I've actually been working on what I like the call the "Angler Defense System" where a ship is outfitted with a very very strong gravity "cell" where one field pushes out very strong and another pulls in but at a further range allowing small artifical-mass defense satellites to skim the orbit which would in theory cover all angles of attack regardless of the ships static armaments
Oh that's cool. I've been designing something that is ironically designed to bypass those systems completely. I've never even seen someone who bothered with anti-kinetic. Everyone has it in their head it's too unwieldy.
Well now that I've seen a gravity missile with a Drill on the front of it, I'd love to see a mining ship that can detach its drills to send them flying at high speeds towards its enemies using gravity!
Back when items did damage to blocks, you could make a "poor man's railgun." You would use a connector to eject stone into several rings of gravity generators and it would be pretty good. Unfortunately Keen nerfed the damage of items, so it's not as effective now. :(
At least you can still deposit a large cargo container’s worth of stone and launch it at a small grid, and if that small grid is right next to a ship or voxel it will be pushed into that which can damage it… very convoluted but…
so gravity drive-based tech has a habit of interferin with other gd tech, so what if we utilize this? could one hypothetically make a weapon to throw gd-powered ships off course, or even repel gravity missiles?
For that last one with a drill add a cargo container filled with gravel. In the past a gravity block shooting gravel out of a connector was enough to do major damage, so added to yours should do a lot of damage.
I've had a concept I've wanted to play around with for a while, effectively it's a torpedo that uses gravity drives and gyros along with heavy armour to effectively to be guided well beyond weapons range to destroy capitalships or, more importantly refineries and the like to cripple someone's production
I made once a space station that uses different kinds of gravity generators to make it fun, walking on ceilings and such, you could dock your ship on 6 different positions but always standing up feet. I havent it finished it though. Maybe i should revisit that project now with al the new blocks
Why just make thrusters obsolete? Couldn't we also make massive ships rotate with gravity gens and mass blocks too? I'd imagine you could make some huuuge ships spin fast with the right configuration and some scripting.
@@CaptainPhantom6 Which is why such a ship wouldn't be atmosphere-capable, yeah. It would still be an interesting and potentially powerful new development for space-only vessels.
AP railgun rounds with drills. And HE with warheads. Interesting, wonder if you could make APHE rounds by adding a fuse to the warhead after in penetrates
@@KrakenIsMahB one second would be way too late after penetration, however if you extend the sensor detection by a bit you could fine tune it to explode about 0.1-0.3 seconds after hitting.
@@a_person5660 I feel you may be ovethinking that too much due to experience with real delayed fuse shells. I would leave it at 1 sec simply because missile isnt moving as fast as irl and SE physics may slow down its advance towards interior of the ship. So in order to maximize the damage it needs to go deeper and therefore it is good to leave at 1sec, maybe even slightly more.
instead of timer delay, it could be set to armed instead it'd blow earlier likely, but it would guarantee it explodes rather than being harmlessly destroyed
Could the spherical gravity generators be used to create some kind of shrapnel shield? Like have one in the middle of the ship and use that spherical gravity field to make armor plates or something circle around it?
Yeah, in the olden days of SE PVP, we would overlap them (spherical fields) to make anti-ballistic shields for "gravity cannon" rounds and "cargo bombs" (cargo blocks loaded with stuff like gravel stacks) but they worked well in battle zones to protect your ship from misc debris from destroyed ships :D
@@Zer0sLegion lol, I'll see if I have any of my old designs still. I didn't usually post my "real" combat ships back when I was more into the PVP side, but I can probably put something together this weekend to show the theory :)
There is a type of thruster missile which uses heavy army to penetrate of a ship, then destroys a cargo container in the missile that has tons of rocks inside of it to tear up the insides of the ship. It'll be interesting to see that with a grav missile.
I saw a gravity based weapon on the workshop a bit ago (Ragnarok Shatter Shell I believe it was called) that absolutely shredded capital ships. And the thing's only 3x3x3
@@Zer0sLegion thing is you want to set them up to one grav is on at a time like you use the wasd use the numbers as 8456 w=8 a=4 s-5 d=6 also the only ting you need to stop is use gyros to turn ...also if you use the oouter shup as a pshere of mass blocks you can use v to see in 3rd person .. also do not forget that each mass block is one grav so if you put 4 or 5 you will begoing the full mass of the ship your on X4 so if your large ships say is 48,000 tons times the mass so it would ne going at a speed of 192000 in 4.34 sec with pout truster's also is you have that ship planetside you will have an antigrav x3 to pull you away or "UP" off the planet
What about attaching more drills to the sides? Since they have that impact damage immunity I feel like that might make them much more effective and potentially unstoppable. I can test this at a later time, but this might be something to consider as if you can just stack on more drills for armor of the projectile then just throw it at a ship. Maybe that'll pack a lot more punch. Could also potentially make a huge battering ram with the custom turret controller setup that you used in another video then just throw a gravity drive on there and also throw on the drills for armor and boom, ship seeking gravity drive missile with a bunch of drills attached for impact armor
Something from back in the day could use the drill treatment. Spherical generator with massblocks flying around it used to be used as a swarm shield type thing. Imagine this with drills that can't easily be destroyed. Fly in close and shred thine enemies. I actually now see CaptaiNarwhal remembers the same thing!
The turret gravity drive should be used with a program that uses regular control keys (zqsd or wasd (not sure for the second i have azerty) + going up and down) to switch on and off the mass blocs and can replicate the dampers effect to slow down and stop more effectively.
I’m just gonna put this out there, but the physics for turretblock-controlled rotors/hinges are different, including *clang*. Rotor collision will sometimes result in the grid teleporting randomly within a small area, and will teleport inside of other grids nearby. It’s not controllable but still… mayhem.
Build a version of this that is only used to accelerate and decelerate going forward and backwards and leave thrusters for directional control, if this is inside the ship it would be a low energy way at getting a ship up to traveling speeds
you could use a series of gravity generators and mass blocks at the core of a ship as sort of an internal slamjet engine for extreme acceleration on demand, and use regular thrusters for standard flight. might be quite useful for evasive maneuvers in a dogfight
The gravity missile is beautiful in its insidious potential... there is always movement in combat... now there is a giant block of clang embeded deep inside the bowels of your ship !! Fortunately there is a defense, you can make a gravity shield to repel them... it of course has to be far stronger than the incoming gravity drive itself.
