Aquatic Elevator
AlphaBlueArx
Join Date: 2015-05-11 Member: 204402Members
Join Date: 2015-05-11 Member: 204402Members
Hey guys I started thinking about this since the first time i arrived at the island!
Why not adding an elevator capable of transport you from surface to bottom?
That you could place above the eye of the island and use it to reach a submarine base below without needing to use the seamoth?
Why not adding an elevator capable of transport you from surface to bottom?
That you could place above the eye of the island and use it to reach a submarine base below without needing to use the seamoth?
Comments
For me not sure why it is needed since you have a sub that takes you down in style. Elevators are so static in design, only good for one area to go up or down to. I like the fact I can build bases at core areas of the ocean, what I call farm hubs and travel between them with my vehicles.
Currently I built a pipe from the top to the entrance of a deep cave, this gave me constant flow of air to allow me to build a base into the cave entrance. This will be my first science lab, I will use this as my starting point to map the cave system. This is just one example, but you could build small bases at each bio, rich in resources and travel with your sub between them, stalking up on rations for your mainbase.
By the way dev's.. Your building system and the pipe tool is spot on! I love those pipes, is helping me tremendously on building a deeper base.
An elevator would be quicker to make, and more realistic too.
And besides, i'm sure an elevator takes less energy than a submarine, considering also that you'll soon be able to power up your bases with solar and nuclear power.
As much fun as it may sound, I'm none too keen on watching the Cyclops implode while I'm inside it. I love my little 'Winnebago Of The Deep'.
However, those abyssal canyons aren't going to explore themselves. This sounds like a job for the Exo-Suit, assuming that it will be designed specifically for operating at extreme depth and have a reasonable amount of power as well as life-support capability. This means NO panicky free-ascents from 10,000+ metres, just because the blasted thing ran out of juice only five minutes into the dive.
It's a wearable deep-sea Mecha, for Pete's sake!
Assume that it's powered by a compact fusion reactor. Gets its fuel directly from the ocean. It also has bulk power to spare. This means plenty of Oxygen (delivered at a normal 1 ATM pressure) for the pilot, since it's a by-product of the electrolytic process that splits seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. You'll probably be able to extract minerals directly from seawater, and use them as raw materials in an onboard Fabricator. Ideally, one of the Exo-Suit's manipulator claws could have the Fabricator's emitters built in, so that the pilot doesn't have to leave the suit in order to build, reclaim or repair underwater structures.
I've got my fingers crossed, hoping desperately for a properly-designed Exo Suit.
While we're still on the subject; I'll take one with the full 'Off-Road Sports Pack', thanks. Prismatic paint job, bull bar, on-board cargo locker and multi-spectral headlights.
Got a 'thing' for IR & UV imaging, in case you haven't noticed.
I also think that an emergency teleport or tractor-beam might be a good idea. There's no denying it, the Exo-Suit would be a painfully slow mode of transport, so a teleport or tractor beam would make sense as a last-ditch escape. In an extreme emergency, the 'Teleport' command would drain all of the Exo-Suit's remaining power to transport the suit to the nearest base or its docking facility aboard the Cyclops. There would need to be an inviolable reserve of 5% power kept available to use this feature. Once this feature is used, the Exo-Suit will require at least one day/night cycle to completely recharge.
No sense making things TOO easy.
To balance things out, the tractor beam can only be used when the Cyclops is directly overhead. A 'pinger' HUD panel in the Exo-Suit could be used to indicate whether or not the player is inside the tractor beam's target area. The suit will return to its docking and recharge station aboard the Cyclops.
Incidentally, if that mining drill is going to be included as one of the Exo-Suit's available tools in the finished version, at least make it capable of delivering a wicked boron nitride-tipped hickey to Mister Reaper. Yes, it's all jolly fun to plod around the sea-bed in a Spam can, but there's no real reason to make our Survivor totally vulnerable to everything meaner than a ticked-off Peeper.
If the Exo-Suit can withstand abyssal water pressure, a Reaper Leviathan's final embrace could be shrugged off as unwelcome foreplay.
Ever wanted to perform unnecessary root canal therapy on something annoying?
Now's your chance.
As for an elevator I'm all for it. I just wonder what will happen once we have critters able to attack our base? As cool as it would be to have my base 'dangle' from the natural pool of the island, if something cut it do I lose all my stuff?
But yeah, an elevator is much more efficient then having to swim to my sub and pilot it; and if we could have a way to integrate the constructor to a surface structure along with solar arrays I think it would be awesome.
Anyways, why can't the elevator just be a long tube, like the vertical section that is going to be added?
I like the idea of hardlight devices so it would be able to cover great distances and it could adapt to the depth.
