Space Engineers Large Custom Hangar Doors 

:) And may Clang never touch you with His Noodly Pistons. Amen.

Maybe I could borrow one of W4stedspace's old Lotus missile designs!

Not one but swarm. And not InterContinental Balisistic Missile but InterPlanetary Balistic Missile.

A comment from the man himself! Thanks, this was a lot of fun to build! I might try the horizontal merge blocks next time, see if that reduces the clang. It hasn't exploded yet, though. The airtight doors seem to jostle the doors into place for the merge blocks to do their thing.

@@Kurazarrh yup its janky but it works haha, also nice addition of the sensor opening a portion of the door for small ships, I really like that design!

We all start somewhere.

Thanks!!!

Nice! I'm glad this design continues to be useful and inspiring to other Space Engineers!

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed the build!

XD There's just no getting away from me!!!

You could try a door that rolls shut

I still like this idea though but try putting wheels on it. People build railed trains in this game that follow track and nobody (as far as I know) has tried a railed door on a remote control

Thank you! Unfortunately, this is as long of an explanation as I have available. The server I built it on is no longer around, and this is the only footage I have. You could check out Venon415's doors, which these were based on; their video(s) might be more in-depth, though I haven't seen them in... 4 years, so I really couldn't say whether they'd be what you're looking for.

Unfortunately this was on a server that stopped in 2019, and I don't have the save file anymore. Sorry!

Unfortunately this was on a server a couple years ago, and it's no longer running. :( We did end up putting multiple, vertically-stacked bays in there, with a diagonal tunnel that connected back to the original base. That tunnel had an automated small ship welding gantry and some additional bays, asking with some pressurized walkways and rooms. It was pretty sweet. And time consuming!

Haha, thanks for checking out my stuff! This is just a hobby for me, so I don't have a release schedule. I was trying to keep one for the Rimworld videos, but then my save file got corrupted, so it went the way of the dinosaur! Thanks for subscribing! I'll probably have another video sometime soon for the Space Engineers ship I'm working on.

@@Kurazarrh any word on that ship?

@@redstripedsocks5245 Still unfinished, unfortunately, but about 85% done. It's been sitting in drydock forever but I posted a WIP album on reddit a while back.

The reason I didn't do that is I wanted it to be airtight. Not that I ever pressurized it mind you but I wanted to have the option! :)

@@Kurazarrh the merge blocks are already on the outside though?, and technically the door and everything else would still be one grid, is just that rather than directly connecting the door's merge block to the frames merge block, you'd have another grid imbetween that is out of the way during opening and closing, just to further reduce risk of clang. Sure it would increase the open and closing times a little, and be a tiny bit kore complex, but the same purpose should still be accomplished, just safer. Plus if you wanted to include a more aesthetic aspect to it all, you would even make it look like one of those fancy rod mechanisms, like with vaults. And since the merge locks are already on the outside, everything should work the same as before. Unless there is something I'm misunderstanding, that it...

@@alexrog6868 Yeah this was already pretty complex, and since it was a co-op server, there wasn't much threat from my friends. Protecting the merge blocks wasn't really a concern.

@@Kurazarrh it just occurred to me that I should mention this, but thanks for actually replying to my comment, that's super cool, and I appreciate the exchange, even if a little brief

@@alexrog6868 Hey, sure thing! I like talking about this kind of stuff!

That's a world setting that you have to disable if you don't want to have to change them from station to ship every time you open them. It's the "Enable Unsupported Station" or something like that. It's been a while since I've played, so I don't recall the exact name of the option.

Thank you!

I wouldn't use this in a PvP environment anyway. But let's be real, armor in SE is only one step up from paper anyway, so no matter what, any hinge solution would become a liability. You could probably armor up the hinge a bit (carefully!) but if I got stuck in the hangar like that, I'd probably just pull a Danny Devito and start blasting!

@@Kurazarrh I've got an idea for a sliding remote control drone door. Build a rail system like how some people build trains but instead of a train it's just a slab of heavy armor with merge blocks or a frame that rolls into place and fills the gaps with hangar doors

@@noneyaonenoneyatwo2879 I considered the sliding doors, but the horizontal real estate wasn't something I felt like dealing with. I was actually designing this as a test run for similar doors in an asteroid. Which I never ended up building. lol

These actually are airtight due to a combination of the doors merging with the frame and the use of the hangar door blocks to complete the seal. Though it didn't matter in the end; the hangar itself was too large and the game refused to fill it with air!!

Thanks! And good luck!

