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Self-Maintaining Survival Station - Lucy v1.4.1

/* IMPORTANT NOTE: 21th May 2016 */
Due to the latest updates some of the Scripts are broken. Ill fix them in the future, but right at the moment there are a lot of Programmable Block and Mod-API related bugfixes and improvements. So Ill wait a little until the Mod-API is stable again and its unlikely that it will break again with the next update.
/* END OF IMPORTANT NOTE */

Today I present you my newest creation. This is a rebuild of my Self-Maintaining Survival-Station which can be found here: http://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=364299611

This Station is Called Lucy and I did my best to make this station as intelligent as possible. It has a whole ton of sensors, programmable blocks, and timers to make sure everything works fine.

** DISCLAIMER **

There are known bugs and there is lots of testing to do until it truly reaches its final state. This Station was built in creative and not much used in survival by now. You can expect lots of changes after I played with it for a little time. Of course you are free to do changes by yourself as long as you dont upload them to the workshop again.

** What does the station offer? **

Oxygen

The Station is completely airtight, and self maintaining. It can bypass your interactions with doors if the station thinks it is not save to open them. For example, if the other room is not pressurized. The whole oxygen production is made by 3 oxygen generators which pressurize the whole station and fill oxygen tanks for backup purposes.
There is one main entrance which is secured by an automated airlock. You are not able to open doors when the conditions are not right. So no player will be able to accidently depressurize the station, which would lead to a disaster if there are players without helmets on the station.

There are two bigger hangars which also are pressurized. It uses a similar logic to the Airlock-System of the main entrance. But in a much larger scale. Both hangars and the airlock don't have connection to the oxygen generators. Before you can enter outer space the remaining oxygen will be stored in tanks to make sure we are not wasting to much oxygen by just opening a door.

KNOWN BUG HERE: Originally I wanted to do a Security-System which runs extremely fast and does cancel openings of doors as soon as possible, but sadly the air vents are quite buggy and might think that a room is no longer pressurized when you open a door. That caused lots of problems. I am just using a one second timer now. It leads to a loss of some oxygen when you open the door, but it closes the door fast enough to prevent the station to be emptied.

Weaponry

On my server experiences it turned out that rocket launchers are hard to handle and often accidently damage the station itself instead of the enemy ship. This is a risk which cannot be taken. If one rocket damages the stations hull it might depressurize a segment of the station. So I only used a bunch of gatling turrets on the outside (which only target ships) and interior turrets (which only target players).

I work on a concept to make the turret aiming-system more efficient, but since the possibilities of the programmable block are still limited I am not making much progress. I want turrets to aim at multiple targets instead of just the nearest one. I dont need ten turrets to go for the cockpit if two are enough. The other eight, could aim at the reactors or the gyroscopes...

Energy

The last station was only powered with solar panels which was really useful because I did not have the need to fight wars with players to get the most uranium to survive. But on this station I was not able to use solar panels as the main source of power. Of course it is totally fine for standby, but antennas, production and life support use up a lot of energy which would require a whole bunch of solar panels to let it work.

The solution here is to have multiple power sources which will dynamically activated. Solar panels provide enough power to maintain the core functions such as scripts, timers and also weapons. If a friendly player is near the station the production will automatically be enabled and batteries will provide the missing power. If the batteries are near empty, the reactor will temporary power the station to refill the batteries and turn off again if the batteries are full. The whole energy management is automated and does not require any player interaction. (Attention: If you play on a server make sure the necessary timers are still running after a server restart.)

Production

The station has 4 refineries, 4 assemblers and 3 arc furnaces. Most of them are only access able via control panel. They are placed on secure sections of the station which are not pressurized and also not enterable. The production management is also fully automated. Ores will be placed in the refinery and arc furnace evenly. So you will get a maximum output of resources. After refinement the ingots will automatically be placed back in a specified container group.

Assemblers follow the same pattern. They take automatically the resources which are needed and the components will automatically be stored where they belong to. I did not want to use the new inventory sorter block, because solving all the inventory management with hardware blocks would lead to a very complex design of conveyor tubes which I would not want to manage. Instead I wrote a program which handles all the stuff via software for me. It has configured rules to follow in a specific order and is easy to maintain (for a programmer at least).

In the control room you will get very detailed information about your stations inventory. You will see how many components, ingots and ores you have plus a bunch of other information. All inventory owners gets the percentage of filling added to their name (for example: Large Cargo Container || [46% filled])

Security
Since you are free to invite every person you want to your station the whole automation process might get in your way. For example: You invite a member of a hostile faction to your station (for negotiations for example). The stations sensors would detect him as a threat and instantly start to get rid of him.

The solution is a intelligent enemy detection system. If a friendly player is on the station, the internal weaponry will get disabled. When a hostile player enters the station, you will be informed via sound block and can enable the weapons manually if you wish. But if you don't they won't get enabled unless someone tries to hack your stations systems.
In order to protect itself and the people who live on the station it might get necessary to overwrite your decisions. When a player starts to hack your station, it will start to defend itself. This would lead to activation of all in and external turrets. All doors will also get closed instantly. The same will happen if your hull breaks and specific rooms are depressurized.

Other Features

Well if you are interested in the station feel free to check it out to find other featured I added in.