Nothing says it can't be, but what happens if we have something hanging instead of building up from the ground, and it gets damaged?
Considering we haven't seen that sort of technology that might feel out of place. Cool, but out of place. There would have to be other applications of hard light or it would really stick out, so it would depend on the dev's plans and aesthetics choices.
Hard light though isn't really something present in any tech or game yet. Like I said it isn't something that can't be done, but to make it stand out less we would need to see some more of it on the Aurora or incorporated somehow with other gear. But I feel if I saw it right now in the game I would find it a bit jarring in contrast to other gear.
Just an Idea though, I'm currently not too unhappy about the way things are.
It would also be nice if you could have a dive weight, kinda like you have the air bladder.
If something like hard light did exist, why not use it for everything? Perhaps the tools the player creates can be made from hard light. I do agree, a fanciful technology like hard light would be drastically out of place.
In terms of gameplay where such things could be done it still probably wouldn't work very well anyway. The easiest way to do it would be to either create a constant effect and just have a tube...to which it would be hard to cap. Or it would be an effect that turned on and off as needed, so then what happens if something happens to be in the tube when it's turned on. Not that any of these things can't be fixed, but just more problems and probably not the most elegant way to do a simple elevator.
The simplest way would be to have a vertical tube, build an elevator on the floor much like a ladder, and then build up the tubes and repeat the floor you wish to terminate the elevator at. While it would be nice to have the elevator run and see out the tube as we ascend and descend, those effects can be added later. That would only leave the question of that happens when we build down and form a hanging structure, but I assume since bases can take damage it has already been thought of in advance by the devs.
Maybe to built the tube we could adopt a technology similar to the dark matter containment field, only less concentrated.
The 'light' is merely a helpful side-effect caused by the excitation of free photons surrounding the polaron beam.
Shiny.
Imagine that you have a nice little habitat perched on the side of an DEEP oceanic trench.
By carefully crunching the numbers, you managed to construct it without totally losing structural integrity in the process. It was tight. Damned tight.
Somehow, you succeeded. Downside, there isn't a speck of titanium left on the seabed for kilometres around, but what the heck, It's Miller Time.
There's an access module located precisely at sea level, containing a Fabricator station, a couple of storage lockers and a sort of cute foyer arrangement for the elevator.
Time to head down, eh?
As you speed downwards grooving to the sweet sounds of Kenny G, take a moment to reflect upon what's physically happening in that 2000-metre tube below your feet.
Air is being compressed. BIG-TIME.
Your elevator capsule will be acting like a piston all the way down the elevator shaft. After travelling roughly 1000 metres (give or take a few hundred), sufficient pressure will have accumulated to blow the base below into confetti. Remember that the base construction process was something of a juggling-act to begin with? Any additional air pressure generated during your descent could work against the current (static) hull integrity of your base modules.
Hull integrity might not fail immediately.
It could possibly fail during your first elevator ascent. Massive inrush of abyssal water pressure. WHOOSH.
On the 'plus' side, you might even achieve orbital velocity.
Downside: You're in an elevator. Otis doesn't make service calls outside the Sol system.
And by the way, i don't think that putting an elevator on the edge of a trench to go down it would be a good idea, like what could you get inside of a trench anyways? unless they put some kind of very very rare resource inside of it or another reason to go inside of it often there would be no point into building something to reach that area.
And besides in my points i suggested having an hardlight/force-field based elevator that would need materials only for the field generator and the capsule.
A cleverly-designed elevator pod and shaft would have integral pressure venting or equalisation systems. I'm assuming that the pod will be travelling on magnetic levitation tracks, and would be a fairly tight fit in the elevator shaft. Whatever the case, most of your base's O2 will be headed 'thataway' each time you use the elevator, unless it's piped back to an on-board storage tank farm. It could also vent out of the base's moon pool, although that would be an extremely wasteful method.
The point is, whenever it comes down to a serious tussle between atmospheric pressure and hydrostatic pressure, water ALWAYS wins.
Water pressure is brutal, and utterly merciless.
This is why 'depth charging' in an above-ground swimming pool or a corrugated iron water tank is a VERY bad idea.
Any sudden, drastic increase in hydrostatic (water) pressure in these flimsy structures is enough to either rupture the tank walls or flatten the pool. Seriously.
YouTube has plenty of clips showing what happens when someone 'bombs' in an above-ground pool.
Mercifully, no-one films what happens when a playful water tank 'bomb' goes wrong.
But since this is a game, I don't think they will go as far as real-world atmospheric pressures. Unless more of us have super-computers then I last checked. Same reason I don't expect to see sediment kicked up to reduce visibility every time we get near the floor bed.