Well, people were wondering how I made all the movable parts in this craft stable so I decided to share a few of the rules for Piston and Rotor placement that I went by.


The first rule for using pistons is to not use pistons. If there is any reasonable way to use rotors instead I would highly recommend you to do that. If you take a look at the landing gear brake I build in the back of the Pathfinder, you'll notice the landing gears sit on rover arms instead of pistons even though a piston construction would have been way easier.

Pistons in SE are incredibly bad at handling transverse forces and torques.
The only two points at which you should ever really use pistons in SE is if

1. The weight attached to them is miniscule compared to what the piston can handle.
   
2. They are used in such a way that they only ever have to handle tensile (and to a lesser extend compressive) forces.
   
   The only reason that piston chain on the drill works stable is because gravity is pulling the drills down and putting the pistons under slight tension.

Rotors have gotten way more stable during the last months to the point where in single player you can use them pretty much without having to be afraid of stuff breaking if you know how to place them correctly. Basically if you have a rotor construction that would work in real life it will also work in SE.

Some general rules:

• Make sure the object attached to the one end of the rotor does not touch the object attached to the other end of the rotor. There should always be a slight gap.
  You can use the offset setting, the rotation limits and stuff like blast door blocks and flat sloped armor blocks to accomplish this. (The same rule goes for pistons too btw.)
  
  
• Attaching stuff to multiple rotors will make it more stable, but you have to make sure there is no tension.
  For example the drilling rig on the Pathfinder is attached with rotors on both sides. However, in order to avoid wiggly effects and weird phantom forces I had to make sure the two rotors are neither compressing the rig between them (too high offset), nor pulling on it from both sides (too low offset)
  In order to pull this off correctly the distance between each rotor block and the block attached to it has to be exactly the distance of two blocks in a normal grid. Sadly the setting you have to use is different for the different rotor types.
  
  On small ships rotors the offset has to be 0 (straightforward, huh)
  On large ship normal Rotors the offset has to be -40cm (-0.4)
  On large ship Advanced Rotors the offset has to be -20cm (-0.2)
  
  If in doubt it's usually better to make the offset a bit too low rather than a bit too high.
  
  
• Normal Rotor bases have a rectangular hitbox (I think), while Advanced Rotor bases have a cylindrical hitbox. This means that sometimes you can do stuff with Advanced Rotors that you cannot do with normal Rotors. For example the entry ramp of the Pathfinder's front Garage would not be possible like that with normal rotors.
  This comes at the price of only having a single connection point on the back though as opposed to one on every side.
  
  
• Just in case you didn't know this trick, if you want to easily attach one grid to multiple rotors, just destroy the rotor head of one of them, build the object, place a rotor head block on it and attach it to the rotor again.
  Make sure you chose the correct offset settings for both rotors in before, or weird stuff can happen.
  
  
• If you are approaching max speed all rotors and pistons will get more problematic. This is why multi-grid builds usually works better on ground vehicles than on ships.
  You can make most of them still work though using the auto-lock feature. An important rule here is that the further a connected grid is from the center of mass of your craft, the lower the speed for locking has to be.
  
  Do not use the lock-override function unless you know what you are doing. 99% of the time it will do more harm than good. There are exceptions though.

Landing gears can be useful to lock down movable objects of your craft while in motion.

The important thing about a connection with landing gear is that it is completely 100% unmovable. This can be both good and bad. On the one hand an object secured with landing gear will not explode anything while locked. On the other hand it also means that tensions which evolve while the landing gear is locked can suddenly discharge the moment it unlocks and destroy everything in the process.

Especially if you have several objects connected to each other with landing gear there can be massive problems.

For example I originally locked down the Pathfinders drilling rig tower in horizontal position using landing gear. However, this meant that the ships on the Pathfinder, the Pathfinder itself, the rig tower, and the drill heads where all locked together with landing gears in a chain.
Sometimes the entire rig would just spazz out and explode once I detached one of them.
As a workaround I decided to just lock it in place instead by attaching/ detaching a rotor to it's head. The connection is slightly less stable, but still more than stable enough and without the spazzing problem.



I really hope this helped and if you have any questions or crafts for me to take a look at and give tips on just write a comment below.