@C_D_W..... There's nothing to update - sadly that's just how projectors work. Ever since Alpha 1.0 they can only project the main grid, not any attached subgrids.
It's still possible to build this in Survival mode though.
The way to do it is to build each of the sub-grids separately, then attach them together manually using the piston & rotor attach tricks.
You'll first need to paste the whole truck into a Creative Mode world, then disassemble it and take blueprints of each of the sections.
See the description for a link to a piston trick tutorial I made that can help. Also check through the comments, as I've been asked this question many times - there are answers in there.
If you need more info after that just drop me another comment & I'll explain in more detail.

hey,
is there any Update, because the Projektor just Projekts the Base of the Drill

How deep does she go when drilling? I'm using a mod that's spawns ores between 50 to 1200m deep so I'm wondering what my options are for large scale mining

Set up my base to utilize the bottom connector, only to find that there is a rather large bush growing through the armor plates. The innuendo is too good.

All jokes aside, loving this W.H.O.R.E. in my current survival game. I can't wait to see what the next iteration looks like!

I'll try not to disappoint!

EEEE! Exciting! Cant wait.

I'll certainly consider doing a re-model. This has been a popular truck, so it'd be nice to give it a new lease of life at some point & bring it up to spec with the game. I'll see what I can do eh. Probably wont be for a while though, as I have a backlog of other stuff to get published first.

@cptsavarus Considering how much more stable pistons and rotors are maybe this can get a rework too. :)
Im gonna try build a functional one in survival for now, but please build a pretty one! this rig is extremely nice in design and function

@Assistant Supervisor... sorry but right now there's no small-grid version. Only what you see on my workshop. When I built this, the same in small-grid was impossibly unstable. Now things are much more stable with small grids I might try again. No promises though.


@Opu... thanks very much! I'm glad you enjoy them. They're a lot of fun to build.
Regards your question, I honestly can't remember. It's been a while now since I made this. From what I do remember, the "lower" funtion had to be slowed down to avoid the truck slamming into the ground too fast & damaging itself. I also remember that a game update at some point caused the timers to not work correctly & that I kind of gave up trying to fix them.

Do you happen to have a Small ship version of this?
Not the same scale, obviously, but a mini one?
This mining rig would be perfect if it was a small ship for something i want to do.

Huge fan of your work, love building these and getting to learn all the little quirks with attaching multiple threads together, you're a true genius for figuring them out!

Just a quick question about the timers on the suspension:
Suspension Lower 2 has the setup action toolbar of Suspension Actual followed by Suspension Lower 1 - Start (which I assume means it cycles though the whole stopping of the raise suspensions every time before continuing to actually lowering)
Suspension Raise 2 however has the setup of Suspension Actual followed by Suspension Raise 2 - Start (meaning it doesn't repeat Raise 1 every time)
I timed the Lower to take ~85seconds, whereas Raise takes ~37seconds
Just wondering if this was intentional to prevent any potential unnecessary bounces and bumps with it going too fast, or is it fine to not repeat Lower 1 every cycle?

Cheers,
Opu

HOW DO I GET THE ORE OUT OF IT

Part 1 of a 3 part tutorial series to help you learn the tricks necessary to build this truck:
Sir Pistonalots' Piston Palace: Piston Tricks Tutorial
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1686546277

Parts 2 & 3 coming very soon.

@Grimm... Got you covered! I'm putting together a series of interactive tutorial / scenario things as we speak to help people learn how to build my stuff.

There will be 3 of them to cover building this truck, though they'll also help teach how to build other things.
2 are "interactive museum exhibit" style mini-games. The 3rd will be a full hands-on building tutorial in a "provided-for" survival world where you'll follow in-game instructions to complete whichever stage of construction you need to learn.

The first one (pistons & merge blocks - 90% of this truck) is already finished and should be on the workshop within a few hours. Once that's up I'll get to work on the other 2.

Hopefully there'll also be a video to follow shortly after that.

I'd appreciate a run through as well as I really want to give this a try in survival. Some ores are pretty deep now.

@Mechanidroid... No problem! As you can see, it's quite an involved build in survival with all the pistons & sub-grids. It *is* possible to do, though a full explanation would be too lengthy for the comments section.
I used to have a full instruction page posted here but it was out of date & needed re-writing, so I took it down. Have been meaning to get round to re-doing it, so will make a start today.

In the meantime I've accepted your F/R, so feel free to PM me and I'll walk you through it a bit at a time. Best to start with the thing that's immediately holding up your progress & cover the rest as & when you get to it - saves overloading on all the info at once.

