Lab Research Update – The Plane Block

This block is so far called “plane” because it is a thin and flat quad, not the flying one.

So what it does? First of all, this has pretty much to do with the lasers. Think it as a relay for forwarding laser beam to farther locations, for up to 20 nodes or maximum distance of 200 cubes in a line. When it works in this scenario, one side receives laser and the other emits. It is crazy because it is fully automatic, you place it and it works. If you have a few of them at the right location they can form a tree of laser network by themselves.

This was one of the optical experiments I have done. When I ask the plane block on the bottom right to “attack” the ground. It draws lasers from nearby prism towers and other plane relay blocks. Notice the width of the beam increasing after taking multiple inputs. This increase the beam power significantly and help situations where you have a spot that need to be finish off, such as a structural weakness point on a target.

Is this all it can do? Of course not. Before finishing talking about the laser part, the plane block also can be used as a receptor to convert the laser back to power. Thus it can be used provide additional power to high consumption designs.

A very common ground tower design would be the spinning Gatling tower with 4 balls on top driven by a cylinder. However, there is a problem with this – the balls shoot very fast and drains all the power it has. The power (or energy) flow among the blocks trying to power up all so blocks can function normally. What make the problem worse is this design can only draw power from ground and transfer it up through the cylinder – the bottleneck.

As you can see above, the energy indicator (either the round one or the bar) has drained out. Now it is time for the plane to help.

So when the plane works in this mode. It can generate strong output of power for heavy use. I actually noticed the number of physics objects has increased nearly 100 – I believe most of which are bullets.

Here I have only used one laser. Sometimes more of them are needed since this is not the most power consuming design.

There is more than just laser manipulation. The plane block has 2 attachable ports, one top and one bottom, pretty much like the cylinder. But the difference is this block can intelligently face one side to the target. Due to the top attachable port is not rotatable, when the plane try to face that direction, it will drive and rotate the upper part too. This is so interesting because an auto aiming arm can be constructed utilizing this. See video.

And in this situation, the relay function is still here:

So these new blocks are being added as this project is getting feature complete. There are still a few more coming on the way, very interesting.