Making An Overengineered Submarine in Trailmakers

hey guys today i'm back in trail makers and i wanted to try making an engine powered submarine now i like the water in this game and i thought that a submarine would be a challenging build so let's get right into it so i loaded up in the sandbox here and the first thing i did was looked for a really good spot to start building and i found that behind me this nice dock area and that seemed perfect so after moving there i opened up the build menu and the first thing i did was put down a spaceship cockpit after that i started building up around it and i wanted to get the body of this fully designed normally i would save the sort of aesthetic stuff for the end but since i need the engine to fit inside of this it's actually really important for me to get the size right now and then figure out what i need to do so i started building up the tube and see here it's about four blocks on each side and it's sort of circular and i figured this is probably just big enough to fit an engine in so i forgot those sides fully closed up i ended up deleting the first three pieces here and started doing some sort of conversion from the small cockpit all the way up to this large diameter now i started by just making a staircase like this and then i realized that looked horrible so i deleted that and i had to do something a little more complicated so it built up a tube somewhat around this cockpit and i figured that building up a tube like this would be really easy to expand out to the full diameter of the bigger piece and once it did that i expanded out a little bit and it seemed to work out so i just kept doing that basically i had to move some pieces in to make it a little bit tighter otherwise it would have been a little bit long but after i did that i sort of just kept working on it and eventually see here it kind of looks okay i actually think all the pieces i put down look good but the cockpit's a little bit long and that i'm going to need to deal with later for now though i just want to expand out the tube and the next thing i did here is put down these buoyancy control pieces these seem really helpful because you could just hit two keys and it automatically expands them or contracts them and that makes the entire structure more or less buoyant so if i put one of these on each side i was hoping it at least would be a good start to get this floating and with those in place the next thing i did is start expanding out the bottom of this and this is where i wanted to put down the engine now of course starting out here i wanted to make it as small as i possibly could and to do that i wanted to try using wheels now i wasn't exactly sure how they worked but i figured if they were able to turn if i had an attachment point on the other side that would actually make one of the smallest bearings in the game all of the other pieces you can use as bearings are two blocks by two blocks which is a little bit bigger and i wasn't sure if i had the space for that so starting out with this seemed like a good idea now in the middle crank i ended up putting down a block and this was supposed to weigh it down so it fall to one side but it wasn't doing that it was standing up completely rigid as if it was just frozen there so went ahead and got in this just to see if that would free it up at all but it didn't seem to change things so i added on an engine because i figured maybe the wheels won't spin unless an engine's attached to them but this just showed me that the wheels are spinning but they're still attached all the way through meaning that it doesn't actually work as a bearing so that's a little annoying and i'm gonna have to use the helicopter engines here now this shouldn't be too bad i think i have the space for it but it's gonna be tight now after i got this first helicopter engine on there i put a block on top of it and originally is gonna put a block in front of it like this but i figured if i get a little bit more throw it might work better but i don't even have space to put this extra block on top i have to put the servo like this slightly overlapping the helicopter engine which should work fine but there is absolutely no extra room in this mechanism at all and trying to get it to work seemed a little weird at first so i realized that i forgot to turn down the strength of the servos to zero that allows him to freely move and i had to reverse one of the helicopter engines and after i did that it was started rolling all over the place but the crank was staying stationary which means i should be able to attach a piston to it now after i get the piston on there i gave it a test but it just didn't seem to work it was not really moving at all and the entire thing was shaking back and forth a bit so i deleted the very top block and i realized i'm gonna need to put in a hinge now this hinge adds one block of space but thankfully i had exactly one extra block here and with that done i was able to pull in the piston and expand it back out and get most of a rotation but it was really slow so i turned up the speed to 100 and now it seemed to be a lot better now to get the engine to rotate more continuously i added in a second piston and i basically copied exactly the same thing that i had before and trying it out now it's pretty much exactly the same except that it has a lot more power which makes it a little more glitchy now i deleted these two blocks in the middle and now so i can put in a servo and i set the server to rotate 90 degrees this is what's going to offset the first two pistons and that's going to allow them to push at different times which means that i should have constant power throughout my rotation now i also went ahead and finally deleted the helicopter engine i had which saves me one block of space it doesn't seem like a lot but when i'm trying to make this as compact as possible it really does make things better now i still needed a way to get this to automatically