Space Engineers Experiments: Rotor or Hinge Drilling Rig? Which Is Better?

Today we compare two types of drilling rigs I've been using to see which is actually better.
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[@JeffreyBlakeney]

I hadn't thought of the fact that the hinge system would give you a square hole. That could be very handy in the future. Also, you can get rid of the timer blocks completely from that system if you use sensors. Sensors can detect sub grids, which the drills will be as they are attached to a hinge. Set the range of the sensors so that it sees the drills when the hinge is completely turned (you might miss a degree or two but it will be close) and then set the action to reverse the hinge. With a sensor on either side set up the same way, it will just keep going back and forth. You might need a conveyor junction between the piston and drills to give you somewhere to put the sensors. I just tried it in a creative world and it works really well.

[@PandemicPlayground]

That is a neat idea.

[@josephlane1614]

Good thinking bro.

[@SirTragain]

What stood out the most to me was that if you used four drills; one from the advanced rotor and three extending off to one side of it instead of seven drills centering on the advanced rotor you would use even less resources. When in a survival scenario, just one more large grid drill is an expense to consider.

[@rippybuckyxboxplayer465]

I like that the honge system looked like a broom dusting off dirt

[@dread7531]

Hmmm yes honge

[@christopherc187]

For drilling using a rotor, the best approach would be to offset the line of drills so you'll gather way more minerals using the same amount of drills, that's where the rotor wins against the hinge.

[@deejeh9494]

People tend to go with two or four arms as the rotation needed is lowered, cutting time in half at least. It takes forever for the outside arms to clear compared to the middle arm.

[@wazzdawg]

@@deejeh9494 However the issue with that is that as previously mentioned, you gain less materials and are having to use more at the start. Plus when you're playing the game anyways you'll be doing a lot of stuff throughout the drilling period so it doesn't matter much if it takes 4x as long. You'll be getting a lot of resources per minute as well so again it's much better to go for the larger radius rather than the quicker and initally more expensive route.

[@markp8295]

I was just about to comment this.

[@celem91]

The fact that the hinge cuts a square while the rotor cuts a circle is useful in itself depending on project. Thanks for the thorough comparison

[@ianbunch1583]

For the hinge system, you can make a compactible system that creates a large rectangular hole by adding length after the hinge. This will increase the sweeping radius. If you do this with a piston, you can get a variable hole, and store the drill system when it's not in use. This could be useful for trench-diggers. Of course, you will need to slow everything down when you increase the radius. For the rotor system, it could be more material efficient if you made an asymmetric system with a radius of 7 drills instead of a symmetric system with a radius of 3.5 drills. The main difference is that in a rotor drill system (asymmetric), when you add more drills, you increase the radius, requiring slower pistons and rotors (or you have more drills going over the same paths to increase speed). In the hinge drill system, you can add more drills to increase the area excavated without needing to slow down the pistons and hinge. You can also use the hinge to fold up the drills to save 2 blocks of vertical space. Hinge systems can also have a variable radius.

[@IONATVS]

from geometry, n drills, with an individual drilling radius of r block-widths, drilling to a depth of d block-widths should give you 2rd(n+2r) blocks worth of material for the line plunge miner pi/4*d(n+2r)^2 for the rotor miner and 2(n+2r)(d-l)(l+r)+pi/2*(n+2r)(l+r)^2, where l is the length of the lever arm between the axis of the hinge and the center of the sphere that the nearest drill drills out. The conclusion being that, the rotor one will start off worse than the hinge one for smaller number of drills, n, but get better faster the larger n is. Though the hinge one can mitigate this effect with a larger l-putting the hinge farther away from the actual drills, such as at the top of the piston stack (though that probably has its own clang problems, so just switch to the rotor for really big projects).

[@dorg9502]

I don't think you are receiving enough credit for this. You setup the math by defining the moving and important parts. Then you explain how to compare them and effect the change in size of each style and how it works.

[@theriveracis5172]

Placing the hinge before the pistons does give some interesting options for attachment though. Assuming you can secure and align your drill, it would allow you to attach additional pistons as you go, significantly increasing drilling capacity. Though as you say, Clang may yet put a stop to such flights so close to the sun

[@prome3us550]

I was about to hamfist this argument without your eloquence; thanks for this reply! He happened to pick the exact size where the swing drill would dig a perfect square (7 wide, 3 long on each side) v a circle of the same diameter - quick head math says circle will be smaller 😊 Also; see above for a better explanation!

