Light Assault Frigate - USS Quell - User Manual

This is the start of a user manual for my recent Space Engineers design.  I've named the ship USS Quell, but you can call it whatever you want.  She's just here to please you.  Oh so many jokes to be had here.  Anyway, let's move on.

The ship is designed to operate fairly intuitively but the torpedo system may require a little explanation.   First, let's breakdown the assigned seats at the bridge (see picture below)

If you can't read the text in the picture above, going from the left to the right, the seats are Engineer seat(controls torpedo launch system), Pilot seat (controls all hatches), Engineer seat (controls countermeasure launch system), Engineer seat (controls frontal dual canon and repair system activation).  Also notice the four red lights directly above the command consoles.  They are indicator lights for the torpedos.  After one has been launched, the corresponding light will be turned off.

So if you want to unleash some torpedoes, go ahead and get yourself seated in the far left seat.  See picture below for an explanation of the hot keys that shows up once you are seated.

Again, if you can't read the text in the picture above, here's the launch sequence.  

(1) Press button 1 to open the missile bay door (if it's not open already).  

(2) Press Button 2 to feed the torpedo into the tube then wait a few seconds as the torpedo goes into position (WARNING: if you press button 3 immediately, the torpedo thrusters may burn through the holding block thus ending in explosions, mutilation, and a whole range of other bad stuff).  

(3) After the torpedo is in position, press button 3 to ignite the torpedo.  At this point, the operator still has the option to cancel the launch system but pressing button 3 again to kill the thrusters on the torpedo then pressing button 2 to retract missile back.  

(4) But if you want to ahead and launch the torpedo, press button 4.  This will disengage the holding system on the missile, then retract the holder and rotate to the next missile.

There are a total of four missiles, each one is launched with separate buttons.  Use the same launch sequence on buttons 5, 6, 7 and 8.  (WARNING: button 5 is simply for rotating the torpedo system, which is actually automatically done after pressing button 4.  So do not press unless you want to retain a missile and cycle to the next one instead).  Buttons 6-8 launches missile 2.  Missile 3 and missile 4 controls are on the second control page (Press "Shift + 2" to get to the second control page).

This concludes the whole launch sequence explanation.

The counter measure launch system follows a somewhat similar pass but slightly simpler.  Go to the counter measure control seat and open the counter measure hatch.  Reverse counter measure rotors to get them into position.  Ignite the countermeasures then launch.  No pictures yet but you can always press "G" when in the seat to figure out what each button does.  The names for the buttons should be fairly intuitive.

That's it for now kids, more to come later (if necessary).

7 Days to Die - Project Awesome House (Day 4)

House Construction

I finally began to construct the primary structure of the house.  I know I wanted a pool, a fire place, and a wing of the house to have about a 180 degree view of the outside so that I can come up there and shoot zombies if I want.  Figures 1-3 illustrate the house in its unfinished form.

Figure 1- Unfinished living room

Figure 2 - Unfinished kitchen

Figure 3 - Unfinished ceiling

The finished product is below.  You will notice that by comparing Figure 1 to Figure 12 that the second story is actually a few blocks lower.  that's because in the initial construction, I realized the second story was way too tall and it did not look good.  I took the extra time to shave it down by a few blocks and the result is better but I wish it was still lower.  Take this as a lesson for advanced planning.  I should have done more homework on this one.

The next thing I plan to do is to upload a video of a walkthrough in the house.  So stay tuned for a link!

