Introducing Minecrafts Precision TnT Cannon 

This is what 7 year old me dreamed about when I first started playing the game and a decade later cubicmetre is making it a reality in vanilla. This is actual Minecraft rocket physics

Using linear algebra and calculus to fire a tnt cannon, nice

I guess the next logical step would be using 2 of these cannons on different fuse timings to redirect the tnt after it gets to a certain point.

we are now 1 step closer to building real life militaries in minecraft

Reminds me of WW1 and WW2 artillery, where they had some tables that had written on them settings and coordinates for operating the machinery, this was how they did it before the use of computers

actually finding the right setting for a cannon becomes very intuitive after you shot it for some hours

Ancient Rome : Bring me the cannon Cubicmetre : Let me introduce you to Minecrafts Smart Artillery..

The most shocking thing in this video is that you can afford Matlab and can actually code in it too

For the asymmetry issue, couldn't you add a second payload option that comes from the opposite side? Then make a 4th setting that tells you whether to fire the left or right payload

Can you make sentry towers for a castle that automatically aim and fire tnt at the outside world using an underground skulk sensor array buffered with a layer of obsidian?

And then he said "Its simply calculus" and started morbin'

Very interesting! The important step now is to combine this technique of controlling where shots will land with the Railgun presented in your last Video and you have got yourself what WarGear players would call a "Schwenk-Stich" or "Shifting Stab-Cannon". The possibilities truely are endless.

Technical minecraft is amazing, also love the idea of having loads of these side by side with 3 players in charge of each cannon yelling numbers, setting values and firing. The implications for the technology will surely make the imaginary minecraft wars more bloody.

Wow! At first it's precision timing of TNT for a straight trajectory, and now it's becoming 3 dimensional!

I like it very much that the rest of the world is now starting to look at tnt. There is the wargear scene, which is currently completely German, where people are in teams trying to build the best cannons together and then build them into so-called wargears. "Wargears" are fighting machines equipped with cannons and shield technology, sometimes even automatic cannons, which are then used to compete against other teams in tournaments. There is a fixed set of rules to guarantee fairness. For example, any block that has a higher tnt resistance than endstone is forbidden, and dispensers may not be used for tnt. In tournaments, the redstone blocks are replaced by endstone for every spectator except for the own team to prevent the theft of cannons. It's really cool every year in the "WargearLiga" to see what the teams have built, sometimes thousands of hours on their cannons, and to see which one wins best. There are currently 2 servers in the Wargear scene. Although the Wargear scene has existed for over 8 years, it unfortunately only has around 200 active players to date, I think because it is simply too difficult and complicated for most. If anyone has any questions just write or send me a message. Have fun building 👍 By the way, you play completely in Vanilla without mods.

I'd love to see a similar concept used to create a very simple world eater.

If you combine this with what you accidentally discovered making your railgun, when it bore a perpendicular hole, it could expand your aiming even more. Imagine being able to precisely aim that kind of railgun shot blasting a long hole through things around corners

This is such a cool project. It is an essence of Minecraft. Love this game, and never underestimate its possibilities. Never underestimate the pure genius of Minecrafters. Because then instead of creepers you'll be scared of smart artillery.

Just ran across this channel today, love it so much. I always loved redstone videos, but much more the technical aspect of things versus just tutorials and such. Thanks cubic!

preciate the showcase cubic! crazy invention as always

If you had two of these cannons would it be possible to have the explosion of the first tnt propel the second tnt around corners or behind walls? Edit: Cannons like this already exist but it would be cool to see Cubic or someone operationalise the concept into a cannon that has adjustable trajectories.

Honestly this was my best present for my birthday so far

Every time I watch your videos I learn something new about Minecraft. Keep up the good work!

This brings Minecraft artillery even closer to how real life fire control works

Loved the quote by Sun Tzu! Fits so well considering you're standing next to an aimable sentry gun. PS: When guitar solo?

I think a design like this could really benefit from tnt minecarts as they explode on impact, removing the fuse limitation which could expand the range of the cannon by quite a lot.

this is the video that made me subscribe. As someone currently studying engineering, seeing the implementation of math and matlab for minecraft was quite interesting.

Ah yes, Sun Tzu, he truly engineered how to think during a war.

Do you think you can aim a tnt towards another tnt mid air to change it's trajectory? Like you fire a bunch for tnt that actually contains the payload and propellent.

This is beautiful. Thank you for sharing all of these formulas. I recognize now how I could potentially utilise this to create a longer range cannon that would still have an adjustable field of fire.

Cubicmetre taking "This will be useful in later in life" to a whole another level.

truly a genius concept. insane execution

What if you had a payload on either side of the water stream and you could choose from which side to fire for more control

This brings back memories from our insane faction cannons, custom built to each base.

Top notch engineering! As a kid I dreamt about something like this when playing arround with TNT cannons and redstone because I knew it was possible. Only difference was I wanted to use a redstone computer for the ballistic calculations. Sadly I was missing the skills at the time. Thank you for doing this! I feel like I've finally found a good reason to play games again. Which I really missed in my life...