rotate and to do that i was gonna use some angle sensors the way this works is that when the angle sensors are fully up and down that's when they're gonna tell the pistons to start contracting and when they're fully upside down i'll have a second angle sensor that tells them to start expanding and trying it out here i only have the sensors in that tell them to push but you can see as they rotate it around there's a certain point where both the pistons start to push and rotate it around so with at least half it working i added a second sensor here and i wanted to give it a test and at first they seemed to be working pretty well but then i realized that the angle sensors were literally going straight through the ground so i had to reposition some stuff to prevent them from doing that but with that done i added a servo here and it was time to add in the propeller now to get this connected up to the crankshaft i added a block here and i put down some of these flat connectors these usually have no collisions sometimes they get weird and start to but in this case they shouldn't and as the crankshaft spins around they should also start to spin around this now i also added in some paddles here and this is the first thing i found that was called paddle so i figured i might as well give it a shot and after adding four of these on here i want to see how it would rotate and starting out it just didn't seem to be that good the engine was completely stalling here i was wondering what was going on and when i went to test it again for whatever reason i started glitching into the water but even when i was here it just seemed to not be working all the time sometimes it started to rotate but then it would just stop again and it was just really weird and i was gonna need to do this anyway so i decided to do was pull off all the paddles and i added on servos these were gonna rotate all the paddles slightly back and that means that as the propeller starts to rotate all the paddles should actually start to push water and move me forward and giving it a test on land it suddenly started to work again but in the water it was not really working at all now i was still confused as to what the problem might be so i just added on more pistons to get me even more power and does make it longer but i figured maybe a lack of power in the water was the problem but when i tried testing this new engine out it would just rotate in the air before it even hit the ground it seems like the engine has so much torque it can actually do that so my solution is to grab these anchor pins and put them right on the bottom of the tub so as it falls it'll grab onto the ground and that'll prevent it from rotating but as it fell it would still rotate a bit too much and then it would start doing this so i just lowered the holding down in the editor and finally here i got a test while it was on the ground and it seemed to be working perfectly fine here and that's when i realized something the way i have the timing set up in this engine those angle sensors are dependent on the sub being straight up and down if it's rotated at all it's gonna be slightly off and the performance is gonna diminish now i added in more of these buoyancy control devices cause i wanted to give myself a little bit more lift and see how it would do above the water so got in the submarine and i wanted to test it here and i was definitely sinking a lot slower now then i first thought to get this to go straight up and down is actually to use cannons i figured it'd be a really easy way to implement this so i just took two of these on i was gonna shoot them on either side to start to rotate this and keep myself straight up and down but when i tried shooting it the game just crashed so that was interesting so looted at my autosave which thankfully actually was fully saved and once i did that i added more of these buoyancy things put it in the water again and that was right on the surface but i still wasn't staying up and down so i added a couple of blocks to the front and i was gonna add in a helicopter engine and this was gonna work like a reaction wheel now i'm gonna use a couple of angle sensors and if i start to rotate too far to the one side or the other the helicopter engine is gonna spin and keep myself straight up and down now forgetting those configured here i want to give it a test and it was working but i did have it backwards so it's actually keeping me upside down 100 of the time and that's not exactly great so i just reversed the output of the two angle sensors and with that done it was keeping itself straight up and down and better yet the engine was actually rotating pretty well here and when i tried turning on the propeller to actually make it go forward it did seem to work i was going three or four miles an hour which wasn't great but i figured i could definitely improve upon that and i also decided at this point to get rid of that spaceship cockpit and i put in this diving ball in the front which looked a little bit better and with that done i added in some walls as well this was to make sure the engine wasn't gonna hit into it and also to give myself a bit more weight so i could get my buoyancy tuning a little bit more precise i also went ahead and doubled up the paddles on my propeller here but this didn't seem to change my top speed pretty much at all so what i decided to do next was actually make my propeller a lot bigger and this puts the propellers a lot further from the center this created a lot more speed you can see here i'm going almost six miles an hour now to get even more speed i figured i might as well just add more propellers and see how that would do so i stuck a bunch more of these on all over the place and giving it a test now it did seem to be a lot better but the propeller was getting a lot bigger at this point and it just didn't seem to be that great the propeller was working though so i wanted to work on the steering next and do that