[@specialist_yeti3307]

Won’t lie, half my playtime so far has been watching a drill dig down in creative mode. The other half was crashing into terrain and monorails.

[@PandemicPlayground]

Half my Space Engineers career has been drilling lol

[@theminechesser]

Cool video! I was curious, so I did the math. Each drill is about 3 blocks long, and mines a little more, so let's say 4 blocks. Then the hinge system mines a cross sectional area of 8*n, n being the number of drills. In contrast, the rotor system mines pi*(n/2)^2 cross sectional area. This means that for sufficiently large n, in particular, n > 32/pi ~~ 10 drills, the rotor system is actually better, however with fewer than 10 drills the hinge system is best.

[@hillzachary01]

This doesn't check out. With the same width (or diameter since rotor makes a circle) the hinge will always provide more because it is getting the corners of the circle that the rotor misses. You could do a plunging rotor drill and make a big circular hole, then swap it for a hinge system that otherwise matched and it would still have the corners to hit and so would produce more stone. The only big advantage of the rotor design is you could have half+1 as many drills by starting in the middle and just going one direction. This would save on drills initially but be a much longer drilling process and require either timer/programmable blocks or an operator

[@dbrowdy]

@@hillzachary01 This took me a while to grok, but the thing is that the more drills you add to the hinge, the more it becomes a rectangle. As it becomes a long, thin rectangle, the rotor always stays a circle and will eventually become more efficient.

[@LaszloIvanyi]

Nice. I've never thought of using a hinge one before. I've seen the circular one, and I built a rig that rotates as well as extends outward and downwards. For my mobile miners, I had 2 design, one with a tower in the middle with 9 stationary drills going down the middle (top heavy not too good) and one where I could retract and fold the drill 90° back to the top of the vehicle. But these designs are good also, I like them. You should make a video concentrating on "fast drilling" :D You know when "how much does it cost" and how "slow you need it to be" are not factors, you just mine as fast as you can.. You know, without breaking it :D Also you can experiment with not putting the drills next to each other. Especially if your rill is rotating you don't need it I think. The biggest drill I made was like a checker pattern. 1 drill 1 skip (or light)I made a 3 row line of that, the middle row longer. And all that was on a rotor. and the rotor was on pistons. I used that on asteroid miners, just parked on top of the ore node, and extended and rotated the drill. It worked well.

[@Hscaper]

After watching this, I would think a cube takes up more volume than a cylinder so I’m glad it showed the same in the experiment

[@wolfe8035]

The kind of drill rig I want has these specifications: A rotor to turn the drills, 2-4 pistons to dig deeper into the ground, a hinge block and 2-4 more pistons to extend outward to get the resources it obviously couldn't get without completely relocating the rig.

[@Schlurf82]

For the rotor system there is a more efficient way to build it. Instead of using a T-shape as in your drill system you could use an L-shape instead, connecting only ONE drill directly under the rotor and then go with all drills in one direction. You still have only 7 drills but the diameter of the circle becomes a total of 12 blocks rather than 7. So you nearly double the area you drill out with the same amount of drills. You'll also drill out a lot more material. But I really like the shape it drills out of the hinge system.

[@PandemicPlayground]

That would be a good way to make a large circle and save materials.

[@Taedrin]

If you double the radius, the area should almost be quadrupled because Area = PI * r^2.

[@dorg9502]

This method works but is risky to clang in multiplayer due to the heavy weight of drills sagging on the rotor. People usually use a center line for this reason.

[@tohpingtiang4878]

I like to dig sideways in a semi circle instead of top down. So my ice farm has a nice fan shape. I made 1 with alternate position drills once and it made wavy pattern on the dig area

[@zrebbesh]

Hinge blocks win on otherwise-equivalent 7-drill rigs. Rotors win on otherwise-equivalent 11-drill rigs. It would be interesting to do an extended experiment with many different kinds of drilling rigs.

[@Krommandant]

Good to know!

[@Letstalkgaming]

I think the combination might work better if you set up your timer blocks in such a way that first you make the hinge go it's full range and only then make the rotor move x degrees before it restarts the hinge.

[@PandemicPlayground]

Yeah, really got to tinker with the timing to get it right.

