Rainbow Fresh Posted June 24 Report Posted June 24 (edited) Commission: Not so far, maybe if nobody can be found who agrees this is a simple yet mandatory change to be made Feature 1: Spur gears are to be aligned with the middle of the block and be made pass-through, allowing easy splitting of a power train in both directions of the original axle without ending the main axle. Feature 2: All mechanical transmission devices (which I think requires the "large gear", "transmission", "clutch" and "brake") should be able to be placed and connected in vertical orientation. In case of the large gear specifically, it should be able to face all 6 directions. Description: I get it, mechanical power is mostly just a proof-of-concept like many other things in Vintage Story and such as, as a mechanic, so utterly under-cooked it's barely qualifying as raw. There are two power producers (as of the latest 1.22 that is) and, if we count the large bellows, 4 consumers; one of which (said bellows) is utterly useless, one of which (the quern) usable, if not better performing, by hand and the remaining two of which are so situationally used that you could reasonably get away with just drawing a line from your windmill to your machine and break and replace whatever machine you need at any given time. But just because a mechanic isn't really used yet doesn't mean we shouldn't be designing it robustly in the first place. When building machinery and automation, no matter if placing a stick line between a windmill and quern in Vintage Story or building an abomination beyond human comprehension producing over 1000 science per second in Factorio, the goals for such systems are always the same: Efficiency. In terms of Vintage Story that specifically means compactness. Save a couple moving parts and your machine might still run with a little less wind available. Make it small and it fits nicely into your other builds without requiring you to build a giant cube to cover it. Sadly, as it currently stands, everything around the current implementation of mechanical power seems to be specifically engineered against being compact. This specifically boils down to two major pain points: - Power Train Splitting (Or in other words: "Why was the spur gear invented again?") As mentioned, VS has currently two power producers; the old faithful windmill and the new shiny 1.22 water wheel. The latter of which is Iron-age+ only and requires world gen RNG to give you rapids. As such, many players will still pretty much guaranteed be having a windmill as their first and/or foremost producer. And especially with the nerf to windmill placing and the addition of an iron-tier+ stronger windmill it seems it is now intended/incentivized to run your multiple machines off of a single windmill, splitting the power train to connect them all and probably put transmissions in there so you can toggle them on or off individually to make the most use of your whimsical wind power. Now in order to do that, we always had the large gear. However, it comes with major drawbacks; for one, as the name suggest, it is a large gear requiring atleast a 5x5 footprint to make any real splitting use of. Furthermore, it's primary use is not train splitting but gear shifting, as any form of horizontal to vertical translation using the large gear up- or down-shifts the power. And while having your helve hammer go nuts would technically be a good thing, taxing your already unreliable windmill at the whimsy of the wind with a 5x torque requirement makes for rather short smithing sessions. Enter stage left, the spur gear. The promised messiah to solve this issue by adding 1:1 power splitting. Sadly though, and I mean this with no offense to the devs, it sucks ass. It does fill this very much existent usage niche, yes, but it does so with such unnecessary limitations that it turns out barely better than the large gear. Why is it an endcap? Why does it only allow splitting the train in the opposite direction of where it was going, requiring you to wrap back around with several angled gears/more spur gears just to keep going in the same direction, let alone "continue" your main line? It makes no sense, is unnecessary and should imo be changed. - Verticality (or rather, the lack thereof) As mentioned before, the primary power provider for most players is and still will be a windmill. Which are usually placed up high. You know, where the wind is strong. Whereas your machines are usually placed on the ground. You know, where you are. Meaning, you will not get around to rerouting your windmill power train vertically downwards towards the ground before connecting it to the machine. Best case scenario that is a quern which has a vertical attachment point and boom, your machine fits into a 1x2 footprint. Now, as mentioned before as well, however, it seems the trend goes towards encouraging train splitting to run multiple machines, not necessarily simultaneously, from the same source. This is where transmissions and clutches, maybe even brakes come in. However, those only work horizontally. So assuming you want to put a transmission and brake on your quern, you need to turn horizontally before the ground to put those and then turn back vertically to connect to the quern, turning your design into a minimum of 1x4 footprint. Probably more like 1x6 because angle gears don't always work connecting directly to anything other than axles so you might need to add extra axle blocks to the bends. All of this when you non-negotiably have so much vertical axle that you could just slap it on, if only the game let you. Time to fix this. Edited June 24 by Rainbow Fresh
Demoncyborg Posted June 24 Report Posted June 24 2 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said: Feature 1: Spur gears are to be aligned with the middle of the block and be made pass-through, allowing easy splitting of a power train in both directions of the original axle without ending the main axle. It was mentioned here that spur gears were meant to do that in the first place, just that it didn't make it for that update u.u hopefully we get that as soon as it's ready!
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