@@Zer0sLegion It's always a surprise how so many folks use "gravity cannons", but never thought to use the ship itself in the same way lol For a bit of fun, if you add a prog-block in, you can create a script to flip the gravity field from Pos (+) to Neg (-) at the push of a button. I'll have to check, but I don't remember if gravity gens have an incremental +/- like thruster do or not. If not, add it to the control script to use the commands like a throttle ;) ::edit:: Just checked, and yep, you can script incremental increase/decrease gravity acceleration via scripts. So programmable throttles for grav drives are a go! :D ::/edit::
@@Zer0sLegion True, but with a script, you can assign a button (not on the tool bar) to the action :D And yes, having throttle or simply +/- inversion helps A LOT! :D
With the new stealth drive mod out on the workshop, figuring out how to make gravity drives work has an extra benefit. The stealth drive will not hide thruster contrails, but if you're propulsion doesn't emit contrails.... yeah.
you could put the artificial mass on the same part of the turret as the gravity generator, like the missile you showed, then you could have it set up so it goes wherever the camera is facing. then you just set binds so you can reverse it easily and bam, your good.
my favorite ship design is a gravity gun that also uses the projectile as a gravity drive. Most of the time its just there for show since i mostly just like to build, but having a ship that can get up to speed with next to no power, with a strong base killer style weapon is a nice jack of all trades style ship, since i usually put it on cargo ships. So from now on, ill remember to put drills on the tip of the gravity bullet. maybe ill even make a capital ship with a usable drill to pick up surface ore from asteroids with the same thing.
Now that we have event controllers you could even control the last design using normal ship controls using event controllers that toggle the mas blocks on and off based on dummy thrusters :D
Easiest method to control is use limited range gravity and mass blocks that you turn on or off via panel, then you can still use gyros etc - I used it as impulse engine ages ago and could limit the range to like 10m and it still worked great
Massive necro, but in regards to Gravity-related concepts: I've been using these sort of things for like 6 1/2 years now, and about 2 years ago I started using very fine-tuned Gravity-acceleration rings to automatically slingshot large amounts of resources in-between planets by essentially throwing containers from ring A to ring B. It's tedious to set up and adjust and it's not really worth the resources given you'd be a lot faster using a Jump-drive, but for RP and just laziness it's really handy. Nothing beats the flabbergasted look on a friends face when their ship is overtaken in the middle of nowhere by 500 tons of Ammo in a metal box that you hurled towards Mars cuz another mate ordered some.
A few years ago another content creator made a missile using gravity generators, mass blocks and containers full of stone. Maybe you could revisit that concept in modern space engineers. It's called the reaper missile
Way back, we used to stick small ion thrusters and landing gear on the fronts of GMD (Gravity Mass Drive or Gravity Momentum Drive, the old, longer name for a Gravity Drive) torpedoes. I believe it was either LSG or whoever he got his design from that called these Melta Torpedoes, as they would literally melt through the armor of the ship they hit.
maybe invert the first design with a spherical gravity generator: have the generator in the center and set up a custom turret with a mass block attached to it
The applications for this could change the entire game for ships. If people can miniaturize the spherical gravity generator, and use a programmable block to integrate all of the thrusters functions, we may potentially see an alternative to the thruster.
If you were to make the missile eject items (for example stone) the gravity should force the items against the ship breaking it, there is already loads of missiles I've seen using a similar system but I'm curious how it might work on a grav drive projectile
My immediate though was to scatter a bunch of artillery shells to launch with gravity at a target, but they don’t detonate that way unfortunately (have to shoot them or destroy a cargo container with them in it). Maybe in conjunction with a warhead detonating next to all the shells, that might detonate them…
you ought to do a video showing the countermeasure and counter-countermeasure to this: a reverse spherical gravity generator on the defending ship (repulsion field), with the countermeasure being a timer block on the missile itself to shut off the mass block before impact :)
server idea: king of the moon the idea is that a team is defending a moon base and the enemy team tryes to capture it in the amount of time start of the game: an amount of time is given to both teams to build their things to defend/attack mid game:The game starts after either both teams are ready or the building time ran out and the attackers attack the moon base while the defending team has to resist the attack end game:The game is won by the defenders when time rans out or they destroyed all the enemyes.The attackers win when they manage to kill all the defenders and/or capture the moon base next round: the teams switch roles (the ones that were attacking go on defense and the ones that were defending are now attacking) the whole game is won when a team gets a number of points (the wins for each round)
I feel like the gravity drive could be miniaturized by quite a bit if you just had a rotor/hinge turret then put the mass blocks/balls just above it with the gen range being expanded to just cover the mass. Would likely fit in a 3³ void with the rotor and mass being embedded in the top and bottom and slope blocks with panels enclosing it for added protection and miniaturization. This could then be slotted into most large ships as a 5x3x3 self contained module or have the outer shell replaced with a bunch of glass for an externally mounted virtual cockpit.
I love and haven't stopped using gravity drives most of my built don't have thrusters I also have a design on a rotating system where I use the rotors and gravity drive to turn my ship so it would still function like a joystick control
I'll have to try to build it again but I had a small drone that was a landing gear and a few artificial mass blocks on it. Latch onto enemy ship and they are now fighting their own artificial gravity or fighting more planets
I used to use a bunch of gravity generators arranged in many stacked rings to sling rods of blast door blocks at things with mass block. They where effective as dumb fire torpedoes but they could hardly ever hit a moving ship if you where manually aiming at something. However, I ended up adapting the exact same ship to launch micro fighters with heavy front armor. Practical? No. Cool? Yes
As for as being able to move diagonally could you use a bunch of rotors and lock directional gravity gens in diagonal positions and place mass blocks in the diagonals? same idea turn them gens off and on to go in those directions? also I think you are able to group thrusters with other objects so they activate at the same time using a bit of signal logic which would allow you to use the arrow keys for coordinal directions instead of having to use the hotbar.
Did you know the first gravity drives used a big chunk of stone attached via landing gear to the ship for its mass? This was long before the mass blocks introduction to SE.