Since your working with projectiles, could you design an arrow launcher to kill the dragon upon entering the end? Dragon always spawns at same coords and the design could be useful for speedrunning to elimate all end RNG (faster then 0 cycle or waiting for perch)

I feel like if someone uses this a lot, at some point they could eyeball the numbers needed to hit targets

12:24 I completely understand, and it made perfect sense to me even without explanation. However... this sentence is extraordinary. "It's actually surprisingly simple."

This is very elegant. Three timers translated into xyz coordinates through a mix of observation and calculation, no obscure tricks. I especially like that all calculations (except for calculating the distances) only need to be performed once, as the input values are discrete. This makes using it simple even without the mod.

Now I want to see a multi-blast-chamber design that uses one cannon and several independent item collection basins for simultaneous but separate operations. Running a tree farm, a cobble farm, and a concrete blaster at once from one nucleation point would be really cool assuming you could systematically automate repeated fire and timing sets

Wake up babe, new Minecraft warfare just dropped

You are the only person in history to ever say "this is simply calculus."

I love how you gave us the tools to improve your design

Another video that I can't understand but still watches cuz its cool

This is absolutely amazing, now for the real question. Could this be combined with the railgun from previous video?

This is just awesome! I use TNT cannons in CTM maps where resources are scarce, so it's hard to find info about advanced cannons which are actually usable to me. But this is exactly what I've been looking for!!

I so happy to see cannon beeing bring back in 2023 and with SO MUCH COOL MATH, nice job mate!!!

dont say it... DONT SAY IT... guess you can say its a... smartillery.

Would it be viable to program it to blow up an area?

Man this is really insane! Keep rocking!

I have never seen this before until now, amazing!

News headline next week: "WaveTech server approves Ukraine military funding package of 37 MSAs (Minecraft Smart Artillery)"

So what I am seeing is that this is a masterpiece of redstone technologies, that is also a dream of every kid that played Minecraft 10 years ago?

You know you found the technical side of minecraft when the guy brings out matlab plots xD Nice video!

2:58 The Engineer from TF2 truly is the SunTzu of our lifetime "The answer? Use a gun. And if that don't work, use more gun."

This is awesome! When I clicked on the video, I thought it was probably gonna be some complicated thing having to do with exploiting some bug in Minecraft, but it's actually pretty simple! Makes me want to try to make one, maybe with an alternate payload source on the left side, expanding the area available on that side. Glad I'm a student so I have access to matlab lol

This could be the end of the world eater we know today. No need for a giant flying machine, just a very precise autocanon that is quickly dispensing TNT from one position to a predefined pattern and making a giant hole of a specific shape and depth. It is time to supersize, cubicmeter!

Imagine the amazing(ly destructive) things we could make by combining this with Create Aeronautics airships!

Never have ai ever thought I'd hear someone use the terms precision targeting, and force multipliers in a minecraft video.

Now we just need an academic journal of applied math in Minecraft for you to publish this to

Yeah, I was trying for years to build something like this. But not being a big Minecraft person, I just couldn’t get the timing right beyond a handful of horizontal and vertical presets that needed different timing to reach the same distance. I never once thought about using water to alter the angles, goddamn engineering genius. The math isn’t that hard if you know what you’re doing, but knowing what you’re doing is easier said than done. Still, even without calculus, it should be doable for someone who finished high school. Although that could be my years of crying over intermediate level calculus problems talking. So your mileage may vary. The coding and modeling is genius tier though, MatLab is pretty easy, but that’s a lot of complicated steps to make work explained in an incredibly straightforward manner. Thank you so much! This is a dream come true for me!

this cannon is already so cool, yet it is just a proof of concept. i can't wait to see further design changes and optimisations made to improve this cannon type!

Amazing! As a maths student and Minecraft player this is the best video I have seen in a while

Seeing this contraption is very cool, I once attempted to create a tnt cannon with variable range and direction, I managed to get 12 "range" options that could be combined with different block heights for the tnt payload giving me enough customization for my needs.

I have been waiting for this!

This is absolutely brilliant!

This has got to be one of the coolest things I've ever seen

Just found this channel, love for tf2 and love for really cool technical minecraft builds and explanations; im in love!

Wow, so complicated and so cool. I never tought this is gonna be posible.

Love the engineering that goes on in some of these videos

A small but extreme smart machine. Never thought I would see calculus put to work to solve problems in Minecraft

student: "Man why do i have to learn calculus and trigonometry' Teacher: 'lets watch a minecraft video'

WOW That is really impresive!

