THIS CANNON ONLY WORKS IN 1.2.5
Records:
Largest number of TNT in a cannon: 6804 TNT
Longest distance cannon: 160 km
Farthest (horizontal) distance traveled by cannon: 12 km
Greatest height reached by cannon: 142 km
Mods used:
barracuda415's TNT memory leak fix
Single Player Commands
Minema
CameraStudio
Downloads:
TNT cannon save: http://www.mediafire...dsg4nzis3tbshyw
Player launcher save: http://www.mediafire...phqeccy9ncrc63n
barracuda415's TNT memory leak fix: http://ata4.info/dow...fix_mc1.2.5.zip
You will need to install the fix so you won't have to allocate around 52GB of memory and wait 12 hours for the cannon to process the explosion. The fix shortens the computation time to only a few minutes.
FYI: Failure rate is about 1 in 7 due to how pistons are still buggy (fixed in 1.3, I think).
Previous record holders:
+50km for longest range cannon:
+72km for highest player launch:
About shooting from 75 meters above ground and not from ground level:
Even though the projectile is shot on the same plane as the ammo, it still gets too much vertical thrust. The stone slab is to get rid of the vertical thrust. I can move the cannon down to ground level and test it so that the amount of vertical thrust is just the right amount, and I bet you I'll still get +100km. But honestly, I really don't want to work on this cannon anymore. I have a life. And most people don't care about these technicalities. It certainly doesn't help that the next update is literally within a week (at the time I released this video), which will break the cannon (see following paragraph).
About my claim that this is "the cannon to end all cannons":
It's more than for the sake of having something dramatic to catch your attention. This cannon uses pistons at the highest speed possible, squeezing in as much TNT as possible. I highly doubt anyone will be able to develop a cannon of equal power under a week. The 1.3 update slows down pistons to 75% its original speed, so after the update, no one else will be able to squeeze in as much TNT as me. Unless they downgrade, but that's silly. Or unless someone comes up with a novel compression method. Someone up for this challenge?
Trivia: The inspiration of the name/video came from a cannon I made in Line Rider several years ago:
Do you think that if you removed the water and placed a bedrock/obsidian block right under where all the TnT explodes, it would break the bedrock/obsidian??
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"I'm learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life ... Procrastinating and rationalizing.
I understand my tests are popular reading in the teachers' lounge." -Watterson
Do you think that if you removed the water and placed a bedrock/obsidian block right under where all the TnT explodes, it would break the bedrock/obsidian??
No. I don't have to test this, it's just how Minecraft works. In any case, I accidentally tested it many times. That would be when the cannon malfunctioned and blew itself up, leaving the obsidian base alone.
ok so, my comment about the vanilla thing just relates really to staying within the vanilla memory limits, tried using the tnt leak mod but upon firing yours i just get out of memory.
how much memory minimum does it need allocated to avoid that, any idea?
sorry im very ignorant regarding anything technical re. pcs.
i noticed some stacks are wedged in with signs but some arent, if you block those in you would stop the tnt jumping back onto an earlier firing piston and hence increase capacity and you could probably add at least 1 more tnt to each stack by placing a ladder above the top tnt to induce a faster drop. also i think you could fit 2 more rows in the gap you have near the firing rig. sorry im sure you have better things to do, just frustrating as i have known how to make the ultimate cannon for some time now but have never had the technical nouse to be able to get it to fire. whereas you do.
The signs aren't actually solid. They were there so I wouldn't misplace a TNT.
Placing ladders behind TNT so they wouldn't move in the wrong direction actually complicates things quite a bit.
Putting solid blocks above TNT is a no-no. That might cause the TNT to fit itself into a redstone rail and blow up the cannon.
I had to redesign the redstone rails a few times, and after I finally settled on a design and built everything, I realized that I could fit in more TNT by flipping the "parity" of rails (the back is TNT-centered, the front is rail-centered). I contemplated on whether it was worth tearing apart the cannon and rebuilding it yet again, and whether it would actually look aesthetically pleasing in the video, and if I had the time to do rebuild. I decided it wasn't worth it.
But yea. Besides how I wanted to do something else, there's the problem of the incoming update. If pistons didn't change, or if the 1.3 update were delayed some more, I would have taken more frequent breaks and have the time and will to perfect the cannon.