You can experiment with some ideas from the videos of using custom turret controllers to build script-less guided missiles. There are already demos made by others. Essentially these designs utilise override gyroscopes as the “base” of the custom turret, therefore changing the orientation of the missile to face towards enemy grids. It has a tracking radius of 800m, and coupled with normal thrusters, with forward thrusters set as override, could make the “turret” fly towards enemy grid. Now these designs have two main things you can learn from. 1: the concept of putting gyroscopes set on override to provide an stable pivot point could potentially help you with building a more stable “custom turret controller controlled-gravity drive propulsions system”(CTCC-GDPS) design 2: whilst most present “custom turret controller controller script-less guided missiles”(CTSC-SGM) are powered by conventional thrusters, some equipped with warheads for HE and blast door tips for AP, your implementation of drill head and Gravity drive could potentially offer significantly greater performance to the existing design. Now imagine a “Gyroscope Stabilised, Custom Turret Controller Controlled, Drill Head Armour Piercing, Gravity Drive Propelled with Conventional Thrusters for Directional Propulsion, War-head High Explosion, Guided Anti Ship Missile”(GS-CTCC-DHAP-GDP-CTDP-WHE-GASM)(I know it’s getting ridiculous now but you know what I mean)
Add a camera script and gyro to track the enemy ship, the gravity drive will propel it at insane speeds and it should technically woh enough speed pad through and circle back around and continue to do so until the target is destroyed
For the turret design gravity drive, attach the gravity generator and the mass blocks in the same frame so they constantly interact with each other in the same way as one unit, then mount that whole unit of 2 that now act as one on a gimbal. End effect should be a directional gravity field which you directly control with the mouse. You should also be able to make the power adjustable with different numbers of gravity generators by turning them on or off in SYMMETRICAL manner. if the generator on/off and the interaction with the gravity blocks is not kept directionally even then you will add extra gravity plane vector distortions. I would suggest a 9 generator grid for example for 5 power levels, set in 3 rows of 3 for a square, at level 1 speed only center generator is on, at level 2 4 generators in a square at corners, at level 3 an 'X' shape come on to equalize pressure, at level 4 the 8 around the outside in a hollow square and finally level 5 with all 9 active. Note the power curve is not exactly equal or incremental with this set up however level 1 is 11% power, level 2 is 44% power, level 3 is 55% power, level 4 is 88% power and 5 is 100%, you can't get 7 to apply the gravity plane equally, 2 and 3 center left right, or just center line would be 'wobbly' in up down plane, and 6 could be mostly stable a line top and bottom or a line left and right, but it would have slightly weaker thrust in one plane. Handling differently at different speeds this way could be a control issue. The reason the design you are currently using is hard to control is because the generator is not interacting with mass blocks in a steady manner. ie. at say 45 degrees the field might be interact with block 1 50% block 2 30% and block 3 20%, Shifting the angle just 10 degrees could totally alter all of those numbers so suddenly the strength of propulsion for the 3 is totally different now it might be block 1-0%, block 2-10%, block 3-40% Block4 40%. etc. Another alternative design would be to a perfect mass block sphere with the directional gimbal with generator in the center point interacting with different mass blocks at the same level no matter the direction it points in. However because the gimbal and the mounting point itself will introduce imperfections to the mass block sphere there will be a few 'directional blind spots' that this type of drive will not be able to point at. All in all drive 1 is probably more feasible even if drive 2 would be more 'esthetically pleasing'. One problem in such a drive however would be if you mount the gimbal cage inside a ship you need to tune your gravity generators so they do not accidentally interact with mass blocks in the ship outside of the gravity drive. I'm not sure how it would interact with other gravity fields, you will also have to be very careful about weight distribution and symmetry of the ship or it will affect angular vector. Also with such a drive it might be difficult to control directionality of 'front' when considering weapon placement in dogfight maneuvering, I'm not sure just gyroscopes will do it, some thrusters might be needed as well and getting those 2 systems to mesh in overall effect would probably be a nightmare. 2 linked gravity drives in symmetrical positions would probably greatly improve stability, where 1 drive would be like trying to balance a plate on a pole on larger ships.
You could actually make a gravity shield using multiple generators. With a copilot activating the gravity shield whenever an enemy gravity missile came your way.
It’s great to see more channels focusing on Space Engineers, it’s an unfortunately uncommon sight. The only channels posting about SE tend to be more established, older channels. Keep it up!
Hmm…. That gives me an idea. What if you made a ship seeking gravity drone. When it finds a ship, it attaches itself to it, and starts pulling it towards the ground. If you have enough of these drones, you should be able to crash a large ship onto the nearest planet. It would probably be far more effective if you’re already in an atmosphere.
i guess the trick now, adding a warhead to the grav missile to detonate once its through the main layers of armor. this should also destroy the drill head, leaving the enemy with nothing. for the spherical drive ship, you only really need mass blocks for 3 axis of movement, the rest could be done by inverting the grav gen for a quick reverse. this would save space, maybe lead to a lop sided design, but you could armor up 1 side for combat. final thought, turret controller grav drive, use a spherical at its base pivot point, and have a mass block extend out from that. might control a bit easier and again, you only need invert the grav field for a hard reverse.
Years ago i did a gravity drop miner, a huge block of few large container and a few drills infront and wheels on the sides that acts like a rail. When it reach its drill point the gravity will be reverse back towards the ship im using by the help of mass blocks and connector. Now i cant remember how i did it.
I found the "turret" was too heavy with the mass blocks on it. Also the more mass blocks I place, the faster I go and I'm able to place more if they're not on the turret
Imagine going up against a big ship, they open up their side bays, and a swarm of Burrower Missiles come flying at you with warheads set to detonate when they breach through enough blocks. This brings war to a new level! Also, what happens if you have a line of gravity rings in a row, then fire a gravity drive missile or space ball through them? Do the gravity fields extend and combine or stack?
It looked to me like it was only difficult to fly because the superstructure of the drive obscured your camera vision quite a lot. Furthermore, you had thrusters turned on, which I gather was for braking force (dampeners) but I put it to you that turning them off would allow for better control and more speed and then toggle them with a timer maybe to disengage the gravity drive and turn the thrusters on to stop?