Opening it too fast not only gives physics the middle finger... Physics gives the middle finger right back! Lol

This definitely took some trial and error. I had to build those struts a couple times before I got them to a place that worked well. Make sure they're not bumping into anything, have their strength high enough to push, and that they're connected to the doors far from the hinge. Also, "Unsupported Stations" needs to be turned off in the game settings.

Oh there were a few explains when I was building it, including one that crashed the server. Those rotors have big nukes hidden inside them!! You didn't actually want everything happening simultaneously, which is why I have timer blocks running everything. It's been so long, though, that I don't remember the specifics of how I built it.

@@Kurazarrh I will try to learn how to use timers, I have already forgotten how they work, but what I cannot achieve is making a rotor connect with another structure that floats, I have achieved it with magnetic plates but it does not seem very useful or functional to me.

There's a game setting for "Enable Unsupported Stations" that you have to turn off in order for this to work.

The double rotors are necessary in order to allow the merge blocks to connect. Two connected subgrids cannot be connected via merge blocks, but if there is a third grid separating the other two, then the merge blocks will work.

Got it. Thank you for your answer

I was wondering that myself. You could accomplish the same thing by using Landing Gear to magnetically keeping the hinge attached to the door. I've done it on a few of my doors and it does well. Your is plenty large enough that it wouldn't be an aesthetic issue using them. That said, based on how old the video is, having the second set of rotors probably helped to reduce Klang by acting as secondary buffers or shock absorbers. Especially since this was before the hitbox adjustment, and using merge blocks like that was a sensitive endeavor. Still is at times, and a lot of even the basic blocks still need hitboxes to be a touch smaller, as me current compact hanger door project can attest to, heh.

Build the doors fully connected to the base first (including the merge blocks), and then hook up the hinges on the outside (since it's got an extra grid in between the sets of rotors, it will let you connect the heads). And make absolutely certain that your rotors have no limits and set their torque to zero before you connect any heads. Once you have that all done, THEN you build the pistons. Again, set their strength modestly, ideally about 20% more than they need to just barely open the doors. And make sure to set their limits, as well. Once that's all done, you can remove all connecting blocks except the merge blocks (if you had any others) and test it. And pray to Clang when you do.

@@Kurazarrh did you ever run into a problem where once extending the pistons the door wouldnt budge at all?

Haha yep! I've significantly upgraded my audio since then! It's been a while since I checked, but pretty sure this is still my most-watched video. XD

@@Kurazarrh it is lol thats how i found it xD also, unrelated to this video, but have you ever thaught about doing a server like 2 towns?

@@V7I-theseventhsector Never heard of 2 towns, but I'm not likely to run a server anytime soon. I just don't have the time to be involved with it; or if I was, I wouldn't be able to keep my video schedule!

You can't attach one grid to a subgrid at two points, you're correct. However, if you have at least one more subgrid between the connection points, it works fine. The pistons on the doors are actually 3 pistons chained together (with rotors at either end), so there are 4 extra subgrids between the frame and doors. The hinges are similar, taking advantage of the same principle to have two connection points by going frame > rotor > hinge piece > rotor > door.

@@Kurazarrh Thanks. I need to think about it.

I may have copied your doors for a space base lol

Sadly, this was done on a server a long time ago in a decade far away, and in an old version of Space Engineers. It's actually fairly simple in concept, just... you know... Klang and all that.

The master speaks!!! Yea I've been trying to figure it out on my own managed to build a giant door with 8 rotor hinges and ended up lining the pistons up with merge blocks and dropping them into place. It kinda worked!!! For a minute. Now it doesn't.... idk what I did wrong it did open and close twice. Then a piston went boom. And I can't figure out how I got it to work loooooooool but it did!!! So that's a start I guess!! Hahaha

@Kurazarrh I think I got it!!!! I did not know about experimental mode and max impulse axis meters. That did it!!! I now have 2 doors!! Working in tandem. A little bumpy on retract and etract of the pistons but I can work with it!! Now just to figure out how to make them close basically evenly enough to build the airtight hanger doors around it and still have to incorporate merge blocks to make a seal. But I think I got it!!! Thanks for the awesome vid kurazarrh!!! Wicked!!

@@adarthurianlegendseso3902 Hey that's great to hear! Glad you were able to puzzle it out!

The original design by Venom415 also has the merge blocks rotated horizontally rather than connecting vertically. He said it seemed to work better that way, so I may have that a shot next time I do this kind of build.

Hey thanks! Unfortunately this was on a server from like, 2019, and it is gonezo. :(

@@Kurazarrh what a shame :( doing a underground project. this would be perfect, im useless with coding and tmings hehe. Thank you for answering

@@kin3tic16 Ah you're doing one, too? Nice, and good luck! The mechanical setup for this was really easy. No code at all, and the only timing was making sure it didn't open\close too fast and jump around.

