Plans, dreams

So what do you put on top of a steampunk planetary explorer chassis? Smaller steampunk vehicles to go out on exciting exploring missions on land, sea and air of course. These come wrapped up in crates for easy loading and unloading.

It took me a week to make the chassis. Unfortunately I then spent a week trying to design a load / unload mechanism using the control pack from the Barcode Truck which only has a single input and output. The idea was

• touch the sensor and the motor drives the lifting gantry backwards until,
• the sensor hits the furthest forward crate, at which point the motor reverses.
• The motor is connected to a differential to give 2 output axles. The second, with least resistance would extend outwards to hook the crate until the forks could go no further at which point,
• the other side of the differential would engage and the gantry would move forward until the sensor hits the stop plate, at which point
• the motor reverses again and the pick-up forks retract until they can go no further at which point,
• the gantry would move backwards to get the next crate until the cycle completes x times and all are unloaded.
• At which point the gantry stops.
• And then with some simple barcode scan programming (hahaha) touching the sensor and the whole process would reverse, picking up a crate, moving the gantry as far back as possible, dropping the crate etc etc.

If you are still with me you can imagine how bonkers this plan is. I went through a bunch of prototypes which was fun but ultimately unfruitful. “Unfortunately” my knee had recovered at this point so I never got chance to work on my other dreams:

• a fork lift truck tucked away underneath the chassis for transport,
• the first crate would hold a truck and trailer for moving crates around with the fork lift acting as go between,
• something waterborne,
• something for under-water.

I also had some vague plans to use the brake pneumatics to also lift some plates in the weather sheild and raise some sensing equipment. It didn’t fit too well with the steampunk theme. A pneumatic catapult or cannon was almost too tempting to resist but I’m an old romantic and think Lego should set a good example and stick to peaceful models.

But yeah, I expect you can see why I never finished this.