Aiming the turret was fine as I was aiming for a marker which I could see through the ship. It's just every difficult to maneuverer, it slides about everywhere. I had the thrusters on for the spherical test to see which direction I was going as I messed up the grouping and believe me, they were doing basically nothing to slow me down.
I would recommend that you add a "breaking" gravity generator, one that is inverted relative to your drive generators so you can slow down when you are looking at your destination.
Make a combination missile, use the gravity gen for forword force, some thrusters for stearing, and maby a warhead for exstra damage, then you got a perfect missile.
Multiple grav drives w/multiple gimbles. 1 5 set forward .. 1 5 set aft both outside the range of the other, linked to one console (the rear being partially reversed X and Y, but Z being normal) .. this should allow you to spin the ship in any direction quickly and accerate forward at 2x speed.
Surround the entire harness with mass blocks so you don't have to aim in such a fixed area. Also can you have the gravity generator putting out constant gravity at variable strength for better and smoother control.
Early Space Engineer meta was ALL grav drives. It got to the point where turning itself was driven by grav drives. It's a crazy energy suck though in more recent versions.
I mean.... i see the use in it in long range travel. Like an Interstellar Drive. The thing is only the breaking back down to normal speeds again. That would only need one direction with a Gyroscope you could change your target a little. No need for something complicated.
Watch out, pretty soon you'll realize you can just put a clang drive in the middle and suddenly you've got a totally energy free drive that ignores the ships mass.
For trying to change gravity drive ship direction, why not use a pair of gyroscopes (with override on) on a pair of rotors with a turret control block, like how many scriptless missiles work.
Any way to make a gravity drive missile use the custom turret controller tracking when within 800m? Would probably need just a gryo and weapon on the grid to make it work
Would a delayed warhead explosion work with the Gravity missiles? Im wondering because im using the Nuclear Warheads mod and im thinking of having a missile that burrows into the target.
I think you can use this as a sort of long range travel drive. Its far more efficient than using thrusters and such, and you can save on fuel for combat encounters!
@@Lord_Buckles Or even an emergency engine for when you ran out of gas. I can't imagine designing a ship only with this propulsion system in mind but I can see it work with others.
@@rightsideup6304 it could also theoretically work as an amazing braking system. The amount of front thrusters to slow down can be annoying especially on bigger ships, if you slap one that goes in reverse then you can slow down in around 6 seconds instantly
What would happen if you put warheads in the grav missiles? Like...rely on the drill to get you penetration through the armoured skin so the warhead can pop inside the juicy soft innards.
Countermeasures against grav torpedoes are interesting to devise. Could you make a video about trapping asteroid fields? In my games it seemed to be the end game warfare tactic since everyone started utilising bases that warp at random unless they need to pick up miners
It seems like something that'll make forward thrusters completely obsolete... requiring only maneuvering thrusters to move. Sure the gravity generators are expensive, but its cheaper to rebuild it than to build and rebuild the masses of thrusters you need to move a ship...
What’s the potential speed of launching that through a series of gravity wells? Would the speed make for higher penetration if you can get the drill moving faster?
make a GMD and have a APHE round that uses a drill on the front a warhead behind it a battery the mass block and then a sensor to trigger the warhead after impact
Have you guys got any other gravity related designs to try out? Please leave a comment below!
try adding more drills to the first one an put trusters behind those ones
How about a timed and ready warhead at the end of the torpedo so it penetrates and then explodes in the ship
You should use the generators to make an ore cannon. Also Incredibly powerful 👌
@@jackattack4047 I did try more drills and it seems to just get stuck and not penetrate as much.
@@onex0064 Or use a sensor to detect when it's inside an enemy ship for maximum damage 0_o
You could have a spherical gravity generator in the middle of a ship with negative acceleration as an anti grav missile shield
The only downside is those gravity projectiles with the ability to turn off their mass blocks
@@jonathanxaviertroche-diodo844 yes but that would require even more work on the weapon makers part and cwis is a thing
@@theess1275 you're not wrong
I've actually been working on what I like the call the "Angler Defense System" where a ship is outfitted with a very very strong gravity "cell" where one field pushes out very strong and another pulls in but at a further range allowing small artifical-mass defense satellites to skim the orbit which would in theory cover all angles of attack regardless of the ships static armaments
Oh that's cool. I've been designing something that is ironically designed to bypass those systems completely. I've never even seen someone who bothered with anti-kinetic. Everyone has it in their head it's too unwieldy.
Well now that I've seen a gravity missile with a Drill on the front of it, I'd love to see a mining ship that can detach its drills to send them flying at high speeds towards its enemies using gravity!
Back when items did damage to blocks, you could make a "poor man's railgun." You would use a connector to eject stone into several rings of gravity generators and it would be pretty good. Unfortunately Keen nerfed the damage of items, so it's not as effective now. :(
The good old days...
At least you can still deposit a large cargo container’s worth of stone and launch it at a small grid, and if that small grid is right next to a ship or voxel it will be pushed into that which can damage it… very convoluted but…
so gravity drive-based tech has a habit of interferin with other gd tech, so what if we utilize this? could one hypothetically make a weapon to throw gd-powered ships off course, or even repel gravity missiles?
Absolutely
One of my favorite capital ships on the workshop I was surprised to see, actually has a bunch of spherical gens acting as a gravity shield.
For that last one with a drill add a cargo container filled with gravel. In the past a gravity block shooting gravel out of a connector was enough to do major damage, so added to yours should do a lot of damage.
Dear god, the drill torpedoes are CRAZY that’s gonna be terrifying to go up against
gravity shield would help
I've had a concept I've wanted to play around with for a while, effectively it's a torpedo that uses gravity drives and gyros along with heavy armour to effectively to be guided well beyond weapons range to destroy capitalships or, more importantly refineries and the like to cripple someone's production
I have a video of me doing this on the channel
I made once a space station that uses different kinds of gravity generators to make it fun, walking on ceilings and such, you could dock your ship on 6 different positions but always standing up feet. I havent it finished it though. Maybe i should revisit that project now with al the new blocks
Why just make thrusters obsolete?
Couldn't we also make massive ships rotate with gravity gens and mass blocks too?
I'd imagine you could make some huuuge ships spin fast with the right configuration and some scripting.
Now this I want to see!
Artificial gravity gets almost completely nullified on earth and mars
I had this very same idea, putting small G-drives in locations that are furthest from the center to compensate for the drag from the mass.
