How To Space Engineers: Rotor Wheel Elevator System

[@LordGrape]

Love this design. A buddy and I are actually going to put in some work today to attempt to make a space elevator out of this to refuel our large ships up in space. We might have to tweak what you have here a bit, but this is amazing!

[@VeeryBird]

I am very curious if the space elevator worked!

[@WardenWolf]

Well, there's two actual practical uses for a space elevator in Space Engineers, although "practical" is something of a misnomer because they like to clang and damage themselves a lot (though you COULD rig up some welders to fix any damage as you go). But, ignoring that, the first practical use is taking ice from a planet to orbit, and the second is taking uranium from space to the planet. Probably the better way of doing the stop is arranging a sensor to stop it at the right point, although there is admittedly something of a lack of precision when doing it with wheeled vehicles.

[@milesmojave8223]

Excellent walkthrough. My friend and I were able to adapt your design for our own space elevator and were successful on the first try! We're using a 3x3 pillar design and are currently changing the design to add a second tether for additional stability. One thing I changed was to ensure that all the rotors were aligned the same way such that positive velocity raises the lift, while negative velocity lowers it. This way, we can control the speed from a three button panel: Stop, Increase Speed (Up), Decrease Speed (Down). The centre of the pillar contains a conveyor which allows large ships to dock in orbit and also allows the tethered station to power the base with solar more effectively than I ever could on the surface since the sun is visible for much longer in space. I plan to use sensors to automate the lift so it'll speed up when departing and slow down when arriving. The elevator is large enough to raise most reasonably sized vehicles and even carefully landed medium ships! I'm considering making a major design change to the elevator by free spinning the rotors, then using ion thrusters to propel the lift. I'm not sure if this design will be able to handle such speed safely, but we'll see tomorrow, I suppose. Anyway, thanks a bunch. You've got a solid and easily adaptable design that works. Well done!

[@Soul.food.]

That looks much simpler than it seemed when I was trying to use wheel suspensions. Thanks!

[@Azura.3297]

Same here, I always thought it had to use the suspensions... now I know you can use rotors. :D

[@epeli0035]

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[@colecook834]

Glad to see my planning of my own elevator was on the right track. Thank you for the tutorial. Now I'm thinking of a mega train for a mining platform that builds its own track.

[@theminechesser]

Awesome tutorial, will definitely be using this in some of my builds in the future. Thanks a lot!

[@bkp777700]

Brillant! Finally I have a solution for our elevator problem. Thank you for this great explanation

[@Comicsluvr]

This is the first wheeled elevator tutorial I've ever seen that makes sense!

[@khmnc]

i've been trying all weekend to get this to work. i started out with large grid wheels and that technically worked in that it did go up at a reasonable speed, but it also damaged the pillar no matter what i tried. i then tried small grid wheels like you showed in the videos and it still damaged the central pillar without the up go.

[@deadaces7949]

if you make sure all rotors face 45 towards the wall, then all rotors are positive direction.

[@stenplayz4468]

You know when someone puts work in his videos when he spends time using emotes in the intro

[@Crookgotjokes]

Im currently trying to design a circular Rotating Ship sized Elevator I was thinking of just using a piston+rotor setup but now im rethinking of using wheels+rotor. I could use Wheels+Rotor to spin the platform and a couple pistons to raise and lower but i feel on the round platform i might have a hard time lining up with the floors and not having clearing so far ive had to use blast door parts to get a good seam between platform and floor with no clipping

[@EpicLelouch]

How are you adding the 5x5 wheels they collide with the object???

[@macaulayfarenden1906]

I built a small one, couldnt get it to work, just stumbled into someones comment about turning the grid from a station to a ship. I already quit without saving haha I'll have to give it another go

[@maciejlewandowski7311]

Singular pillar

[@WiseOakDakota]

I’m trying to get the four pillar system to work for a large and heavy elevator, any tips? Got all the wheels to work in the right way, and the piece will move up and down my pillar, but when I add some weight the wheels just spin in place… even with the Torque all the way up and low gravity on the moon…anyway to get around it? Going to try adding thrusters to the elevator shafts or maybe anti grav generators that pull up mass blocks located on the elevator?

[@DeconvertedMan]

thanks for this, I'm going to make something like it :) I used thursters rather then wheels as it was easier to figure out.

[@MartenElectric]

Great tutorial, this reminds me kind of what Splitsie making. Thanks mate!

[@BaconIover69]

Thank you, great tutorial! I have one question: why arent your pistons dangling? When i stack 4 or more pistons the start to wiggle around.

[@PandemicPlayground]

Using shared inertia will prevent the limp rofl

[@robertharris3333]

I am going to try this but instead of an elevator see if it the design can be inverted to go down a square hole

[@albinalmquist4253]

I can't place the 7th and 8th rotors on the side because the hitboxes of the other rotors stop it.

[@stenplayz4468]

I needed this thanks

[@YouTubeH8sMe]

After messing about with the rotors and placing blastdrro blocks i finaly got it all setup right, everything works right except the elevator will not move, there is no friction and no way to add friction to wheels without a suspension. ill try adding thrusters and use this wheel rotor as the stabilisation system. Sucks it dont work as is. btw i play survival and on a dedicated multiplayr server, so dont now if thats got anything to do with it not moving for me.

