At its founding, the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) inherited the Army’s Jupiter and Redstone test stands, but much larger facilities were needed for the giant stages of the Saturn V. From 1960 to 1964, the existing stands were remodeled and a sizable new test area was developed. The new comprehensive test complex for propulsion and structural dynamics was unique within the nation and the free world, and they remain so today because they were constructed with foresight to meet the future as well as on going needs. Construction of the S-IC Static test stand complex began in 1961 in the west test area of MSFC, and was completed in 1964. The S-IC static test stand was designed to develop and test the 138-ft long and 33-ft diameter Saturn V S-IC first stage, or booster stage, weighing in at 280,000 pounds. Required to hold down the brute force of a 7,500,000-pound thrust produced by 5 F-1 engines, the S-IC static test stand was designed and constructed with the strength of hundreds of tons of steel and 12,000,000 pounds of cement, planted down to bedrock 40 feet below ground level. The foundation walls, constructed with concrete and steel, are 4 feet thick. The base structure consists of four towers with 40-foot-thick walls extending upward 144 feet above ground level. The structure was topped by a crane with a 135-foot boom. With the boom in the upright position, the stand was given an overall height of 405 feet, placing it among the highest structures in Alabama at the time. In addition to the stand itself, related facilities were constructed during this time. Built directly east of the test stand was the Block House, which served as the control center for the test stand. The two were connected by a narrow tunnel which housed the cables for the controls. Again to the east, just south of the Block House, was a newly constructed Pump House. Its function was to provide water to the stand to prevent melting damage during testing. The water was sprayed through small holes in the stand’s 1900 ton water deflector at the rate of 320,000 gallons per minute. In this photo, taken March 20, 1962, construction of the Pump House area is well underway.
speaking of minecraft I should really do more minecraft posting like tutorials and stuff because holy shit, so few WRITTEN resources and tutorials for it exist out there. it’s all youtube videos. fuck that.
There are written redstone tutorials but the people writing them Cannot Explain Things Clearly
when I first started doing stuff with redstone, I didn’t want to copy a tutorial, but it was so hard to find anything that just explained clearly what redstone components did that I’m pretty sure I ended up reinventing the wheel a thousand times trying to build redstone contraptions.
In particular I was stuck on automatic farms because I couldn’t work out how to make contraptions that kept working without the player doing anything. What I ended up doing was making a closed loop of powered railroad track with those rails that light up when something passes over them, and setting a mine cart with a chest running on the loop of track, so it would automatically extend a piston every few seconds, as if on a timer.
Then I found out what an observer was and I was like “wait”
Oh gosh you used minecarts? thats almost horrifying.
…okay now i’m curious i need people who know stuff about redstone to tell me how fucked up this is actually
(I have no idea how much you know about any redstone mechanics, so bear with me. I’m probably over-explaining some shit while not explaining others nearly enough.)
There are three issues I can see with using a minecart as a clock almost all of them having more to do with how the game runs than any in-game feature:
Moving entities. A minecart going around a track is going to be a lo more resource intensive than almost any other option.
Minecart movement is buggy as hell, particularly when the chunk the minecart is in gets unloaded/reloaded. There’s some sort of weird edge case where, if a minecart was on the edge of a chunk when it got unloaded, it might not save the momentum data, and the minecart would be stopped when it got reloaded. This got fixed a few times now, and I don’t know if it’s still an issue.
There are SO many other ways to make a redstone clock that don’t have these issues. I mean “clock” in the digital circuits/logic sense, meaning a circuit that outputs a signal at regular intervals.
To build off point 3, the most simple clock out there is to make a loop of repeaters, and put a fast pulse (flick a lever on and off, for example). You can also make a loop of hoppers with an item in it, and a comparator “reading” one of them, giving a faint signal when the item passes in front.
My personal favorite for things like crop farms, that I don’t see very often, is to hook up an observer to one of the plants to serve as the “trigger” that should power the farm, on average, when the plants are about half grown. I like this method for melon/sugar/kelp style farms, because the farm “decides” when to harvest based on the speed the plant grows. It’s simple and elegant, and that’s how I like my redstone.
Most folks use the “Etho Hopper Clock” like this:
This little guy lets items flow from right to left, until the right hopper is empty. Then, because the comparator stops reading anything in the right hopper, it stops powering the right piston, moving the redstome block to the right. That locks the right hopper, UNlocks the left hopper, ans the whole process repeats in reverse. You can pull a signal off of almost any part of this, but most folks will pull from the dust on either side. This has the HUGE advantage of being one circuit that can be tuned to fire off at almost any rate, by changing the number of items the hoppers pass back and forth. It’s a little bulkier than “just put an observer in a good spot” but it’s great for people who can remember a set of simple redstone machines, and then string them together to make more complex ones.
Whenever redstoners stand in their item streams to show off how much stuff is going through their farms I have the visceral mental image of like– you know those people who stand in fast rivers with their pant legs rolled up, trying to catch fish swimming by their legs? Except surrounded by industrial equipment instead of your standard river bank.
it is NOT a joke when i say u could have fucking college courses on minecraft redstone it has insane amounts of depth that you cant even begin to imagine if youve never messed with it much before
theres literally subsets of redstone mechanics too like theres multiple Fields of Study within redstone. like yeah you know basic algebra? well i know how slimestone works. working on getting my certification in wireless redstone, hoping to dabble in sculk tech once thats given better foundations to become its own field of study. also have some minor familiarity with applied stickystone/honey-based machines. command blocks are another specialty, including functions and datapacks. please hire me i really need this job after i got laid off from the villager tech industry after the 1.14 crash.
this post is soooooooo funny if you have a special interest in minecraft redstone. just take my word for it if you dont understand. im hilarious