@@CaptainPhantom6 Which is why such a ship wouldn't be atmosphere-capable, yeah. It would still be an interesting and potentially powerful new development for space-only vessels.
A "fly swatter" Dreadnought that just zooms up right above soemthing then does a 180 in half a second and creates a rather large debris field
AP railgun rounds with drills. And HE with warheads. Interesting, wonder if you could make APHE rounds by adding a fuse to the warhead after in penetrates
If you put a sensor on it, you could make it explode when it detects it's inside an enemy ship!
set warhead to go off like 1 second after penetration... came to the comment section for exactly the same idea
@@KrakenIsMahB one second would be way too late after penetration, however if you extend the sensor detection by a bit you could fine tune it to explode about 0.1-0.3 seconds after hitting.
@@a_person5660 I feel you may be ovethinking that too much due to experience with real delayed fuse shells. I would leave it at 1 sec simply because missile isnt moving as fast as irl and SE physics may slow down its advance towards interior of the ship. So in order to maximize the damage it needs to go deeper and therefore it is good to leave at 1sec, maybe even slightly more.
instead of timer delay, it could be set to armed instead
it'd blow earlier likely, but it would guarantee it explodes rather than being harmlessly destroyed
Could the spherical gravity generators be used to create some kind of shrapnel shield? Like have one in the middle of the ship and use that spherical gravity field to make armor plates or something circle around it?
I guess so, if you got the pieces into orbit it would work.
Yeah, in the olden days of SE PVP, we would overlap them (spherical fields) to make anti-ballistic shields for "gravity cannon" rounds and "cargo bombs" (cargo blocks loaded with stuff like gravel stacks) but they worked well in battle zones to protect your ship from misc debris from destroyed ships :D
@@Haladmer that's sounds awesome, I'd love to see it
@@Zer0sLegion lol, I'll see if I have any of my old designs still. I didn't usually post my "real" combat ships back when I was more into the PVP side, but I can probably put something together this weekend to show the theory :)
You can use the same generator one would use for the 3d G-drive to create the field to save on resources and power.
There is a type of thruster missile which uses heavy army to penetrate of a ship, then destroys a cargo container in the missile that has tons of rocks inside of it to tear up the insides of the ship.
It'll be interesting to see that with a grav missile.
Thought items didn't damage grids enough for something like this to be viable anymore
9:01 Not to worry, they're still flying half a ship.
I saw a gravity based weapon on the workshop a bit ago (Ragnarok Shatter Shell I believe it was called) that absolutely shredded capital ships. And the thing's only 3x3x3
Damn that editing is next level man!
Thanks Ludi
@@Zer0sLegion thing is you want to set them up to one grav is on at a time like you use the wasd use the numbers as 8456 w=8 a=4 s-5 d=6 also the only ting you need to stop is use gyros to turn ...also if you use the oouter shup as a pshere of mass blocks you can use v to see in 3rd person .. also do not forget that each mass block is one grav so if you put 4 or 5 you will begoing the full mass of the ship your on X4 so if your large ships say is 48,000 tons times the mass so it would ne going at a speed of 192000 in 4.34 sec with pout truster's also is you have that ship planetside you will have an antigrav x3 to pull you away or "UP" off the planet
Large Grid 1073 look it up or look up my name .
What about attaching more drills to the sides? Since they have that impact damage immunity I feel like that might make them much more effective and potentially unstoppable. I can test this at a later time, but this might be something to consider as if you can just stack on more drills for armor of the projectile then just throw it at a ship. Maybe that'll pack a lot more punch. Could also potentially make a huge battering ram with the custom turret controller setup that you used in another video then just throw a gravity drive on there and also throw on the drills for armor and boom, ship seeking gravity drive missile with a bunch of drills attached for impact armor
Something from back in the day could use the drill treatment. Spherical generator with massblocks flying around it used to be used as a swarm shield type thing. Imagine this with drills that can't easily be destroyed. Fly in close and shred thine enemies. I actually now see CaptaiNarwhal remembers the same thing!
The turret gravity drive should be used with a program that uses regular control keys (zqsd or wasd (not sure for the second i have azerty) + going up and down) to switch on and off the mass blocs and can replicate the dampers effect to slow down and stop more effectively.
I’m just gonna put this out there, but the physics for turretblock-controlled rotors/hinges are different, including *clang*. Rotor collision will sometimes result in the grid teleporting randomly within a small area, and will teleport inside of other grids nearby. It’s not controllable but still… mayhem.
Build a version of this that is only used to accelerate and decelerate going forward and backwards and leave thrusters for directional control, if this is inside the ship it would be a low energy way at getting a ship up to traveling speeds
you could use a series of gravity generators and mass blocks at the core of a ship as sort of an internal slamjet engine for extreme acceleration on demand, and use regular thrusters for standard flight. might be quite useful for evasive maneuvers in a dogfight
Put heavy armour around the grave generators and other key components to make them slightly more effective
Yeah, I did try this but it makes the missile less effective. It gets stuck against the armour as it doesn't damage as many blocks.
@@Zer0sLegion I guess it varies because on some of mine it's more effective
The gravity missile is beautiful in its insidious potential... there is always movement in combat... now there is a giant block of clang embeded deep inside the bowels of your ship !! Fortunately there is a defense, you can make a gravity shield to repel them... it of course has to be far stronger than the incoming gravity drive itself.
Spaceballs?!
.... there goes the planet.
Welcome to the love of spherical grav drives :D
Great testing vid, always fun to see how others work with the concept, so thanks for sharing!
I was surprised it was as easy to use as it was!
@@Zer0sLegion It's always a surprise how so many folks use "gravity cannons", but never thought to use the ship itself in the same way lol
For a bit of fun, if you add a prog-block in, you can create a script to flip the gravity field from Pos (+) to Neg (-) at the push of a button. I'll have to check, but I don't remember if gravity gens have an incremental +/- like thruster do or not. If not, add it to the control script to use the commands like a throttle ;)
::edit:: Just checked, and yep, you can script incremental increase/decrease gravity acceleration via scripts. So programmable throttles for grav drives are a go! :D ::/edit::
@@Haladmer I could invert the graving using a timer block on loop as well, hopefully that would give me a bit more control lol.