Figure 4 - Back of the house

Figure 5 - Left side of the house

Figure 6 - Downstairs lounging area with bar

Figure 7 - Family room

Figure 8 - Open firing range

Figure 9 - Entrance to open firing range; firing range storage lockers; roof access

Figure 10 - Frontal view of the house and sky walk (the sky walk connects the open firing range to the second floor)

Figure 11 - Right side of the house

Figure 12 - Living room with fire space and stairs to second floor

Figure 13 - Downstairs bedroom with lounging area, work desk and safe

Figure 14 - Additional downstairs bedroom view

Figure 15 - Tunnel access to the bottom of the ditch and then outside (this is at the foundation of the sky walk)

Figure 16 - Pool area

Figure 17 - Sky walk

Figure 18 - Up stairs primary storage area and access to firing range

Figure 19 - Upstairs lounging area with sky light and access to upstairs bed room

7 Days to Die - Project Awesome House (Day 3)

Ditch Digging

Digging the ditch deep enough to kill zombies with fall damage is the worst commitment I ever made.  Shaving through rocks with an auger took about 3 days to totally complete the ditch.  I did come up with a little bit of a short cut and I imagine it probably saved me a few hours.  So here's the shortcut.  If you want a ditch 3 blocks across then you dig on either side for about 3 blocks tall and go all the way to the end.  Then you take out the last row and the middle row will simply fall off.  An illustration is provided below.

Figure 1 - How to dig a ditch

Figure 2 - How to dig a ditch

After some grueling work, it is finally done.  Isn't it magnificent?  Unfortunately it won't kill bloated zombies on fall because I heard they require about 40 blocks deep to kill and I'm not about to spend a month just digging.

Figure 3 - Final form of ditch

7 Days to Die - Project Awesome House (Day 2)

It is day 2 and I have moved from drawing on paper to actually building the house in-game.  I'm going to give a relatively detailed account so if you'd like to replicate the process, you can do so with plenty of references.  Otherwise, I hope this could inspire you to begin your own awesome project.

LOCATION 

First things first, I had to first find an open field large enough to accommodate my house.  Furthermore, I wanted to have some natural elements such as trees and grass surrounding my house to give it a more organic feel.  After running around for a bit, I liked the land as shown in Figure 1.  Unfortunately, there were a few small hills next to it.  I decided to digging through them and clear off about half the hill to give more room to my building space.  I have to say, that was very very tedious.

Figure 1 - Map and Location

FOUNDATION

I wanted to put in 1 layer of foundation as a reference.  Furthermore, the foundation layer would also serve as the flooring for the first floor and thus be level with the ground.  This means digging out 1 layer in the dirt in the shape of the first floor (Figure 2).

Figure 2 - Foundation Dugout

I'd like to refer to my initial drawing for the next part.  Since I planned to have a super deep ditch around the house, I cannot use ladders directly inside the ditch to access the outside because the zombies can also use the ladders to avoid the fall damage.  The plan I came up with is to have a tunnel accessible from the house that goes all the way down to the bottom level of the ditch then tunnels out and up into an open field.  This is difficult to explain with words but it will become more clear later with illustrations.  Now, the tunnel access is indicated in Figure 3.

Figure 3 - Tunnel Access

During the foundation planning, I also dug down extra deep for the tunnel layer so that I can keep it in mind while building out the house.  This is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 - Tunnel Foundation

This more or less completes the initial zoning.  Next phase is digging that deep ditch.  This may be the most tedious phase of the project.  To speed it up, I decided to cheat a little bit and use the creative menu to access the auger to aid in my digging process.  Stay tuned for details.

New Project - Building an awesome house in 7 Days to Die (Day 1)

So I've begun a new project.  This time, I'm not building a computer but I've recently taken an interest in the game 7 Days to Die.  It's an amalgamation of Minecraft and various zombie shooters although the graphics are much better than that of Minecraft.

Anyway, given the scope and flexibility of the building system within the game, I thought I would be able to create a rather nice looking house.

Before I began, I had the following thoughts/goals:

1. The building should be aesthetically pleasing
2. I want the inside of the building to feel as if someone could literally move in and live there
3. Given #1, I will forgo most of the defensive mechanisms that one would normally implement inside the game such as building a perimeter of spikes.  Instead, I will surround the whole building with a deep enough ditch so the zombies will die from falling.

With these things in mind, I did some initial planning for my awesome future house.  Here is a summary of what I did:

Building Material: Mostly reinforced concrete.  I discovered that it is one of the few building blocks within the game that keeps its perfectly straight edges when placed on the ground  Most of the other materials will warp with the landscape.