In addition, I knew you probably knew how to make the ultimate cannon, but, for well over a year, I've been wanting had this VISION to make the ultimate cannon AND make an epic video to go along with it. I would be disappointed if someone else released a video of the ultimate cannon without all the epicness.
Let me tell you this. I've been playing Minecraft since classic mode. I was around when redstone was first implemented and released. I could have been one of those famous redstone engineers, like shrogg or etho or sethbling, had I been able to produce good quality videos. In those days, I worked on a lot of redstone contraptions and TNT cannons that I'm not afraid to say were ahead of the times (one cannon was an early version of the ultra dense cannon, powered by TNT compressors instead of pistons, which didn't exist yet). But I could only use screenshots to document it, because at that time, my PC was pretty awful. I couldn't properly present it with videos since the videos would be unbearably laggy (I had someone else record the 7 segment display video for me). Yet, all around me, everyone else was catching up and making videos demonstrating their contraptions.
And sometimes, those videos were really bad quality. Not in the pixelated/laggy sense, but the presentation would be awful, ie the person would be rambling about some technobabble and the viewer would be like "just show us the damn thing already." I mean, it's fine for a tutorial, but when you're showing off something incredible, it deserves an incredible video. That's why Openarl managed to beat me in releasing the first Rubik's cube: I was busy making my video.
tl;dr i know how you feel ):
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My Youtube channel.
Contains Pachebel's Canon made with noteblocks, a working Rubik's cube made with pistons, and the ultimate TNT cannon.
by the way, my method for controlling the angle is as simple as placing a block at the right height above the shot....the higher the block the higher the shot as long as there are no blocks above where the charge is compacted to. this method however does not work with the mod you linked me so would make it hard to test for massive loads, not sure how it would affect distance but would make it shoot upwards and come back down to earth in time.
what.
what.
it's that simple?
oh my god.
I mean I had a feeling there was a very peculiar way Minecraft computed the collisions TNT has with blocks, (move in the y direction, then move in the x direction, then move in the z direction). I ran a few tests but I couldn't confirm that it was so, so I didn't think of using it. I actually had the cannon originally shooting west, but it always shot diagonally due to the aforementioned peculiarity.
So all this time, I could have, indeed, shot from ground level. Hmm.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My Youtube channel.
Contains Pachebel's Canon made with noteblocks, a working Rubik's cube made with pistons, and the ultimate TNT cannon.
yeah that part is that simple although it took a lot of experimenting to stumble upon it and then perfect its use.
there may be an upper limit of load where this method stops working although i didnt reach it up to 1500 load....as the load increases the height above the shot of the hat goes up.....my biggest versions had the hat about 80 blocks above ground. it didnt seem to act directly as a roof to collide with but more as a sort of surpressor of sorts. if my physics is right tnt wouldnt have time to go up to 80 blocks then drop to the ground as half the flight is in theory upwards travel and 2 seconds (half a fuse) isnt enough for an 80 block drop. Also the higher angle of "tee" i used required a lower hat to surpress the shot more. more supression meant less distance so ideal combo was lowest tee setting with smallest "face" on tee. I found enchanting table with brewing stand ideal as the tnt can be lit on 40th tick as it is close enough to tee but not touching at rest and brewing table has a central spine similar to fance post that blocks less of the charge. if the tnt is in contact with the tee (as in your setup) you suffer a loss of performance due to friction (about 30% loss at a guess) and if tee is less than 2 pixels higher than charge (again as in yours) the cannon will have a sort of backfire which also causes a loss of performance in my experience.
by the way the east west angle shot quirk (or is it the north south straight shot quirk?) can also be used to aim shots to some extent.
if, as you face the shot, the collumn to its left has missing blocks the shot will favour going left, if the right has more gaps it tends to go right of centre when shooting north south.
i have this set-up in another project i was working on but again ran into memory issues, a 10 shot/second reloading machine gun cannon, 500 metre shots from same barrel, with direction and range finding abilitys using the tricks above. its proven to be way too prone to glitch and mega resource hungry, maybe if they sort pistons out will get a working example for a vid.
I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out the ideal set up for the launchpad, but after a while, I knew I just had to stick to the best thing I had and move on due to time constraints. Also, I'm pretty sure that since the projectile TNT is technically "inside" the fence post, it acts as if it were in air, so I got around that.
