Helicopters & Airplanes: A Toni Carter Aerial Mod

Minecraft 1.21.1 · NeoForge

Oil, from the ground to the tank

Aircraft do not appear out of nowhere. Everything runs on a supply chain you have to build:

Oil Ore generates underground between Y 0 and Y 64, in large veins — a little rarer than coal, a little more common than iron — in both stone and deepslate. Break it for Oil Shale.

The Oil Extractor presses shale into Crude Oil. It accepts Forge Energy from any cable, generator or battery, and if you have not built a power grid yet it will burn coal in its own firebox instead, so the chain can start the moment you find the ore.

The Oil Refinery cracks crude oil into Aviation Fuel. It needs real power, so this is the point where a proper energy setup starts to pay off. The included Coal Generator will do if you have nothing else.

The Fuel Tank stores what you make, and the Fuel Canister carries it to wherever you parked. Every one of these speaks the standard capabilities, so pipes, cables and hoppers from other tech mods work with them without a compatibility patch.

Iron & copper       ->  Machine Casing  ->  Coal Generator
Oil Ore (Y 0-64)    ->  Oil Shale       ->  Oil Extractor   ->  Crude Oil
Crude Oil           ->  Oil Refinery    ->  Aviation Fuel   ->  Canister / Fuel Tank
Aircraft Frame + Propeller or Rotor + Avionics              ->  small aircraft
+ Turbine Engine + iron and diamond blocks                  ->  large aircraft

Aircraft are meant to be an achievement. You will not be flying an airliner on day two.

Ten aircraft, all genuinely different

Flying it

Airplanes need a takeoff run. The control surfaces only bite once air is moving over them, so open the throttle, let it roll, and pull back as it gathers speed — at stall speed the wings start carrying it and the nose comes off the runway. In the air the wings drag the velocity round onto the nose, so the aeroplane goes where you point it.

They are arcade aeroplanes on purpose: under power a climb costs no airspeed, so you can haul the nose up and go up fast instead of watching the speed decay. A dive runs well past the level flight limit, which makes pointing at the ground — or losing the engine and falling out of the sky — the quickest any of them will ever move.

Helicopters hover at about half collective and go wherever the rotor disc is tilted. They are quick over the ground and deliberate in the vertical, so getting somewhere means flying there rather than going straight up. The rotor is the only thing holding one up: wind the collective off, run the tank dry or shut the engine down, and it drops, accelerating all the way.

And then there is the ground. A gentle touchdown costs nothing, a firm one costs structural integrity, and coming down fast — or flying into a hillside — writes the aircraft off where it lands: cargo scattered, everyone thrown out of their seats, and whatever fuel was still aboard going up with it. A full airliner makes a considerably larger hole than an empty trainer. Server owners who would rather it did not can turn it off in the config.

Cabins you actually sit in

Every aircraft is built around one description of its cabin, and that single description decides where the seats go, how the model is built and how big the collision box is. They cannot drift apart, which means:

• Board an aircraft and you sit on a seat, inside the cabin, with a cushion under you and the roof over your head — not perched on the fuselage with your head through the ceiling.
• The glazing is translucent. You can see the crew and passengers in there, and the pilot can see out.
• The server decides which seat you take and tells every client, so passengers keep their own seat for the whole flight. When the pilot climbs out, nobody is shuffled forward into the controls.
• Everyone aboard banks and pitches with the airframe.

Right click to board: the pilot's seat if it is free, otherwise the nearest free seat to where you are standing. The HUD tells you whether you are the pilot, the copilot or a passenger, alongside speed, altitude, fuel and — in a helicopter — vertical speed.

Built for servers

Movement follows the model vanilla uses for boats: the pilot's client runs the flight physics so the controls answer immediately, and the server validates the result and is the authority for everyone else. Fuel, engine state, cargo, machine energy and every inventory transaction are decided server side only. The client sends control inputs and never a result.

Machines expose a restricted port to automation — hoppers may fill the input slots and empty the output slots, and nothing else — so a pipe cannot jam rubbish into the slot your filled buckets come out of.

Balance lives in config/aerial-server.toml, per world and synced to clients: fuel consumption, airplane and helicopter speed, ore generation rate, machine energy costs and process times, crude and fuel yields, collision damage, and whether crashes explode at all.

Compatibility

Everything is built on the standard NeoForge capabilities rather than a private API:

• EnergyStorage — the extractor and refinery take Forge Energy from any cable, generator or battery; the coal generator pushes it into any adjacent consumer.
• FluidHandler (block and item) — machine tanks talk to pipes, and the fuel canister is an ordinary fluid container.
• ItemHandler (block and entity) — machine inventories and aircraft cargo holds automate normally.

If your tech mod does the same, it already works with this one.

airport

Find oil, refine it into aviation fuel, and fly ten helicopters and airplanes from a generated airbase with a runway, apron, helipads and a control tower. Full industrial chain, real flight models, and crashes that explode.