Were your doors connected directly to the frame with a rotor?

It worked out really well! The original design by Venom415 used a combination of powered rotors aided by thrusters, but since rotors under tension have a tendency to detonate spontaneously, I took inspiration from my car's trunk struts! Thanks for checking it out!

That's correct! We were working on building out all the blocks in the crater to pressurize it, but never finished it. Also, spaces that are particularly huge like this hangar sometimes won't pressurize anyway. That may have gotten better in recent versions of the game, but I haven't played it since I recorded this video.

@@Kurazarrh I am not sure but I will try to run some tests on large spaces and see what kind of results I get

Also if anyone can tell me a mod that makes just steel blocks cheaper thatd be great cause the "Cheaper Blocks" mod is great but feels cheap

Actually the steel plates were the easiest part to get and keep stocked. We actually used a 20+ piston crane with a zillion drills rotating on the end to slowly bore into the moon, so we ended up with absolutely infinite amounts of stone to refine (and this was made in I think the first version of the game where you could get small amounts of some metals by refining stone... Iron, Silicon, Nickel, I think?). Then we used Isy's Inventory Manager script and tied all our refineries and assemblers to it (minus one each for custom work) and set a high quota on materials. I think we tried to keep a minimum of 10,000 steel plates around. In case you're not familiar with those scripts, they will automatically manage your inventory and production; all you have to do is give it quotas and it will fill them. With 8 max-speed assemblers, it had NO trouble keeping up! Combined with a pretty sweet welder ship I got from the workshop (and modified to work on the moon), I could also have Isy's automatically load up the welder ship. So I could go weld a couple hundred blocks, come back and dock for like... 3 seconds, and then take off again. It was actually pretty fun to work on. I made this video almost a year and a half ago now, and it's still surprisingly popular, so I may have to see if I can dust off that server save. But it hasn't been fired up in over a year, so I don't know if the save and mods are still compatible with the current game version. I could totally do a better tour of the whole base, though.

I'll try doing that cause whenever I needed materials in bulk i just made a small mining ship cause bigger ones are too expensive at that moment

For me, it wasn't about patience so much as it was fun to build. Lol. Maybe I'm just weird like that. But it also helps that once you build some mining\grinding\welding ships that you're comfortable using, it really speeds up the building process. The one part that was actually a bit of a pain was digging out the crater for the hangar. It was too narrow and shallow, so I used a rotating drill arm and something like 22 pistons all set to their slowest possible speed. But it gave me plenty of materials for building the base, once refined! The drilling itself was easy; I just started it up and walked away for like 5 hours. It was the setup and connecting the drilling rig to the existing conveyor network.

It's what I get for using a desk mic and keyboard with CherryMX Blue switches! :D

Oh my gosh you actually responded 😁

XD Yeah it was one of my older videos recorded on my desktop. MAXIMUM CLICKETY CLACK! I don't do SE videos anymore, but starting with my Vintage Story Guide series, no more keyboard noises! ;)

@@Kurazarrh oh nice one man good to see you've evolved! A lot of SE RU-vidrs have done that and exclusively that 😭all the best to you my friend! I wish you all the success man and I'll always keep an eye out for if you return to an SE series!

@@AcuteP4nda :) Thank you! I don't expect to return to SE unless and until the developers add some kind of story/interaction element to the game, but nonetheless it may happen eventually!

@@Kurazarrh the only thing missing from the game in my opinion, there's some good mods that can get a good story line but a lot of extra work 😭hopefully Bethesda's new game is the answer because that looks insane!

Thanks!

:D Thank you, too!!

Unfortunately this was on a modded server that is no longer running, from over a year ago at this point, and it got wiped maybe 8 months ago. So this video is all the evidence that it ever existed... ;(

:D Thank you!!

Luckily, I no longer have that keyboard and use a totally different setup for my newer videos. ;)

Initially, yes. Since there are two hinges, when you go to start the actual door, you need a pair of merge blocks to get that process started. You can also skip the merge blocks and just use the rotor head connection method, but I found that route to be a little... Explosive.

Thanks!

Yeah, you could set the timer to 15 seconds, have the sensor trigger the timer, and then have the timer trigger whatever it is you want to run on a delay. The tricky bit would be setting it up so you could cancel the timer if the sensor deactivates before the timer trigger the action. Unless you didn't care about cancelling.

@@Kurazarrh I'll see if I have time today and try it I tried a few days ago for like 4 hours and I cannot figure it out

I'm not too sad about it. The hangar area is so big that the game night not pressurize it anyway, even if we sealed up all the rock faces.