The 1.3 update has more stable pistons and significant performance improvements, so maybe you'll finally be able to carry out your experiments (:
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My Youtube channel.
Contains Pachebel's Canon made with noteblocks, a working Rubik's cube made with pistons, and the ultimate TNT cannon.
Contains Pachebel's Canon made with noteblocks, a working Rubik's cube made with pistons, and the ultimate TNT cannon.
- Squarest of the Dogs
Conundrumer deserves his own custom title on the MCF:
"Demolitions Expert"
I understand my tests are popular reading in the teachers' lounge." -Watterson
No. I don't have to test this, it's just how Minecraft works. In any case, I accidentally tested it many times. That would be when the cannon malfunctioned and blew itself up, leaving the obsidian base alone.
Are you sure you installed the memory leak fix properly? You apparently won't need that much memory according to this post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/wlwm1/several_weeks_ago_a_friend_detonated_a_lot_of_tnt/c5eiaoe
The signs aren't actually solid. They were there so I wouldn't misplace a TNT.
Placing ladders behind TNT so they wouldn't move in the wrong direction actually complicates things quite a bit.
Putting solid blocks above TNT is a no-no. That might cause the TNT to fit itself into a redstone rail and blow up the cannon.
I had to redesign the redstone rails a few times, and after I finally settled on a design and built everything, I realized that I could fit in more TNT by flipping the "parity" of rails (the back is TNT-centered, the front is rail-centered). I contemplated on whether it was worth tearing apart the cannon and rebuilding it yet again, and whether it would actually look aesthetically pleasing in the video, and if I had the time to do rebuild. I decided it wasn't worth it.
But yea. Besides how I wanted to do something else, there's the problem of the incoming update. If pistons didn't change, or if the 1.3 update were delayed some more, I would have taken more frequent breaks and have the time and will to perfect the cannon.
In addition, I knew you probably knew how to make the ultimate cannon, but, for well over a year, I've
been wantinghad this VISION to make the ultimate cannon AND make an epic video to go along with it. I would be disappointed if someone else released a video of the ultimate cannon without all the epicness.Let me tell you this. I've been playing Minecraft since classic mode. I was around when redstone was first implemented and released. I could have been one of those famous redstone engineers, like shrogg or etho or sethbling, had I been able to produce good quality videos. In those days, I worked on a lot of redstone contraptions and TNT cannons that I'm not afraid to say were ahead of the times (one cannon was an early version of the ultra dense cannon, powered by TNT compressors instead of pistons, which didn't exist yet). But I could only use screenshots to document it, because at that time, my PC was pretty awful. I couldn't properly present it with videos since the videos would be unbearably laggy (I had someone else record the 7 segment display video for me). Yet, all around me, everyone else was catching up and making videos demonstrating their contraptions.
And sometimes, those videos were really bad quality. Not in the pixelated/laggy sense, but the presentation would be awful, ie the person would be rambling about some technobabble and the viewer would be like "just show us the damn thing already." I mean, it's fine for a tutorial, but when you're showing off something incredible, it deserves an incredible video. That's why Openarl managed to beat me in releasing the first Rubik's cube: I was busy making my video.
tl;dr i know how you feel ):
Contains Pachebel's Canon made with noteblocks, a working Rubik's cube made with pistons, and the ultimate TNT cannon.
what.
what.
it's that simple?
oh my god.
I mean I had a feeling there was a very peculiar way Minecraft computed the collisions TNT has with blocks, (move in the y direction, then move in the x direction, then move in the z direction). I ran a few tests but I couldn't confirm that it was so, so I didn't think of using it. I actually had the cannon originally shooting west, but it always shot diagonally due to the aforementioned peculiarity.
So all this time, I could have, indeed, shot from ground level. Hmm.
Contains Pachebel's Canon made with noteblocks, a working Rubik's cube made with pistons, and the ultimate TNT cannon.
I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out the ideal set up for the launchpad, but after a while, I knew I just had to stick to the best thing I had and move on due to time constraints. Also, I'm pretty sure that since the projectile TNT is technically "inside" the fence post, it acts as if it were in air, so I got around that.
The 1.3 update has more stable pistons and significant performance improvements, so maybe you'll finally be able to carry out your experiments (:
Contains Pachebel's Canon made with noteblocks, a working Rubik's cube made with pistons, and the ultimate TNT cannon.