Flooring: I want to have a nice hard wood floor for the house and it's a toss up between the old wood blocks or the normal wood planks.  I picked the latter because I thought it would bring some warmth to the house given its yellowish hue.

Floor Plan and Sizing: The picture below (Figure 1) is my initial drawing of what I imagined the house would general look like and how each room would be divided up.  I had no thoughts yet on exactly how wide, tall, long the whole thing would be.  I was just going to section off an area in the game and see how it goes.

Figure 1 - Initial Floor Plan

This was my first go at planning out the building.  Stay tuned for how everything went.

Lian Li PC TU-200 The HTPC Build (Construction - Part 1)

Setting Up the Case

Step 1: Remove thumb screws

First remove the side panels of the case.  This means removing (see picture: step 1) the thumb screw at the top left and right hand corners.  Next push the protruding level outward (see picture: step 2).

Step 2: Remove the side panels

Side Note: I encountered some difficulty opening the left side panel.  The lever was simply not pushing the panel out no matter how hard I pushed (to be fair, I didn't want to push too hard).  The solution?  Look from one side and use a screw driver or some other tool to push out the panel.  See picture below for where you can insert a tool to push out the side panel (note: push firmly but it won't take too much power to remove the side panel).

 Next account for all the parts that comes with the case.  Besides the manuals there are some screws, a USB 3 to USB 2 converter, and attachments for the hard drive for easy installation:

Next, I remove the drive bay and get the front case fan out.  There are lots of thumb screws to be removed from the drive bay.  See pictures below.

Side Note: I didn't notice that before sliding the front case fan out, I needed to first remove a thumb screw (see picture below).  I used too much force and broke the side of the case fan.  Luckily I won't be needing this fan anymore.  So pay special attention here before trying to forcefully removing the fan.  

 Before installing the case fan, first unscrew the filter and the anti-vibration screws from the original case fan, then reattach them to the new case fan.  See below for an illustration.

Next I installed the optical drive.  This is done by first removing the optical drive bay cover by unscrewing two side screws on either side (see picture below) then remove the drive bay cover by pushing it toward the inside of the case.  Sliding the optical drive in from the front.  Next reattach the drive bay cover.  Then slide the optical drive flush against the back of the cover and use a thumb screw to secure the optical drive.  Finally replace the drive bay cover.  This is a pretty convoluted process so be sure to patiently work through it.

Stay tuned for the next part on the system construction

Lian Li PC TU-200 The HTPC Build (Introduction)

Inspiration

The reason I decided to make this build in the first place is because my father in law needed an everyday use PC and I wanted to build this little guy as a surprise for his birthday.  He also likes to watch movies so I started out with a home theater PC ("HTPC") in mind.  His everyday usage mainly consists of Excel and Word; occasionally he may use it for Photoshop but that's quite rare.  My father in law loves novelty items and he has mentioned on quite a few occasions that he wants a cool looking PC with LED lights inside.  I intend to fulfill that wish with this build.

The reason I chose the Lian Li PC TU-200 is for three reasons:

1) The case is extremely small but still capable of hosting some serious hardware as it can take an ATX power supply as well as a full size graphics card.  This is quite rare on for mini-ITX cases, at least to my knowledge.

2) This case looks awesome.  Look at it.  The overall design is sleek and clean.  There is some added flair with the screws at the edges, giving it a modern industrial feel.  The handle on top to fully take advantage of the small form factor is just a cherry on top.

3) This case is very well-made (though there are a few flaws that will be covered later).  It's constructed with aluminum and the craftsmanship is amazing.

Overall Assessment of Build Difficulty: Difficult.  Due to the small (very small) form factor as well as some of the case design decisions, this is a case that requires lots of patience and experience.

Planning

Since the case has been chosen, I decided to do some further research and find out just what's needed to get a system up and running inside this little guy.