I can't always reply to chat messages immediately but will respond whenever I can.

hey would love a quick run through on what I need to do to get it working on survival

@DAM... A good suggestion!
Sadly I don't have the software (or time) to make videos, more to the pity (I'd love to be able to make vids of my builds!)
I did used to have a guide posted here on how to build the subgrids in Survival mode but it was out of date & needed re-writing, so I took it down.

I'll try to get around to writing a new guide soon, though I'm being inundated with requests for updates & all sorts right now, what with so many new players buying the game & seeing my work, so it may be a while before I get the time to write it all up.

In the meantime, if you have questions of your own, feel free to ask them & I'll do my best to answer.

@cptsavarus It would be really great to read or see (maybe a video) a short explanation about you usined subgrids in the miner.

ok, I'll check and see if it does the same thing in single player tomorrow

@ [ ] Ahh... that could explain it then. If you're playing on someone elses server, the admins may have disabled multi-piston rigs. They do that to reduce lag & improve performance. Builds like this one can also be highly unstable in MP, owing to MP being generally more unstable to begin with. Not a lot I can do to fix that really & sorry to say I know of no way to improve stability in MP.
Try pasting it into an offline / SP world & let me know if you have the same problem. If you do We'll look into it more.

@Kiyoshi... Yes, there is a way around it. For the drills, basically the easiest way is to build the subgrids manually (without the projector) The method is complicated & kind of tricky; and I probably wouldn't recommend you attempt it just yet if you're a brand new player, as it deals with some pretty advanced jiggery - but I'd be happy to explain it to you if you want to try.
Fair warning, it's a steep learning curve & takes a LOT of explaining - and it may not make complete sense to begin with. It'll also take me a while to type it up. Let me know if you want it & I'll get to work on it.

as for deleting the piston, the head just continues to act normally (well as normal as a detached head can)

yes, I am playing with experimental mode turned on (I like to use a few mods such as fletchers) but I was on a MP everytime I have built it so far

@[ ] I think I know what you're describing. That's definitely not normal for this build though.
You *are* playing with experimental mode turned on, right? The pistons use force settings that are unstable outside of experimental mode. You need to enable it in order to use them...
From the main menu, go to Options / Game and check the box.

If it's not that then it sounds like you may be seeing a bug in your world. How old is the save file? If it was created before the last update (in this case the recent beta test) then there's a chance it could be corrupted. Separated pistons is often an indicator of a corrupted save.

What happens if you delete the piston (not the head, just the piston body)? Does the head snap into position like it's rubber-banding?

for each level three of the piston heads will be seperated from the piston*

no when they connect the piston head gets seperated from the piston when I merge them together, same thing happens when I paste it into the world, for the drill three of the piston heads will be disconnected and one will stay connected

So new to space engineers....when I try to load this up in my projector in survival mode it tells me that multiple grids are not supported....is there a way around this?

@[ ]... When you say "plop it down" do you mean the pistons separate when you paste the truck as a complete thing?
If so, that shouldn't be happening. Everything should be connected if you paste it in complete.

As I understand it, there's a (relatively new) bug with Merge Blocks right now which might be causing you problems when building the truck from scratch in survival mode.
Sometimes the Merge Blocks just don't merge.
I'm sure it'll be fixed with tomorrows Survival update but for now it's a pain in the @rse & we just have to put up with it.

If the light on your Merge Blocks is anything but green, they're not connected.

If it's yellow or white, extend the piston to full & retract it again. Sometimes it can take several attempts before the Merge Blocks work like they're supposed to.
Red obviously means unpowered - but that shouldn't normally be a problem.

Question, How did you get all the pistons to stay together, when ever I try to plop it down or manually build the drill and stabiliser they just detach after I merge them together?

That's why I gave up using mods, especially for my workshop stuff. Used to have about 60 modded builds on here. Keeping that lot working after every weekly update was hell! One mod goes down & half your work is borked.
Maybe I'll go back to mods when there's no more updates coming but to be honest since I did away with the mods I actually prefer building in vanilla.

At least it was a simple fix. Incoming version looks like it will break a number of mods... again

Hey @Vorg - if you're still reading, I tested it and had the same problem you reported, so good shout!
The stone has all been removed. No idea how so much of it got in there to begin with but it's gone now & the truck pastes in fine with no 'splodyness. It actually bounces really nicely when it hits the ground now.

Pro tip if you want some laughs with it - If you adjust the timers that control the raising / lowering of the suspension you can make it bunnyhop like a lowrider!