[@OperativePeanut]

I found the same issue in a dedicated MP Server, we also attempted the same thing, using thrusters to attempt to move it. Ours was 7 blocks wide and 5 deep, but I don't think that was the issue sadly

[@malougaming4559]

great tutorial

[@LegendTyan]

Thx from Russia

[@zsoltlang2144]

now I'm interested

[@boldlyunbuffed]

I'm running into a lot of slipping with this. It works, fundamentally, but the rotor+wheel "huggers" will occasionally slip a little. Any way to prevent that or improve on that? I'm just using regular light armor blocks for pillars and regular 5x5 small grid wheels.

[@StonerJezus]

if you are using large grid pillars try some walls on it. Adds a bit more clang sound, but seems to work. Having some rotorhead breaking now and then, not sure if this is related to using these walls. Will most likely combine rotors with some normal suspension to get extra grip and push a lil harder into the pillar.

[@PandemicPlayground]

Try increasing friction on the wheels if you haven't done that already

[@chiefgully9353]

Awesome job buddy

[@Xaelur]

Didnt work for me on an almost vanilla dedicated server. I duplicated the single middle pillar one. Didnt even try to move when detatching it from the base.

[@Ramash440]

Does this thing have any significant cargo capacity ? I feel like building one for mining vehicles.

[@WiseOakDakota]

Did you ever figure out how to make this work for something heavy? Trying to do something similar and failing miserably

[@lia-uq1cn]

Watched and Liked

[@kamilnowak5264]

Deos still work? People on reddit are saying that wheels on rotors have no traction physics

[@PandemicPlayground]

It still can work if the rig isn't too heavy. Traction wise, it's not the same as wheels on suspension.

[@sergioruiz1936]

it works for me, built this in space, no issues at all on a dedicated server. just takes some testing

[@josephlane1614]

Is there any reason not to use both landing gears and rotors?

[@danielwilson7567]

There are rollers where the elevator is on gears. It's much better and more realistic.

[@ClemMorton]

Hummm. Has anyone taken this system and added a drill wall to the bottom on periodic pistons, with mag plates to lock to the walls. Drill down, then flip on a projector, weld in new pillars, retract down and continue the drilling. When you want to get back to the top, reverse - climb the pillars - extend wheeled outriggers, and drive off the ore spot. Could be a mobile base capable of completely removing large chunks of ground fast and getting quickly to the ore.

[@hazeros]

Nice vid. Also what is good/bad on piston elevator and rotor elevator. I want to build a fast one and dont know wich one to use.

[@btCharlie_]

Idk if you mean fast as in quick to build or fast as in high velocity, but for both those cases, pistons are the answer. Make one centered piston column, turn on share inertia tensor, and set axis force accordingly. You could probably just max it out, but be aware that it has a lot of force at that point and if something goes wrong, it won't stop easily, causing some weird physics stuff happening if something goes wrong. Otherwise, the main limitation of pistons is the maximum and minimum height such an elevator can go, kinda like shown in the video. Also, if you need to move really high masses with your elevator (large grid vehicles and such), you have to make parallel pillars (e.g. one in every corner - Pandemic Playground has some of those systems in the underground base series) and join them into a single grid using merge blocks to maintain stability and provide enough force. Also, as you scale up a piston elevator, the complexity of the system goes up dramatically. At some point, the wheeled systems like this one start to look more attractive, because even though they're complex to begin with, they really don't get much more complex as you scale them up. In fact, in terms of travel distance of such an elevator, you only need to make a longer carrier pillars, whereas with pistons, you have to add 1 more piston for each 10m of travel, which also moves your minimum and maximum height by additional 5m, and it gets kinda messy to think about, plus each piston increases weight of the system and at some point, the lowest piston won't be able to raise the whole contraption up. An honorable mention goes to piston systems that use an "inchworm" kind of travel - there are top and bottom parts connected by one or more pistons traveling around a carrier pillar. The bottom part fixes itself to a carrier pillar, usually with a connector or a merge block, then the top part extends up to a point where there's another set of connection points, where it connects to the pillar. The bottom part then disconnects and the pistons contract, moving the bottom part upwards. This is pretty slow, but moderately stable. Though it requires a more complex carrier pillar with carefully thought-out connection points all over the travel path.

[@hazeros]

​@@btCharlie_ yes i was meaning fast in velocity, to make a kind of emergency elevator. I think i dont need a lot of piston, maybe 3 high. building it with rotor would be more complex indeed. Thanks for the information really appreciated 😊. I'm french sorry for my bad english...

[@Juron85riqta]

can you do this in survival ?

[@PandemicPlayground]

Yup, I just did it in creative to save time from gathering mats and welding.

[@VisualNovelStreaming]

This doesn't work. The wheels have no friction, and my elevator moves up and slides down, no matter how many rotors and tires i put on it.

[@TheNerogarden]

Works fine for me

[@mridontclickbaitftw4366]

Dude, i literally cant attach the f***king wheel to the rotor. What mods where you using?????

[@shawnhill9369]

Did you forget the add rotor head step?

[@ЖужелицаЗаморская]

Noice

[@philipventer5456]

For the life of me I can't get this to work. Everything is set right, but just sits there. No up, no down.

[@PandemicPlayground]

There is a chance it no longer works. Haven't tried it in a while now

[@philipventer5456]

@@PandemicPlayground Oh, it works, need to convert the block to a ship. Missed that part for some reason. Having lots of breakages.

[@bobdanger8077]

Does not work for Dedicated Servers unfortunately. That was a long build just to strip it down, don't make my mistake.

[@Zanzikhan]

Has anyone tried this elevator method on a dedicated server?

[@Rirlain]

After testing different models, I reproduced the one with the 4 pillars (I used two before and it was not very stable) but it does not work. It falls under its own weight. I have lightened it to the max but nothing works :C