[@TheBrookemarley]

Volume of a block is greater than volume of tube, if 2r (r of tube) = block lenght with the aprox same height For example 2r of circle = lenght = 7 Vol cylinder = πr^2 ≈ 38,5 × height Vol block = 7x7= 49 × height Vol block > vol cylinder CMIIW sorry for bad english, english is not my mothertounge

[@michaelsandy2869]

What do you think of a drill that doesn't start spinning until it is at the ore level, and possibly has the outer drills hinge outward, so there is a smaller hole on top, and a wider hole at the ore level? It would be a little bit more complicated but would allow a smaller rig to excavate a larger volume.

[@armedbobery4879]

I wonder if you could do two hinges with timer blocks to alternate direction. My thought is, make a cross shape with drills and a hinge in each direction so it sweeps one way and back, switches hinge, the piston lowers and repeats.

[@luxferre5546]

The rotor and hinge combined drillrig needs to have a really fast hinge and slow pistons. It can work out nicely but it is pretty slow

[@Hscaper]

What I’m curious about is what is the efficiency of you added a drill at the ends, going from 7 wide to 9 wide. Do you gain efficiency by the round one in that aspect?

[@TomSilver_42]

Rather then creating amusement park as at 18:03 I would opt for few conveor blocks between hinge and drills, so "arm" of the drills will be longer and as that swing will be longer the hole will be wider and so collects more material. However, in theory those are nice and proven designs if you would like to drill a loot of Ice for example (sorry, don't know too many people intentionally drilling gazillion of metric tons of Stone). And as ore deposits are usually a bit flat. Then my favorite method is airborne drill rig with static drills in front. Usually manual so instead of drilling and dumping stone I scrape those layers once I get close to them via access shaft in drilled with RMB. Make a rig square to drills and it will then be capable of U-turn inside a shaft it drilled for itself. Handy for easier "driving".

[@kurmis999]

4:20 you infe 1 timing block. First action reverse hinge, next action to trigger same timer block. And timing normally around 32.5s if hinge speed is at 0.5 to swing between -45⁰ to 45⁰

[@rdm22]

Thanks for that info I was looking through the whole video for what speed and what timing, but he didn't mention, and I can do with only 1 timer nice!

[@KrogerKing]

What hinge settings do you need?

[@yammoyammamoto8323]

The function of volume maxes at the point of being a "cube". Meaning - had you moved the hinge up one step(i.e put one of the pistons under the hinge) you would have gathered even more, even though you made a shallower dig.

[@hillzachary01]

But that runs the risk of the pistons hitting undrilled rock and destroying the entire rig

[@Aganeya]

So, I made a little math here... Hinge would be more effective in 7 or less blocks After 7 ( 7.63 to be more specific ) blocks rotor system would be more effective ( if we plays drills as Diameter ) But if we will place our drills as Radius, then rotor system will be more effective after placing 4 drills As for the combined system: it will add 0.564 * (number of drills) ^ 2 to your rotor mine area

[@leonielson7138]

You need 3 fewer drills with the rotor system, because the drills rotate, covering the same area, so the difference is 1 steel plate, 2 timing blocks, and 3 drills.

[@riebeckhearthian4948]

If you stick to this setup, hinges are only better until it reaches 7 large drills. After that, the rotor one gets better. So if you are starting out, hinges are great. But if you want more space covered further in the game, use the rotor with more than 7 drills. You could make it even better (while slower) if you cover the radius and not the diameter (said from another comment) This happens due to the hinge drill only extending horizontally, so if it’s 10 drills, it’s instead a rectangle. The rotor, however, expands in a constant circle, thus always getting bigger in the x AND z (or y if your looking from the top) axis.

[@JednoOkyAgresor]

But you can extend space between hinge and drills and keep it still square.

[@robertlcgarcia123]

@@JednoOkyAgresor yes but the size increases much faster and cheaper then a square

[@MARTINGOLDING96]

The Advanced rotor and hinge have the same build costs as the additional 5-6 steel plates aren't vital

[@michaelsandy2869]

You could have an extra piston below the hinge, so that when it gets to the right depth, it can be slowly extended so as to sweep a larger area.

[@hillzachary01]

This idea could.work pretty well but it risky to run without supervision

[@Runescope]

When placing drills, it's useless to place them next to each other as they mind the 'block' they are in and the ones around it. You should have drill-spacer-drill-spacer-drill. It's cheaper on resources.

[@D8W2P4]

But everything you said doesn't work and leaves machine eating voxels in between the drills. There is a reason people put drills next to each other with no spaces in between.

[@stalincat2457]

@@D8W2P4 If you offset the drills on one side of the arm (start with a spacer on one arm and a drill on the other end) you wont have this problem :)

[@D8W2P4]

@@stalincat2457 Then there's no point in spacing it.