I have a challenge for you: shooting around corners. That smart artillery seems to be consistent and precise enough to launch a payload (henceforth: redirection payload) + a projectile to be redirected mid air. It should theoretically be possible but to simplify, you could build a prototype that only shoots straight, and then just varies the position of the redirection payload in relation to the position of the projectile at that point in time. Using entity tick control like the extreme rail gun tnt cannons do, should allow you to fire a payload so large (actually probably not that big) that just 1 tick of delay between the launched payload and the actual projectile exploding should be enough to get a very large point cloud of possible coordinates. Taking the smart artillery approach would leave you with 5 degrees of freedom for the limited prototype: 1. ignition delay of projectile 2. x position of redirection payload in relation to the projectile 3. y position of redirection payload -||- 4. z position of redirection payload -||- 5. ignition delay between the static payload and the redirection payload + projectile. This would, theoretically, allow you to hit any coordinate in a sphere with a radius depending on the size of the redirection payload, at a set offset away from the cannon in the direction it is facing depending on the size of the payload. Also yes I just noticed there's a major caveat in this. When reaching for medium distances, bullet drop takes effect. Now this is sorta counter-acted by the fact that both the redirection payload and the projectile has the same ballistic arc, but it will still mean that you have to vary the size of the initial payload (and increase d.o.f. 5) to compensate. But still doable! (theoretically). Now, for actually building the prototype, I think dropping the redirection payload into a 3m^3, alining it with pistons/water streams/water-elevators/!water-elevators (I've seen Ilmango do some crazy entity alignment magic) and then dropping the projectile tnt into this space timed with the explosion of the payload is a valid way to go. I know a limited version is possible, but getting that full 360 degree sphere is probably going to take a whole lot of math and timing.

This is the first time i see Matlab being actually useful, and I had a whole semester of it

You got my respect for using Saxton Hale's legs and torso + Engineer's quote, fellow TF2 player

So you obtained a closed form solution for the ballistics of the payload TNT. Impressive. I have been working on a research project in real life where the ballistics of an axisymmetric projectile is solved iteratively. The 6 DOF equations of motion are 12 coupled differential equations that are solved simultaneously. MATLAB solving is simple but I'll have to see what happens when I try this on a microcontroller haha

This is impressive. Also the SunTzu interaction was funny as hell 😂

Beautiful y-simple curve. This is amazing ‼️

Who knew this would be the beggining of a journey that lead to a TNT nuke, insane!

This is ingenious. I love it.

This is awesome! I love math, and its super cool to see it being applied here. The next step: make a smart TNT railgun!

Letting the RU-vid alg know I want to see more of these videos

The next thing we need is intercepting tnt cannons. (if you use command blocks for real time position tracking of any projectile and a ton of math).

Thank you for motivating me to do my intro to numerical methods homework🙏

This is insane! I don't think it will be as useful in an attacking pvp scenario since it will take a while to set up, but this might be fun to use within a castle wall!

Wow thats really smart. Good job.

Its funny because about a mounth ago i had a test in matlab, well actualy in octave that is a free and open source version that uses the same language. And i had to do quite a similar thing. Very well done.

Using MATLAB to model Minecraft mechanics... never thought I'd see the day! Most impressive.

VERY interesting concept!

Next step: this combined with the raingun. I would love to see the planning process of this. Your video reminds me of and old series called Minecraft over engineering which was very advanced for that time (10 years ago)

Cubicmetre, you just earned the title "Professor in Minecraft sciences" and if that title does not exist, it should... just for you ;-)

Excellent video as usual ! I was thinking about something but maybe it can't work : instead of push the "bombshell" tnt with piston and water, do a vertical set above the system, this set can allow us to make fall down multiple TNT at the same time on a specific block. However it would be less precise but the extra damage would cover this inaccuracy. (Sorry for bad english I wish you understand what I mean)

Bro really derived the guidance and control laws for a minecraft TnT cannon.

“if you’re not sure what i’m talking about, this is simply calculus!”

This is very cool, but it isn't destructive enough! I made a primitive full-auto aimable TNT Cannon a few years ago. It fires as fast as comparator clocks pulse, but the fuze time of the projectile is always the maximum. It used multiple propellant locations that could be toggled on or off to aim where it shot. Maybe there's a way to do this more elegantly that can shoot at more than just 20 or so different points. There might be a way to make it shoot faster, too, I'm still very new to zero-ticking and such.

Amazing, we are waiting for more "Smart" thing such as this.

Nice! Here’s an idea for an improvement: make the timer re-usable. This timer moves the items like it does now, but then, after firing, moves the items back into the timers, like a self-flipping hourglass! The beauty of this is that, if you are targeting the same spot; you don’t need to make any changes. No re-stocking the timers! Subtle changes are just subtle! Even more advanced would be having buttons that add or remove items, allowing you to configure the cannon from the front! So, a “controll panel” at the front has “fire”, as well as 2 rows of 3 inputs (note lock variety probally), each row modifying colum controlling one timer, the top row increasing by one item, the bottom decreasing. A “ready to fire” light turns on when no timing items are in movement. That means the timers have reset from your previous fire, and your adjustments have been accepted and done! You can’t fire while that lights off. The only major flaw is if you adjust the timer too quickly, it might over or under adjust since your input is just letting items through. To avoid that, always wait at least a half second before adjusting again! (Unless you want to make a counter that it then uses to change the timer…

me: but when am i ever gonna use calculus in my everyday life? my math teacher:

this is the coolest minecraft video i've ever seen.