@@Zer0sLegion True, but with a script, you can assign a button (not on the tool bar) to the action :D
And yes, having throttle or simply +/- inversion helps A LOT! :D
I feel great pride that the 3d grav drive I mentioned worked out for you! Keep up the good work on doing things outside the box....err space
Thanks for the great suggestion!
With the new stealth drive mod out on the workshop, figuring out how to make gravity drives work has an extra benefit. The stealth drive will not hide thruster contrails, but if you're propulsion doesn't emit contrails.... yeah.
I once saw a video of someone using lil rocks as a shotgun in huge railgun-like ship full of gravity generators. It was jaw-dropping.
Beautiful! I'm really enjoying your content, you and Mad Mavn are my favorite SE content creators. You both have great energy.
Glad you enjoyed it!
you could put the artificial mass on the same part of the turret as the gravity generator, like the missile you showed, then you could have it set up so it goes wherever the camera is facing. then you just set binds so you can reverse it easily and bam, your good.
It would be easier to control but not as fast...
my favorite ship design is a gravity gun that also uses the projectile as a gravity drive. Most of the time its just there for show since i mostly just like to build, but having a ship that can get up to speed with next to no power, with a strong base killer style weapon is a nice jack of all trades style ship, since i usually put it on cargo ships.
So from now on, ill remember to put drills on the tip of the gravity bullet. maybe ill even make a capital ship with a usable drill to pick up surface ore from asteroids with the same thing.
I'm gonna use this to make a Holdo Maneuver ship.
Now that we have event controllers you could even control the last design using normal ship controls using event controllers that toggle the mas blocks on and off based on dummy thrusters :D
Easiest method to control is use limited range gravity and mass blocks that you turn on or off via panel, then you can still use gyros etc - I used it as impulse engine ages ago and could limit the range to like 10m and it still worked great
Massive necro, but in regards to Gravity-related concepts: I've been using these sort of things for like 6 1/2 years now, and about 2 years ago I started using very fine-tuned Gravity-acceleration rings to automatically slingshot large amounts of resources in-between planets by essentially throwing containers from ring A to ring B. It's tedious to set up and adjust and it's not really worth the resources given you'd be a lot faster using a Jump-drive, but for RP and just laziness it's really handy. Nothing beats the flabbergasted look on a friends face when their ship is overtaken in the middle of nowhere by 500 tons of Ammo in a metal box that you hurled towards Mars cuz another mate ordered some.
Those gravity weapons look like ship boarding craft
A few years ago another content creator made a missile using gravity generators, mass blocks and containers full of stone. Maybe you could revisit that concept in modern space engineers. It's called the reaper missile
Sounds interesting! I think they've patched stone damaging blocks but I can certainly give it a go.
Way back, we used to stick small ion thrusters and landing gear on the fronts of GMD (Gravity Mass Drive or Gravity Momentum Drive, the old, longer name for a Gravity Drive) torpedoes. I believe it was either LSG or whoever he got his design from that called these Melta Torpedoes, as they would literally melt through the armor of the ship they hit.
maybe invert the first design with a spherical gravity generator: have the generator in the center and set up a custom turret with a mass block attached to it
The applications for this could change the entire game for ships. If people can miniaturize the spherical gravity generator, and use a programmable block to integrate all of the thrusters functions, we may potentially see an alternative to the thruster.
Adding the timer block with warhead to the projectile with drill seems, at least in theory, very effective. Great video!
You wouldn't need a timer block because the warhead has one built into it
Once you've pierced the armour with the drill, you could blow up the internals with a warhead, perfect!
@@astronomicalgamer205 A sensor would make more sense. You could set it to trigger when in range of an enemy ship.
@@Zer0sLegion I know but I hate dealing with sensors. Cost me to many of my own ships
If you were to make the missile eject items (for example stone) the gravity should force the items against the ship breaking it, there is already loads of missiles I've seen using a similar system but I'm curious how it might work on a grav drive projectile
Sounds interesting, I'll give it a try
I think the devs removed that kind of damage a while ago or at least nerfed it
My immediate though was to scatter a bunch of artillery shells to launch with gravity at a target, but they don’t detonate that way unfortunately (have to shoot them or destroy a cargo container with them in it). Maybe in conjunction with a warhead detonating next to all the shells, that might detonate them…
you ought to do a video showing the countermeasure and counter-countermeasure to this: a reverse spherical gravity generator on the defending ship (repulsion field), with the countermeasure being a timer block on the missile itself to shut off the mass block before impact :)
server idea: king of the moon
the idea is that a team is defending a moon base and the enemy team tryes to capture it in the amount of time
start of the game: an amount of time is given to both teams to build their things to defend/attack
mid game:The game starts after either both teams are ready or the building time ran out and the attackers attack the moon base while the defending team has to resist the attack
end game:The game is won by the defenders when time rans out or they destroyed all the enemyes.The attackers win when they manage to kill all the defenders and/or capture the moon base
next round: the teams switch roles (the ones that were attacking go on defense and the ones that were defending are now attacking)
the whole game is won when a team gets a number of points (the wins for each round)
Sounds fun!
didn't expect to actually get noticed, thanks
I feel like the gravity drive could be miniaturized by quite a bit if you just had a rotor/hinge turret then put the mass blocks/balls just above it with the gen range being expanded to just cover the mass. Would likely fit in a 3³ void with the rotor and mass being embedded in the top and bottom and slope blocks with panels enclosing it for added protection and miniaturization.
This could then be slotted into most large ships as a 5x3x3 self contained module or have the outer shell replaced with a bunch of glass for an externally mounted virtual cockpit.
I love and haven't stopped using gravity drives most of my built don't have thrusters I also have a design on a rotating system where I use the rotors and gravity drive to turn my ship so it would still function like a joystick control
I'll have to try to build it again but I had a small drone that was a landing gear and a few artificial mass blocks on it. Latch onto enemy ship and they are now fighting their own artificial gravity or fighting more planets
I used to use a bunch of gravity generators arranged in many stacked rings to sling rods of blast door blocks at things with mass block. They where effective as dumb fire torpedoes but they could hardly ever hit a moving ship if you where manually aiming at something. However, I ended up adapting the exact same ship to launch micro fighters with heavy front armor. Practical? No. Cool? Yes
As for as being able to move diagonally could you use a bunch of rotors and lock directional gravity gens in diagonal positions and place mass blocks in the diagonals? same idea turn them gens off and on to go in those directions? also I think you are able to group thrusters with other objects so they activate at the same time using a bit of signal logic which would allow you to use the arrow keys for coordinal directions instead of having to use the hotbar.