[@stalincat2457]

@@D8W2P4 There very much is, resource-wise. You'll be able to mine a bigger radius with the same amount of resources (wich is what the video is about). In survival this is key as running back and forth with the hand drill gets tiring fast.

[@D8W2P4]

@@stalincat2457 There is no point since you have to have those areas in between removed or else it will eat the miner. Like I said before there is a reason people do solid drill arms with no spaces.

[@dimitrismardakis]

The thing is mathematically the hinge solution will harvest more resources. Both the side of the square and the diameter of the circle equal 5 drills. Thing is, a circle with the diameter of a square will fit perfectly in the square resulting in some missed spots in the corners. Practically it's the issue mathematicians have with trying to square-ify the circle.

[@lamebubblesflysohigh]

Well hinge drill obviously gathers more - it is basic geometry. If you overlay both holes, the round one has unexcavated corners and thus mined smaller area in same amount of time. Square hole is also easier to convert into underground base if that is what you want. However where rotating drill shines is how hard/easy it is to scale it up. All you need is to move the rotor from the head to the base of the rig and it will dig up a giant hole around itself... you cant do that with the hinge drill. You can add a rotor to the base but some drills will always overlap with already dug areas and thus mine nothing and thus making it less efficient at large scale mining.

[@jasonwilson6062]

Put a piston after the hinge increase the swing of the drill head maybe?

[@akiraic]

for the hinge+rotor, just decrease the piston velocity to 1/4 of the original and done.

[@BotondKisKovacs]

You can simply calculate how much better the hinge one is by looking at the area of the holes. They both use the same width which becomes the diameter (D, r=D/2) for the round hole and the side (S) of the square hole. Area of the circle is 3.14 x r squared, area of square is S squared. If you do the math with any size you will see that the circle has 78.5% of the area of the square. Based on the mined materials you can see that is indeed pretty accurate. You can say that you roughly mine 20% more with a similarly sized hinged design.

[@monrastbreil3927]

Yeah I thought similar before he even hit start

[@Locomotor1979]

hee pandemic could you tell via youtube vid how to setup up the swiveling mining drill setup whit timer block's included

[@SirTragain]

I agree; this needed to be included in the video just as the piston speed was. Rotor speed in conjunction with piston speeds are valid variables when determine maximum yield.

[@BleachWizz]

Okay the circular one scales with the number of drills squared since it goes in a circle an extra drill increases the area in 2 dimensions. The one the goes back and forth only increases in a line so it has basically the same efficiency scale as the basic one. Which is pretty bad. In the case for the 7 drillls seems to be the tipping point since it forms a square. More than that I'd definetly say the circular should be better (maybe it goes to 8 or 9) but 7 drills making a square you can move it and cover a bigger area easier than with the rotor system so even tough the system is scales less if you put it to the best you can use it smartly and get a lot out of it.

[@stuartmacleod259]

What about combining the hinge with the rotor? would that work, or just get stuck on the ground? Edit: never mind, just caught the end of the video

[@XscotsmanX]

Your math is pretty good :P

[@geminisierra938]

what is the settings on the timer blocks for the hinge? did you mention it and I just missed it?

[@PandemicPlayground]

7 second delay on the timer blocks with the hinge at 4 velocity. I set the timer block action to hit reverse on the hinge and start the other timer block and the same with the 2nd block.

[@reecejones1248]

I like the video but you went as far enough as to put a control but then say later that it might be different because the slant of the hill might not have the same amount of material lol

[@kiwirambob]

Thank you ..

[@The_Digital_Samurai]

Did they remove Share Inertia from Pistons and Rotors?

[@eeeguba432]

I just use horizontal drills with a rail, the hole is way bigger, and it runs per layer without player attention,

[@wizzedsoup4277]

You didn't use the rotor and the hinge to their potential. The hinge is more useful if the hinge is higher up since it gives more swing and covers more area. The rotor is more efficient if you put the drills on only one of the sides of the drill so that the amount of drills equals the radius of the hole instead of half the radius, you can double the efficiency of the drill setups without using more materials this way. You can also put small grid drills with attaching a small rotor/hinge instead of a big one to save materials. The rotor would be much better if you put the drills in a more efficient way. The hinge would eventually beat the rotors but you need to put them at a very high point.

[@Skorpychan]

How do you stop either of these systems incurring the wrath of Klang? I tried a simple rotor and pistons system, and the whole thing snapped off in the hole.