Thanks again for the report. Let me know if you have any more problems with it.

I participated in the first 2 test betas but not the latest one. From the info posted it looks like there were many small changes this time round but it's hard to know if anything that'd affect this particular build.
It should totally not be blowing huge craters though. That's not normal!

Trouble with the beta tests is... well there's not a lot of point trying to adjust existing builds to work with them, since chances are by the time the finalised update rolls out, everything will have changed again & the stuff you think you're fixing just ends up more broken than ever.
Easier just to wait til the update, then fix stuff once & for all.

Will look into this crater-blowing though. That's definitely never been a problem before. What could Keen possibly have broken this time?!

Might be a change with 1.189. One explosion sent the rock over onto the premade base. Another try was on the lake to get a flat area and it made a crater big enough to to put several trucks in. blasted the ice out all the way down to dirt. Problem is, testing is over and they make you jump through a lot of hoops to maybe keep it in single player offline only with steam in offline mode.

Strange. Never had any issue with it before. Have tried dropping it from quite high up and the suspension always did a great job of stopping any damage - as long as it lands on all 4 wheels that is.

Good info though, so thanks for the report!
No idea why it has stone in it but I'll remove that & have a look at the suspension settings while I'm at it.
Perhaps there's been some changes in one of the updates that's causing the suspension to work differently to when I set it up.
I haven't tested this build in any of the beta test versions, so could be that the change is being made there.

Will have to go through & update all my WS blueprints when the survival update rolls out anyway, so will mark this one down for thorough re-testing. Can't have my stuff not working properly - that just aint right!

Thanks again for the report & glad you got it figured out

Yes. it was the testing branch. And it was the Earth start under custom tab.

Got one to spawn mostly intact and it does have stone in it. I think the problem is, it makes the truck heavy, so it's near impossible to spawn at the right distance to the ground that it doesn't hit too hard. Spawning with wheels just touching, is too high, Seems to need to be lower whit wheels clipping a bit. That shows hit box (square for the wheels) below ground, but overall, the bounding box stays green. Need to try lowering to just where it turns read and back off. Seems to me that would cause a problem with wheels spawning in the ground though.

@Vorg... Not to my knowledge. It should be empty. I'll double check for you but even if it does have cargo on board, that shouldn't be causing it to explode.

I'll do some testing & see if I can spot any obvious problems. In the meantime could you provide more detail? What planet you're playing on, how high above the ground you're spawning it, etc. Screenshots would be helpful if you have the time to grab some.

Also, are you playing the beta test version of SE or stable branch?
If you're in the beta test then I can't guarantee anything will work - there may be new bugs introduced by that version that I'm unaware of; or that change the way pistons / rotors work.
If in stable branch it should work fine. I've had no problems with it in the past & no reports til now.

Will investigate but any additional info you can provide would be useful.

I tried several times to spawn this in a creative world to look at it and it explodes making a large crater/ Also found a large stone near by. Did you BP it with cargo full of stone?

That's good to know. I've had that thing sitting in my blueprints for ages & have somehow never gotten around to putting it through its paces. It's too cool of an idea to unsub & every so often I feel the urge to test it out but for some reason I'm put off by the config malarky. Silly I know. I'm sure the urge will be strong enough one day. Maybe by then it'll work better!

If it's not much good at getting OUT of holes though... perhaps it might make an ok tunnelling machine if you wanted to tunnel all the way through a hill. Just set it going & eventually it comes out the other side. Don't know if it can be made to work like that. It'd have to eject everything as it went but unless you're actually going for ore, it'd just be stone, so no huge loss.

I loved the concept of the Octopus. Unfortunately for me it never worked as intended. Auto-dock: 10/10, finding surface ores and mining them: 10/10, finding deeper ore and mining it: 10/10, getting out of a 20m deep hole: 0/10. It just can't get straight down and trying to get it up out of the hole always was far more work than everything it was able to do. But the script is marvelous. Hell, that guy was the first I knew who aligned the miner to the center of the planet - even if the outcome wasn't that good, maybe because of the drill shaking. I don't know. But I gave it up because my drones were 10times faster without "automatic mining". In fact I still have to see a really working automated atmo-miner.

Yep, that's the one I was talking about. Looks like the same guy has published a bulldozer to go with it. Have subbed but not checked them out yet. Hoping I'll get some good ideas from those though.

Hadn't really thought about doing anything with an arm control script to be honest. Not a bad idea that. Thanks! I've looked at a couple of those scripts but so far haven't got around to playing with them in any of my own builds.