Would it be possible to place a warhead behind the drill? Make it pierce a ship and then detonate on a timer after impact to rip apart the interior
No need for a timer, use a sensor to detect when it's inside an enemy ship!
Very cool stuff Zer0. Keep up the great work!
you could do someting like the gravity circle of go fast but launch drills with warheads behind
You could mount those Drill weapons on the outside of your ship with merge blocks and launch em like missiles.
Did you know the first gravity drives used a big chunk of stone attached via landing gear to the ship for its mass? This was long before the mass blocks introduction to SE.
You can experiment with some ideas from the videos of using custom turret controllers to build script-less guided missiles. There are already demos made by others.
Essentially these designs utilise override gyroscopes as the “base” of the custom turret, therefore changing the orientation of the missile to face towards enemy grids. It has a tracking radius of 800m, and coupled with normal thrusters, with forward thrusters set as override, could make the “turret” fly towards enemy grid.
Now these designs have two main things you can learn from.
1: the concept of putting gyroscopes set on override to provide an stable pivot point could potentially help you with building a more stable “custom turret controller controlled-gravity drive propulsions system”(CTCC-GDPS) design
2: whilst most present “custom turret controller controller script-less guided missiles”(CTSC-SGM) are powered by conventional thrusters, some equipped with warheads for HE and blast door tips for AP, your implementation of drill head and Gravity drive could potentially offer significantly greater performance to the existing design. Now imagine a “Gyroscope Stabilised, Custom Turret Controller Controlled, Drill Head Armour Piercing, Gravity Drive Propelled with Conventional Thrusters for Directional Propulsion, War-head High Explosion, Guided Anti Ship Missile”(GS-CTCC-DHAP-GDP-CTDP-WHE-GASM)(I know it’s getting ridiculous now but you know what I mean)
Gonna need to work on names
Add a camera script and gyro to track the enemy ship, the gravity drive will propel it at insane speeds and it should technically woh enough speed pad through and circle back around and continue to do so until the target is destroyed
For the turret design gravity drive, attach the gravity generator and the mass blocks in the same frame so they constantly interact with each other in the same way as one unit, then mount that whole unit of 2 that now act as one on a gimbal.
End effect should be a directional gravity field which you directly control with the mouse. You should also be able to make the power adjustable with different numbers of gravity generators by turning them on or off in SYMMETRICAL manner. if the generator on/off and the interaction with the gravity blocks is not kept directionally even then you will add extra gravity plane vector distortions. I would suggest a 9 generator grid for example for 5 power levels, set in 3 rows of 3 for a square, at level 1 speed only center generator is on, at level 2 4 generators in a square at corners, at level 3 an 'X' shape come on to equalize pressure, at level 4 the 8 around the outside in a hollow square and finally level 5 with all 9 active. Note the power curve is not exactly equal or incremental with this set up however level 1 is 11% power, level 2 is 44% power, level 3 is 55% power, level 4 is 88% power and 5 is 100%, you can't get 7 to apply the gravity plane equally, 2 and 3 center left right, or just center line would be 'wobbly' in up down plane, and 6 could be mostly stable a line top and bottom or a line left and right, but it would have slightly weaker thrust in one plane. Handling differently at different speeds this way could be a control issue.
The reason the design you are currently using is hard to control is because the generator is not interacting with mass blocks in a steady manner. ie. at say 45 degrees the field might be interact with block 1 50% block 2 30% and block 3 20%, Shifting the angle just 10 degrees could totally alter all of those numbers so suddenly the strength of propulsion for the 3 is totally different now it might be block 1-0%, block 2-10%, block 3-40% Block4 40%. etc.
Another alternative design would be to a perfect mass block sphere with the directional gimbal with generator in the center point interacting with different mass blocks at the same level no matter the direction it points in. However because the gimbal and the mounting point itself will introduce imperfections to the mass block sphere there will be a few 'directional blind spots' that this type of drive will not be able to point at.
All in all drive 1 is probably more feasible even if drive 2 would be more 'esthetically pleasing'.
One problem in such a drive however would be if you mount the gimbal cage inside a ship you need to tune your gravity generators so they do not accidentally interact with mass blocks in the ship outside of the gravity drive. I'm not sure how it would interact with other gravity fields, you will also have to be very careful about weight distribution and symmetry of the ship or it will affect angular vector. Also with such a drive it might be difficult to control directionality of 'front' when considering weapon placement in dogfight maneuvering, I'm not sure just gyroscopes will do it, some thrusters might be needed as well and getting those 2 systems to mesh in overall effect would probably be a nightmare.
2 linked gravity drives in symmetrical positions would probably greatly improve stability, where 1 drive would be like trying to balance a plate on a pole on larger ships.
You could actually make a gravity shield using multiple generators. With a copilot activating the gravity shield whenever an enemy gravity missile came your way.
It’s great to see more channels focusing on Space Engineers, it’s an unfortunately uncommon sight. The only channels posting about SE tend to be more established, older channels. Keep it up!
Some say Striker is still drifting into the void from the last video.
Hmm…. That gives me an idea. What if you made a ship seeking gravity drone. When it finds a ship, it attaches itself to it, and starts pulling it towards the ground. If you have enough of these drones, you should be able to crash a large ship onto the nearest planet. It would probably be far more effective if you’re already in an atmosphere.
i guess the trick now, adding a warhead to the grav missile to detonate once its through the main layers of armor. this should also destroy the drill head, leaving the enemy with nothing.
for the spherical drive ship, you only really need mass blocks for 3 axis of movement, the rest could be done by inverting the grav gen for a quick reverse. this would save space, maybe lead to a lop sided design, but you could armor up 1 side for combat.
final thought, turret controller grav drive, use a spherical at its base pivot point, and have a mass block extend out from that. might control a bit easier and again, you only need invert the grav field for a hard reverse.