This a great design! I definitely will try to incorporate something like this. What purpose does the merge block serve?

@@shrander1 The merge blocks allow the doors to connect with and become part of the base itself, thereby allowing an airtight seal around the door, as well as reducing strain on the server and reducing clang.

Haha well... The slowness was to keep it from exploding but it does give it a nice weight to it's motions!

Is your rotor somewhere that could be considered "attached" when the merge blocks lock? Also are you using at least three separate grids?

Kurazarrh It worked when I used three separate grids, another guy told me about it.

@@Amexel Gotcha. Yeah you have to have at least one grid separating the other two.

That's how you know it's a good keyboard.... Right? >.>;;;

Sadly, I can't. This was on a server several years ago at this point, and I don't have the world file. :(

I haven't played in this world in forever, but IIRC the doors were 80m, so 32-ish blocks or so. As for connecting the pistons to the doors, it goes like frame > rotor > piston (x3 in this case) > rotor > door. The hinges are similar, but just frame > rotor > armor blocks > rotor > door. Though I guess manually creating hinges may not be as necessary anymore with the new hinge blocks! Getting them connected involved liberal use of rotor limits and some careful rotation of them to get everything aligned before connecting the rotor heads (I built the doors fully attached and then connected the hinges to them). It also involved a few explosions! I did the hinges first. Connecting the pistons to the door was a lot easier than getting the rotations on the hinges (the rotors on the pistons are free-rotating).

I'd like to get a better setup for the future, though my channel isn't monetized and I just like to post fun stuff every once in a blue moon. I've been tinkering around with noise filters with some luck, but I also recently got a much quieter keyboard. Hopefully next time I make a video, it'll be free of annoying clicks!

@@Kurazarrh Sweet, good to know, cheers man!

'Twas forged by dwarves in the deepest depths of the Moldagrynn Mines!

It technically does when the merge blocks connect, but once they disconnect, it becomes a subgrid that's only connected to the station by long chains of pistons and rotors. No flat faces of any armor blocks make contact with the station, preventing permanent merging, and I used hangar doors to seal the gaps.

@@Kurazarrh soon as my test rig attaches, ONLY by the merge block, no other connected blocks, they will not separate. I turn the one on my gate-grid off, and they still wont separate. same if I turn them both off. The grid needs to be turned back into a large ship before it will move.

@@TheNeo2k Ah, that's happening probably because you have "unsupported stations" turned on in the game\world settings. You'll have to turn that off if you want it to work, but make sure any floating stains in a gravity well are secured first!

@@Kurazarrh Just turned my server off to check this, and it's currently not enabled... lol. gotta love SE.

@@TheNeo2k It's been a long time since I played SE, but IIRC, the setting may actually be inverted. I thought they fixed it at some point, but that may have been just a text change in the server container I was using (Torch, at the time) to make it clearer to server admins. Could try toggling it on and see if it helps!

You might have to turn off the option in the game settings that allows "unsupported stations." That way, as soon as the doors are released from the merge blocks, it will convert automatically.

@@Kurazarrh cool, thanks! i was building in creativ. it worked as it should in survival :)

Pfff haha. I'm the worst at "uhs" and "ums." All I need now is to get my gaffe game on and I'm all set!

Thanks! The ship was just a throwaway "need something small with lots of dakka" design. Not much happens if the outer hinges go. However, if the merge blocks are destroyed, it will release the doors onto their piston supports, but with the Airtight Hangar Door blocks all closed. That might cause a non-trivial amount of explosive Clang.

@@Kurazarrh Making it redundant and having multiple merge blocks on the door, all in different places will make the door harder to destroy. Especially because i don't think turrets target merge blocks.

Unfortunately, this was done on a server that's no longer running, so the design is only in the video and in my head. What parts are giving you trouble?

I think I've got it mostly working now, I do have a question: Did your piston line shake a little while pushing the doors up? I'm not sure if it'll destroy itself as soon as I turn on block destruction but if it doesn't then I've made a working replica.

@@jklol7063 yeah the pistons are a little bouncy, especially the farther they extend. I never had an issue with explosions or anything, and it was very stable even though it was on a server.

The server wasn't, but this build was vanilla, yeah.

:) Thanks!

Thanks!

Unfortunately not. It was part of a big base, so not very blueprint-friendly.

@@Kurazarrh Ah I see, thanks anyway, awesome build!

@@supercraft2 Thanks! :)

This design isn't new... Or are you just missing an \s?

If I could go back 4 years in time, I would...

I built it on the moon. ;)