Side note: I will make side notes throughout this article and point out the little things that I think are important.  In this instance, I want to emphasize that research is absolutely imperative to any PC builder.  No one wants to spend over $800 and come home with parts that do not fit together.

My research first focused on form factor.  I want to find out whether there are any peculiarities when it comes to the parts that might fit in this PC.  It turns out that the case does fit an ATX power supply, HOWEVER, if the case is left unmodified and the hard drive bay is kept inside, one should consider using a 140mm long ATX power supply. Any longer and you will risk mashing the cables from the power supply against the drive bay.  See picture below for details and note that the red box depicts roughly how a power supply would fit.

This case needs a 140mm ATX power supply.

Next I know that I need a mini-ITX motherboard ("mobo").  One thing worth noting here is that I worried a mini-ITX motherboard may have a limited selection of CPUs.  So I wanted to find out what type of sockets are on these types of mobo.  It turns out the AMD mini-ITX mobo have FM1 sockets (Ex: a CPU for FM1 type socket would be AMD A6-3670K) and AM3/AM2+/AM2 sockets (Ex: these sockets fit Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs).  The Intel mini-ITX mobo can have LGA1155 socket types which can fit Core i7 to i3 type CPUs.  These are the latest and the greatest CPUs on the market so I guess my worries were unwarranted.

I wasn't planning on inserting a powerful graphics card into the computer since it won't be used for gaming and the rare usage of Photoshop would not warrant a powerful discrete graphics card.  As a result I did no further research on how well graphics cards fit into this case.

My father in law did want some LEDs inside so I thought a red LED front case fan should contrast nicely with the black.  I did some research but did find any information on whether the front 140mm front fan is (easily) removable.  So I emailed some editors from a few online publications and found out that it is indeed removable.  Great!  See picture here for a full frontal view of the case.

This roughly concludes my initial research.  Now onto the rest of the parts.


Motherboard and CPU

Given the needs of this computer, I know I potentially wanted an integrated video card on the mobo.  However, it turns out all the mobos I like come without an integrated video card.  Luckily, AMD came out with the AMD A8-3870K that's got a quad core CPU along with an AMD Radeon HD 6550D that comes all in the size of a normal CPU.

Power Supply

It was difficult finding a 140mm long power supply.  I finally spotted the Corsair PC Builder series that's just 140mm long.  In the end I decided to go with the 500 watt or the CX500 model.  This is more than sufficient for my needs and if I ever decide to stick a discrete video card inside this case, I think the 500 watt model would be able to handle it as well as there are two PCI-Express connectors.

Hard Drive and Memory

Boot time and overall speed is pretty important so I wanted to invest in a solid state drive ("SSD").  In order to have enough storage space, I bought a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB drive.  With memory or RAM, I decided to go with 8 GB.

The Rest of It

Since I expect this PC to be carried around a bit, I wanted to give it some wireless capabilities.  So I went with a Rosewill RNX-N150 wireless card.  As mentioned before, I wanted to swap out the front case fan for a LED fan.  I settled on the XIGMATEK 140mm red LED fan.  Reviews seem to indicate that it's of solid build and relatively quiet.  Which are both important factors.  In order to make this a all-around HTPC, I decided to invest in a Blu-Ray drive.  And the chosen one is Finally, since the case is so small, I decided to stick an extra PCI slot fan to increase airflow and ensure temperature control inside the case.  For that I decided on the AOC FC-2000 case cooler.  It's also reported to be relatively quiet and can move large amounts of air out the case.

Complete Parts List

Case - Lian Li PC TU-200

CPU - AMD A8-3870K

Mobo - ASRock A75M-ITX

Memory - Kingston XMP 8GB

Primary Hard Drive (OS) - AData XPG SX900 128 GB

Secondary Hard Drive (Storage) - Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB

Power Supply - Corsair CX500

Case Fan - Xigmatek Crystal Series CLF-F1452

PCI Slot Fan - AOC FC-2000

Wireless Card - Rosewill RNX-150PCe

Optical Drive - LITE-ON Blu-Ray

Stay tuned for the next part on the actual construction of the system