Something is wrong with piston towers

Nigel Haslock shared this feedback ago

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In creative mode, I built a small stack of pistons. I thought the control panel looked ugly so I went out and ground one, fully retracted, piston to non-functional. Back to the control panel to rename the grid consisting of anon-functional piston. Back to the stack. Repair it.

The piston jumped to fully extended and then began to retract to its original size. I did this several times an noticed instance of the piston leaving its head (and everything built onto it) behind. When the piston was fully retracted, the head jumped back into position.

Also the sorting of the grids in the control panel was random. I was expecting an alphabetic sort by grid name or a sort by creation order. What I got was something else.

What I would like to see is pistons joined, end to end, presented and controlled as a single grid.

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Replies (1)

Deon Beauchamp ●

Were they small pistons or large ones ?

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Nigel Haslock ●

Small pistons with tiny negative velocity

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Deon Beauchamp ●

I have seen problems with small pistons too on on Verdure' surface. They do not appear to be strong enough in gravity.

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Nigel Haslock ●

I tried again with large pistons. Same problems and more besides. Note that you do have have the velocity set before you start grinding.

Large pistons do not snap to a large piston head. You need to use <CTRL> to make the necessary fine adjustments to get it into place.

The cause of the problem may be that when you repair a large piston, the velocity is reset to 0.0 That is, I suspect that the return to functional resets the pistons setting to its default values (I noticed this with the large pistons but I didn't check the settings on the small pistons).

Building a stack of small pistons in survival requires placing a piston, then a piston head, then the next piston, then the next piston head and so on. Why not have the default be to place the piston with its head, allowing you to create a stack without cycling the block to be placed. Alternatively, allow pistons to seat on pistons without an intervening piston head, at which point you could justify treating the stack as a single grid.

I also noted that flying a ship with a set of grappling arms made of piston stacks make the dampeners very unhappy and steering with dampeners on quixotic. This on a 30t ship with twin 2.5m gyroscopes.

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