one of my rocket bays refuels on take-off too, I've not payed attention to the others.  I'm not too fussed about that to be honest, more so that the rockets gets refuelled and the fuel isn't being cycled constantly.

So you may find automation from the 1st post useful. Although it's a bit bulky

[Craigjw]

Indeed, however I was working out the logic for the refuelling at the time anyway so thought I'd share it.  I did seriously consider using your version, however mine didn't seem to set off refuelling after the launch, but that was probably due to not paying attention long enough to noticed the change in signal after launch.  It seemed to work so didn't really want to fix it.

I think your version might be able to be condensed if it made use of the AND/NOT gate configuration that I shown, as yours relies on proper logic to get the edge signal rather than a hack taking advantage of how the game processes the automation signals, does this technically class this as an exploit?

 

[Craigjw]

I've done more thorough testing on the AND/NOT gate and it seems that it has nothing to do with the wiring, the not gate just gets processed before the and gate.

[Craigjw]

I have improved upon the edge detecting method and came up with this simple circuit that converts 0101 to 001.

The input from the scanner needs to be negated as the edge detector only detects a 0-1 and we don't want to start refuelling when the rocket is detected, only when it stopped detecting the rocket, ie when it's landed.

I'd like to be able to stop refuelling when i detect the fuel returning to the tank, rather than when the rocket takes off.

A toggle with a buffer seems to be ok.

.

[playerthesecond]

7 hours ago, Craigjw said:

I have improved upon the edge detecting method and came up with this simple circuit that converts 0101 to 001.

it is convrerts 0101 to 0011,  so i think  another "AND" gate between input and output will give us 0001 in result.

Very good solution, and pretty compact too. I'm on my way to replace my old scheme.

 

And i use this to stop refueling: (almost identical).

 

[Craigjw]

I'm not convinced that we need 0001, but rather 0010, as we want the refuelling to happen on the 3rd zero (0101)

In any case, the only caveat is, that it stops refuelling once it's taken off and gone out of scanner range and ideally we want it to stop as it detects the signal. Is this what you mean?

Thanks for the image, the xor/filter is much better way to set them.

I did try your method after getting irritated that my rockets kept getting out of sync and it worked wonderfully, however I just couldn't fit it into the space I had available for my other rockets too.

[playerthesecond]

2 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

I'm not convinced that we need 0001, but rather 0010, as we want the refuelling to happen on the 3rd zero (0101)

In any case, the only caveat is, that it stops refuelling once it's taken off and gone out of scanner range and ideally we want it to stop as it detects the signal. Is this what you mean?

No i mean: we have 010101010101....  sequence from comman capluse anyway (or from radar, but i prefer first) and we going to convert it to ...000100010001... to detect landing stance of the rocket to start refueling.  (11001100110011 sequence isnt perfect )

So there is no difference between 0010  0100 0001  or even 1101  sequence - it's all the same "1 of 4". We are the ones who decide the starting point to align it with landing position of rocket.

To stop refueling - we only use pipe detector and xor+filter. So we need to be sure  it didn't starts again when rocket is absent

 

[Craigjw]

Does the command capsule give a brief output when an item on it's checklist gets ticked or something, I don't see how you can use the command capsule signal.

[playerthesecond]

On 13.11.2019 at 12:21 AM, Craigjw said:

Does the command capsule give a brief output when an item on it's checklist gets ticked or something, I don't see how you can use the command capsule signal.

i use both. Command capsule output and rocket radar are both connected to the bunker door so it opens automatically when it needed. On all item checked in cheklist OR rocket arrival.