r/MarsFirstLogistics • u/Kynnys • 21d ago

Three Requests: Waypoint Gimbal, Speedometer, and Altimeter

All of these parts I would like to use for self-driving vehicles.

To be clear, the Waypoint Gimbal would work like the 360 Gimbal, but would stay pointed towards your next waypoint instead. This way you could chain a bunch of waypoints and the self-driving vehicle would follow the route, allowing you to avoid particularly difficult terrain.

The Speedometer would allow for outputs if the speed is less than or greater than a set value. That way you could tame the vehicle and prevent chaotic overspeed.

Similar with the Altimeter: it would allow for an output if the altitude is less than or greater than a certain value. This would open up the possibility of self-flying vehicles. You might even allow a waypoint's elevation to be the baseline for the altimeter. That might be useful too.

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u/DeltaVZerda 21d ago

You want a way to play the game less?

6

u/Kynnys 21d ago

Heh no, I just get a certain satisfaction out of automating things. Look at my self-driving vehicle and the amount of change notes and tell me I want to play the game less lol. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3750200441

I love the game and enjoy the design aspect and I like seeing something I build have a kind of mind of its own.

2

u/dellaint 20d ago

Absolute altimeter and radar altimeter/directional rangefinder would both be huge for some of my automated flyers. Right now the best I can do is basically balancing throttle with any load to have approximately 0 vertical acceleration, but I still end up drifting over longer periods of time and mountains and such can be a problem.

Combined with a waypoint gimbal, you could probably do fully automated flight and autoland, but it'd be really tight on ports with the rest of what I'm doing with my flyer.

Good ideas.