[@deejeh9494]

Turn on "share inertia" and keep is simple. You could also double the piston width and have them joined at the end. Slower rotor rotation.

[@mjtwardy]

Even without checking, it's quite obvious that a square of length 7, will have a larger area than a circle of diameter 7.

[@Lobisomen79]

7 is the diameter, not the radius

[@mjtwardy]

@@Lobisomen79 yeah, I meant diameter. My bad.

[@Stranger69in]

Seems like a no brainer

[@FBlaise]

How did he setup the timer block? Not sure why he didn't show it...

[@GB-yt9sn]

Something like the timer time is set to the the time it takes the hinge to move through 180° then reverses the hinge so It moves the other way. Although with the 2 timing blocks he may have set one for each 90°.

[@shadowlordalpha]

Probably should have done this on an ice lake

[@brockabbott8139]

My hinge comes up incomplete why!?

[@trevorhoener8388]

Combine BOTH methods for ultimate mining carnage

[@MrWoofWoof03]

What about a hing rotor drill

[@mikkelknudsen9133]

the hinge is better the less drills it has while the rotor is better with many drills

[@brandonjones1234]

They are small drills i use three conveyors and 7 to 8 pistons

[@fledglingbodhisatva4821]

Combine them

[@Thaytor]

Just think what would happen if you put the hinge above the pistons instead of below

[@PandemicPlayground]

It would be a broom like drilling system lol

[@Thaytor]

@@PandemicPlayground and the sweep would be 66 blocks across with just the same cost and almost triple the amount of material as having it below.

[@PandemicPlayground]

Yeah, this sounds to be most efficient, but I'm still picturing like a broom action lol. This is an amazing idea to collect material for low cost.

[@coolent_cracker3287]

The difference here is the circular one can be expanded exponentially because of how circles work, for every drill you add to the line you increase the overall size of the circle each time. With the square you get the same increase each time

[@robertlcgarcia123]

@@coolent_cracker3287 that's true but you'll eventually get to a size were you will have to either slow down the rotation speed to allow the added drill to extract the minerals instead of passing over it occasionally

[@FJRyder]

You really don't need to make your rotor based drill rigs symmetrical. Only build out from the center in 1 direction. It will make the same hole. And other people have said this but, space out your drills (Drill,Spacer,Drill,Spacer,Drill) would have gave you the same hole with only 3 drills.

[@FJRyder]

@Aliver87 Yes the drill spins slower, but in survival you can only process so much. And if there is a difference in material it's not much.

[@FJRyder]

@Aliver87 I'm not talking about the drill process rate, I'm talking about the refinery rate.

[@FJRyder]

@Aliver87 And if you are starting your first drill rig, you might not have the resources.... I wasn't saying its better, I was saying it can be done cheaper. I also put pistons on the horizontal arm of my drill rigs to maximize the affective area.

[@FJRyder]

@Aliver87 I'm currently playing on realistic... So things are slower.... My statement wasn't wrong, just because you want it to go faster. You don't have to build it symmetrically.... You can if you want, but you DON'T HAVE TO. Like I said, if you're just starting off and you're tired of using your survival kit. You might like to know that you don't have to waste a bunch of time drilling by hand. THATS ALL. You Don't want to , FINE..... DON'T.

[@FJRyder]

@Aliver87 Well when he started adding all the drills to say how many you save by using this design....

[@cookreviews]

I think you would get a lot more subscribers if you gave the results immediately and then said keep watching to see how I got to this conclusion if you like. Thanks for the info. I skipped around a lot to get it.

[@zorgestorm]

If u change rotor to start drilling from rotor it will be more 3 drills dont do anything

[@rolandthelefty7743]

SOmeone HALP i have a hinge set up on my ship that lowers a drill, but the conveyor system wont work.........

[@PandemicPlayground]

Make sure your hinge and connectors are completely built and connected properly. Also, The hinge block has 2 parts, maybe check that to see if both the outside and middle parts are fully welded.

[@rolandthelefty7743]

@@PandemicPlayground thanks for the reply man, it turned out to be bugged for some reason.... loaded it up in creative and it worked fine right off the bat... went back to survival and it worked fine :S lord clang was mad i guess

[@FritzHugo3]

Why not over on top a Hinge with rotor? Shure the speed must be lower but its a bitter range than. Oh you did it later in video smile. But much, much to fast.

[@Telemaniakus]

vehicle...

[@LordJunes]

you talk to much