Got half an idea about using an autopilot script somehow. There's a cool auto-miner on the workshop called Octopus that uses one. Wondering if something similar could be done with a wheeled vehicle.

Enjoy the new cargo truck anyhow. More stuff on its way!

@cptsavarus no worries, sometimes I have other thing to do, too ;) And the Steam messaging system never was very reliable.

There's a road builder on the workshop, too. Digging in front and scratching beneath to level the road. Not sure what it's worth, downloaded the bp yesterday. A moveable drill is a nice idea. I think I got that. Bad thing that the remote control is not very usefull for wheeled miners (I tried with A.R.M.S., which is bulky and completely over the top for just getting a vehicle from point A to point B).

Now I have to look after your new cargo truck. Thanks for the info so far.

...cont'd... There's a truck on the workshop at the moment designed for drilling out roadways across the surface of planets. That one has drills that move up & down on pistons, which is the idea I've been working with. The only problem with any design being that the wheels will always follow the contour left by the drills.

The idea I have is for a vehicle with a free-floating drilling head that takes advantage of gravity to level itself. That way the wheels get to follow a path that's flat & level. Once they're on that path it's fairly easy to keep the thing drilling straight.

Hey @Marco! Sorry for the delayed response. For some reason I didn't get a notification of your post.
From what I can tell, the drilling angle depends on the height of the drills from the ground. If they're low down the vehicle will tend to dig itself downward, whereas if they're raised up it'll dig upward. Somewhere in the middle there's a magic height at which the vehicle should in theory dig straight forward.

The weight offset of the cargo containers can mostly be negated by increasing the wheel suspension.

The big trick is levelling the first few metres of the terrain so the tunnel starts off straight. If it starts off at an angle at all, things tend to only get progressively worse from there. The easiest way to do it is by starting with the vehicle on an ice lake & drilling into the "shore" line....

I have a script which does nothing but gravity alignment through gyro-override. Was meant for a frigate, no idea if and how it works on a wheeled miner. Works fine on a flying miner, though.

Maybe putting the cargoes at the very back end of the truck and a conveyor sorter draining stuff at once out of the drills backward? While I'm still not sure if the drills themselves tend to drill downwards or if it's the weight balancing of the truck.

I had the idea to use the w.h.o.r.e. backwards, but than the drills are too high above ground.
Actually I'm working with a drill-train that lays its own trails with projector and welder, but that thing is slow as hell and fails more often than it works. And with my lack of patience I tend to use stuff from other people rather than working hours on own projects...

Thanks for sharing your testing info @Marco. I've not tested it with that much weight on board before, so is good to have an idea of its limits.

Yeah, I've been trying to come up with a solid design for a horizontal tunnelling machine similar to the W.H.O.R.E. As yet I don't have one that both works and looks good but I'll keep trying until I nail it. As you found out, the biggest problem is keeping the tunnel straight & not digging downward.
I'm working on a vehicle that can level itself to the planets gravity field... if I can nail a compact design that does that then I'll be able to solve the problem of keeping the tunnel straight.
After that, having the machine build tunnel walls behind it shouldn't be too difficult.

@Ranger Uhm, I'm working with 10x inventory and I never dared to fully load that thing as the parking break is still the first to give up. So I normally go back home after 2 drill runs. Had to pull out the stabilisers as an emergency break once, that taught me a lesson - total weight was way over 1000 tons and the parking break didn't hold the truck on a smooth hill. Btw exploding landing gears can make a LOT of damage...

Tried a tunneldigger just before I wrote the previous comment, as I had to dig a tunnel (duh!). That thing is in the NeverComeBack-Alliance. With thrusters and gyros and what not, after 10m it goes downwards. And after a few meters already it isn't powerful enough to get out of it's own whole. Seems it is meant to build tunnels through the middle of Earth, not really what I had in mind for my train. I rather adapt the w.h.o.r.e. than try that thing again. Oh, could you make a tunnelwhore that digs and builds a tunnel behind it, preferably out of stone plates? Lol.

@Ranger... sorry to report there's a bug with the game right now that causes wheels to glitch into the ground for some people. It sounds like that's what you're seeing.
I've never experienced this bug myself, so not sure of how to fix it. You could try the forum & see if anyone there knows a solution.

The truck itself is tested to work fine with both cargo containers full to capacity on realistic inventory settings. Can't say for its max capacity on 3x and 10x settings but I'd imagine it'll carry a lot more than what I've tested it with.