i put in a couple of hinges and i put in some of these really large paddles now after i saw those big paddles i decided to delete a lot of these smaller ones and try out a design with just these larger ones instead now the whole thing was a lot more compact here and you'll actually notice my top speed was quite a bit higher now i also noticed my steering paddles were not gonna work because i put them on the rotating propeller so they're just gonna spin around like that so to fix that problem i had to move the paddles to the bottom of the boat and get them to fit i was also gonna need to use some of the small paddles this meant that as i tried to use them they just didn't really seem to be that good i was getting a small amount of movement to the left but it was really not that much and this just wasn't working that well so i went ahead and deleted those paddles and instead i put the hinge on the front and i was gonna try sort of flipping them out and seeing if that would have any effect now to put this on the front here it did actually seem to start to rotate me into the rocks but it was pretty slow so moved up to the large paddle instead and now i was trying to avoid this pipe and it sort of seemed to be turning me but it somehow seemed to be even slower than before so this was just not gonna be fast enough here and i needed a completely different solution now that's when i decided to add in a helicopter engine in the middle and this one acts as another reaction wheel to spin me side to side now the helicopter engine is taking a little bit to get up to speed but once it did it seemed to have a lot of power and that should actually work now the last thing i wanted to add on was some sort of sonar thing and of course there's no like microphone in this game so instead i'm gonna use the distance sensor and just treat that as sonar so as it spins around you see sometimes it lights up and that means it detects an object in front of it so i figured if i added on an angle meter i detect both the direction and the presence of an object and with an and gate that should be able to turn me away and it started to work here i was near this rock face and it was kind of slow but it was spinning up the wheels in the middle but i also realized when i went the opposite direction it was starting to pull me into the rocks and the angle meter was sort of being annoying so i decided instead to use some distance sensors and these will detect the direction that the main distance sensor is currently facing and you can see here if i put a pipe on it as it spins around they all light up and that signals that it's currently underneath it and running into this pipe here this seemed to be a lot better it's actually starting to pivot away at least at first it seemed to be pretty good but i went towards this pipe i noticed that nothing seemed to happen at all which was a little weird because i just ended up running into it here but i figured maybe it was just a glitch or something so i went over to this next wall here and i actually did seem to get turned away it was good and the next wall as well also seemed to be fine but when i headed towards this boat the same thing happened but this time i realized the distance sensor detected an object in front of it and i currently have nothing telling it to actually turn one way or the other when it does that so it just arbitrarily told it to turn right whenever it sees something in front of it and while turning right might not be the best option in every scenario it's definitely better than going forward so with that done i added in some altimeters here and these of course are control those buoyancy sensors to keep me in a certain range so i set one of them so if i go above negative 10 meters it'll start to move me down and if i go below negative 30 meters the other one's gonna tell it to push up after getting those hooked up i designed it a little bit more and made it a little bit prettier and with that done i decided to send it off and see how it would do on its own now heading towards these rocks here actually seem to be pretty good at detecting them and starting to move away after that i was heading towards this boat here and is also moving down a little bit further than i would have liked but it did manage to detect the boat and started to spin around and get itself up off the ground and with that done it seemed to save itself so i decided to set a second one of these submarines free and once it was out of range i spawned in a second one and i was gonna pilot this one and follow it around and see how it would do now starting off it seemed to be okay but then it turned away from this pole and it was on the collision course with these rocks so after a little while did get close to them but it started to turn away here and now i was just going into the open water but it does have a slight tendency to turn left and that caused it to get near this boat now in the open water here you can really see that height control working it gets a little higher than i would have liked but i'm actually okay with it getting a little bit too high it surfaces it's not that big of a deal but if it gets too low that's a bit more of a problem but getting into this boat finally exceed turns away from it fine actually does a really big turn here and after that an edge to get right under this and you can see me follow it all the way to the coast again so guys thanks for watching it's definitely a fun little build here and i've had it on my list for a little bit too long now so i'm glad i finally got to do it so if you have any more ideas in this game or any game i play make sure to leave down the comments below subscribe if you want to see more content like this make sure to like the video if you enjoyed it and otherwise until next time

Channel: Reid Captain

Views: 145,001

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Id: HnKT48hWVpY

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 03 2022