Subscribe to download
Dragonfly

The idea was to have a solar powered drill ship, that can fold back its wings and subsist on battery while mining.

In practice, it's too fragile and has a hard time charging batteries from solar energy alone, but I still like how it looks during the folding/unfolding animation.

So the solar panels are mounted on rotors, which are controlled by a programmable block, which is run every second by a timer block. The sensor block I put in the action bar is not used for its sensing capabilities, but merely as a switch button: You toggle it, and by testing its state, the programmable block knows if you want the wings to be open or closed.

Later I found out that by grouping rotors and using "inverse" and "on/off" from the action bar, the panel deployment can be controlled as well if not better than with the programmable block. Use the second action bar for that.

As with any construction using stacked rotors, it wriggles a bit. And sharp turns will cause the panels to clap. Be careful, solar panels are quite fragile. The wing attachment points are 1 block too close, so panels overlap a tiny bit.

There's also a piston mounted landing gear, that retracts and extends with the wings. Because there was no interface to check autolock state, instead the program keeps on trying to lock the gear when unfolding/ed, and unlock when folding/ed.

The LCD mounted on the top is useful for debugging. It may have been fixed by now, but when they were introduced, using LCD caused crash and instabilities to Space Engineers. You may grind the LCD, the program will carry on. Destruction of other elements, such as the rotors or landing gear, would on the other hand make the program block's script stop with error.

Projectors do not support ships with different grids (such as parts attached via rotor and piston), and the placement, settings and naming of rotors are too tricky to be redone from scratch, so currently this blueprint can only be imported in creative. Though you could switch back to survival once the ship is in your world.

The batteries are charged and the cargo containers are filled with enough component for a small base (such as refinery, furnace, assembler, reactor, large container, and a few tubes), so that it may be used a spawn ship.