Orbital Miner

Dex Luther

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Aug 15, 2013
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When a player has built a space station around a planet I was thinking of cool things that could be done. With all the threads about putting laser canons and shields for no reason on the space station it got me thinking about orbital ion canons.

What if instead of an Ion Canon we had an Oribital Miner? I think the green laser that the Arcane Bore from Thaumcraft looks pretty awesome. I would imagine something LIKE that, but bigger and coming down from space would be even cooler!

It would probably need to be somewhat expensive to build, and need lots of power. More power hungry than a buildcraft quarry anyways and it would probably need to be slightly slower too.

I imagine it needing two parts to operate.

First, The orbital miner/canon that's built and then placed on a space station.

Second, A targeting beacon, which would need to be linked to the canon and then brought down to the planet and placed somewhere. The beacon should also be somewhat expensive to build, but less expensive than the miner itself. The beacon would also be destroyed in the process of mining.

When back on the station the Miner/canon would find the beacon, lock on, and fire a beam down to the planet and start mining. Placing items into an adjacent chest.

The beam would be similar to the Arcane bore as it would also create roundish holes, but on the scale of a Buildcraft quarry. For extra coolness the beam would cover the entire mining area (as in not move around like the Bore or Quarry do), but blocks would be picked up at random like when you shoot a portal gun at the moon.

Ion_cannon_firing.jpg


More examples of awesomeness:


ion_cannon.jpg

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Dex Luther

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Good idea... but, can this be codded in?

If item tesseracts and ender chests can be coded into the game, then I don't see why not.

Earlier versions of the mod were made TE compatible and TE is being updated. It could be made so that when TE is installed along side GC you not only get different space station material requirements, but the orbital miner would also require item tesseracts in the recipe. The recipe could even require a couple of vanilla ender chests for each of the parts when TE isn't installed.

The beam down on the planet would have an invisible entity in it somewhere. I think this is something that would essentially be required for it to work anyways (it also gives people something to delete from their world using world edit if something goes wrong). This invisible entity would serve as an invisible ender chest/item tesseract with the other end connected to the miner itself.

I don't know if TE is open source. Either way King Lemming might be nice enough to share his Item Tesseract code. The code for Vanilla Ender chests might be free to use.
 

Dex Luther

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Its a good idea so you can get ressources without Buildcraft quarry and pipesystem to launchcontroller

Well... it's basically a Galacticraft themed quarry that has an effect that works in both dimensions. It would require people to at least build a small space station above the planet they want to mine.

I have to redo my minecraft installation. I'm tired of playing on 1.5.2, but there are no FTB packs for 1.6.4 yet, When I get around to updating everything, I'll try getting some example screenshots up. I might just end up getting the screenshots from my current pack instead. But I'm lazy lol
 
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MoltonMontro

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Good idea... but, can this be codded in?
Anything is possible if you tried hard enough. You got rockets going in to the air and those other mods with mining lasers. I'm sure it is very possible, just slightly tougher.
 

FatedOne

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FWIW the Minefactory Reloaded Laser Drill works on a space station. It technically works by randomly generating ores from thin air. I think it looks pretty cool too.

 

FatedOne

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It take a lot of power to generate ore 200,000 buildcraft MJ per ore. Cheaty in the sense that they are created from thin air but the power requirement is astronomical.
 

AcapitalA

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It would be epic if you could control it, and maybe if it could be added there should be an asteroid every few days, so you could fire the laser at it's location (asteroid is just a render, like a backdrop)
 

Dex Luther

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It would be epic if you could control it, and maybe if it could be added there should be an asteroid every few days, so you could fire the laser at it's location (asteroid is just a render, like a backdrop)

Wouldn't an inter-dimensional quarry handle this? Place the targeting block where ever you want on the over world, and there's a big laser effect. The blocks you mine though are beamed to the block on your space station.

On the overworld it would look like the laser's coming down from space (to minecraft max building height), and in space the laser would look like it going down to the planet (down to that height were you fall down into the over world). That's how I imagine it anyways. Mitch might have better ideas.
 

AcapitalA

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Apr 12, 2013
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Wouldn't an inter-dimensional quarry handle this? Place the targeting block where ever you want on the over world, and there's a big laser effect. The blocks you mine though are beamed to the block on your space station.

On the overworld it would look like the laser's coming down from space (to minecraft max building height), and in space the laser would look like it going down to the planet (down to that height were you fall down into the over world). That's how I imagine it anyways. Mitch might have better ideas.
True, but to aim it in space at other things via a beacon block to an asteroid...
 

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