I’ve been spending some time playing about with scripting in Space Engineers recently. My latest creation is a remotely controllable mining machine which uses a programmable block to allow user input to be used to control pistons. It also has a pan/tilt camera mechanism for checking everything is connected.
With this I don’t think I’ll be running out of ice anytime soon as it can crawl down the conveyor rail to go to any depth.
In order to make shipping the hydrogen produced by it easy I also designed a hydrogen tanker.
When this is on the ground the main engines can rotate downward to conteract gravity and then they can swivel to a vertical position once the ship is in a climb or in space.
Ths ship also features a jump drive so it can transport hydrogen between planets.
Scripting
In addition to the simple scripts I wrote for the ship and mining maching I’ve also been updating my status/airlock script to be much nicer looking using the sprite interface.
This allows viewing the quantities of hydrogen, oxygen, uranium and battery charge in an easy to see graphical format. This is much better then the text display I had before.
I also have airlock status displays so you can compartmentalise ships and stations and lock the door if one area is presurised and the other isn’t (which is great for making airlocks).
The next things I’d like to do is build a docking display script to make docking easier and some communication scripts to implement store and forward communications using laser antennas.
I recently bought Space Engineers on steam when it was discounted. It’s pretty much minecraft in space the object is to build ships and spacestations. Like Minecraft it has a survival mode and creative mode. In survival mode you have to mine asteroids for minerals which you can smelt down and assemble into components needed to build things and run nuclear reactors to generate power.