Years ago i did a gravity drop miner, a huge block of few large container and a few drills infront and wheels on the sides that acts like a rail. When it reach its drill point the gravity will be reverse back towards the ship im using by the help of mass blocks and connector. Now i cant remember how i did it.
Why not put gravity generator + mass block both on the same turret, and swivel the entire drive?
(I dont know much about SE physics though)
I found the "turret" was too heavy with the mass blocks on it. Also the more mass blocks I place, the faster I go and I'm able to place more if they're not on the turret
or just the gravity generator and a shit ton of mass blocks around it
looks like this would be good for a massive mothership that is meant to just get into the area while other craft get up close
Imagine going up against a big ship, they open up their side bays, and a swarm of Burrower Missiles come flying at you with warheads set to detonate when they breach through enough blocks.
This brings war to a new level!
Also, what happens if you have a line of gravity rings in a row, then fire a gravity drive missile or space ball through them? Do the gravity fields extend and combine or stack?
They stack but you're still capped by the 100m/s speed limit
Try adding mass blocks on the rotating center of the gravity ship. Maybe you can steer that way!
Yes the railgun does piss about 4 blocks of armor. Pissed 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. 12 pisses on the 16x16x16 HA block. You go British R. Kelley.
Sorry Zer0 I'm southern so any chance I get to mess with someone about their vernacular or its usage I take it.
It looked to me like it was only difficult to fly because the superstructure of the drive obscured your camera vision quite a lot. Furthermore, you had thrusters turned on, which I gather was for braking force (dampeners) but I put it to you that turning them off would allow for better control and more speed and then toggle them with a timer maybe to disengage the gravity drive and turn the thrusters on to stop?
Aiming the turret was fine as I was aiming for a marker which I could see through the ship. It's just every difficult to maneuverer, it slides about everywhere.
I had the thrusters on for the spherical test to see which direction I was going as I messed up the grouping and believe me, they were doing basically nothing to slow me down.
@@Zer0sLegion Ahhh okies :)
You done good bro either way XD
Oh and drills for missile tips! big WOW! defo gonna use that one!
I would recommend that you add a "breaking" gravity generator, one that is inverted relative to your drive generators so you can slow down when you are looking at your destination.
@@devinlarson1947 You're 100% right but it would still be a massive pain to control. as you can only stop in one direction before turning around.
2:39 you would need to increase the number of mass blocks on the outside rings
The drill might be good to build a sort of boarding drop pod
Theoretically, you could set up a script to control the gravity drive with thruster inputs and give it inertial dampening.
Make a combination missile, use the gravity gen for forword force, some thrusters for stearing, and maby a warhead for exstra damage, then you got a perfect missile.
Multiple grav drives w/multiple gimbles. 1 5 set forward .. 1 5 set aft both outside the range of the other, linked to one console (the rear being partially reversed X and Y, but Z being normal) .. this should allow you to spin the ship in any direction quickly and accerate forward at 2x speed.
If you just add enough gravity to change direction quickly it'll control crazy well
Surround the entire harness with mass blocks so you don't have to aim in such a fixed area. Also can you have the gravity generator putting out constant gravity at variable strength for better and smoother control.
Early Space Engineer meta was ALL grav drives. It got to the point where turning itself was driven by grav drives. It's a crazy energy suck though in more recent versions.
Use the first experiment example as a jump drive and normal thruster for the fine work
I mean.... i see the use in it in long range travel. Like an Interstellar Drive. The thing is only the breaking back down to normal speeds again. That would only need one direction with a Gyroscope you could change your target a little. No need for something complicated.
Watch out, pretty soon you'll realize you can just put a clang drive in the middle and suddenly you've got a totally energy free drive that ignores the ships mass.
Clang is scary, I don't want to upset him
1st thing I thought seeing that contraption... You made a gyroscopic drive
For trying to change gravity drive ship direction, why not use a pair of gyroscopes (with override on) on a pair of rotors with a turret control block, like how many scriptless missiles work.
Any way to make a gravity drive missile use the custom turret controller tracking when within 800m? Would probably need just a gryo and weapon on the grid to make it work
the next logical step would be gravity shields/deflectors
Would a delayed warhead explosion work with the Gravity missiles? Im wondering because im using the Nuclear Warheads mod and im thinking of having a missile that burrows into the target.
Does this hurt the drills?
No, no it does not
GravDrives as I like to call them, are fooken insane with unlimited speed mod
I think you can use this as a sort of long range travel drive. Its far more efficient than using thrusters and such, and you can save on fuel for combat encounters!
Poor man's jump drive. Have to travel a far distance? Turn on the grav gen + mass block and cruise the seven spaces
@@Lord_Buckles Or even an emergency engine for when you ran out of gas. I can't imagine designing a ship only with this propulsion system in mind but I can see it work with others.
@@rightsideup6304 it could also theoretically work as an amazing braking system. The amount of front thrusters to slow down can be annoying especially on bigger ships, if you slap one that goes in reverse then you can slow down in around 6 seconds instantly
What would happen if you put warheads in the grav missiles? Like...rely on the drill to get you penetration through the armoured skin so the warhead can pop inside the juicy soft innards.
You would believe how many times I've gotten that comment 😅
Countermeasures against grav torpedoes are interesting to devise.
Could you make a video about trapping asteroid fields? In my games it seemed to be the end game warfare tactic since everyone started utilising bases that warp at random unless they need to pick up miners
Kind of wish you could load ammo up in the drills and have them empty on empact. cause lots of inside distruction.
It seems like something that'll make forward thrusters completely obsolete... requiring only maneuvering thrusters to move. Sure the gravity generators are expensive, but its cheaper to rebuild it than to build and rebuild the masses of thrusters you need to move a ship...
I guess you can build tractor beams to affect gravity drives.
What’s the potential speed of launching that through a series of gravity wells? Would the speed make for higher penetration if you can get the drill moving faster?
The longer you're affected by artificial gravity, the faster you will go.
Gravity Sphere. Just combine the grav weap with sphere gen plus added back thrusters.
could u use drills to protect the other blocks?
Ah yes, the warp bubble FTL drive.
How about adding warhead to your drill torpedo for inside climax
make a GMD and have a APHE round that uses a drill on the front a warhead behind it a battery the mass block and then a sensor to trigger the warhead after impact