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[kefkakrazy]

The biggest design issue right now is figuring out where to put the pump tower, which will raise the water to the top of the water tower. I THINK that I'm going to build a small addon structure to the main tower which will house the pumps, since this will allow me to use the windmills I'm building. It's going to take a ton of them but I have enough open space to build them.

[Pilsu]

One could probably cause the pulses by simple putting a lever into the meeting area and setting it to repeat when goblins come'a'knockin

Do show us how it turned out when you're done

[kefkakrazy]

It's going to take a godawful long time to build the tower-I've set all my miners to "masons" so that they'd use their hax stats to help haul the stone for it. The pumps that will fill it will also be windmill-fed, since I don't have the inclination to set up water wheels. This shouldn't be much of a problem, aside from getting the wood required (but that's not TOO big of a problem).

I'm going to set things up with a simple floodgate fed by gravity and using the lever-repeat trick, as an interim, but I'm also going to set up an automated system whereby one pull will activate it all. I've already started rigging my fortress so that it will be impossible to flood-all that's left to do is dig to the bottomless pit and open a drain there.

[Tanelorn]

As a simpler alternative to pulses, you can work with a continuous flow. For this (and it works, it is my main line of defense), have water coming from the ceiling (top room) into a the central walking path of  a corridor. The sides of the corridor have to be channels, so the creatures are pushed into the channels and fall in the room below.
That room  (middle room) must not fill with water unless you specifically want it to, or things will stop falling into it. So you will need to dig some channels and cover them with grates, to allow the flow of water further down into the lower room, but to retain creatures.
The lower room just needs floodgates underneath the grates from the middle room so you can decide wether to drown (close the floodgates, and the water will fill all the rooms) or simply store the unfortunate creatures that got trapped. You also need to get rid of the water somehow, so the middle room keeps getting drained. It's a good idea to recycle your water and send it back to the top room. So you have a continuous flow.

In my case, the corridor (walking area) of the middle room is 3x11, with two 1x11 channels on the sides. You don't want the walking area to be 1x11, or the falling water will obstruct the path and gobos will no come. With a 3x11 corridor, the central row is where the water falls, and creatures walk on the side rows. One push, and they are in the channels.

A side effect of water pushing things (a bug?) is that most items will eventually get destroyed by the water flow. So you can get rid of the goblin's junk without breaking a sweat. First trap the gobos in the room with the grates. Then drown the gobos to "release" their equipment by closing the floodgates. Reopen the floodgates with the water flow still on, and water will start pushing the equipment around continuously, because the items are trapped in the middle room. The light items (clothing, limbs) will get destroyed/ripped apart. The heavier things (corpses, iron armor, weapons) will remain, so you can collect it later.

It gives you a nice trap that also works for waste management.

[kefkakrazy]

Phase one of the water tower (the windmill farm, the site selection, and the pipeline that will fill it from the brook) are almost complete. I only have to finish the windmills on the farm and pipeline, as well as the machinery that will eventually link the windmill farm to the pump tower. I think the tower will be about four or five Z-levels high-that should keep me from running out. I've also got, as stated before, drain canals from the fortress and the tower, so I should be able to keep myself from ever actually flooding the fort.

EDIT: Having minor issues getting the pipeline windmills to connect to the pumps. I may have to move the windmills and build gears and axles-the pumps may not accept power directly from the windmills. This shouldn't be a huge issue, though-each windmill produces enough power for one screw pump and any pieces I need to connect it with, so there's no power issues. I'm going to try moving the windmill-maybe the pump requires that the windmill be over a different section of the pump. If that doesn't work, it's gears and axles. I don't think a horizontal axle will block a hole to water flow or pumping, so that shouldn't be a problem.
TEST AND YE SHALL FIND!

And things getting destroyed by water flow doesn't sound like that much of a bug, considering. Dunno. I may use that design you just talked about somewhere, though.

UPDATE: Water tower construction is off the ground. I've shuffled some things around, and I'm using a construction technique where I've built a staircase going up to where the top of the tower will be. I'm building a ring of floors on the inside of where the walls will be built, both so the masons can get to the build sites and so that I'll have a "scaffold" to get to the walls, in order to install new taps on the water tower. Also working on the pipeline-the fix to get the pumps to accept the power seems to be fairly simple.

[axus]

I can't wait to see the video

[kefkakrazy]

I'd include an image of the now-mostly-completed pipeline and the tower's base if I could figure out how to do it. It's a pretty big image (though the filesize isn't that big) so I'm not gonna worry about it unless someone cares enough to tell me how.

The pipeline is now complete, I'm just linking up the gears to a lever for an emergency stop system and am building the walls to channel the water. The tricky bit, moving the water up about three Z-levels to get to the tower site, is done. Work on the tower itself is flowing along nicely as well now that I've conscripted a bunch of non-mason dwarves to work on the building-my miners and various other dwarves with nothing to do or useless professions are making themselves useful by pitching in as part-time masons.

[UPDATE: Minor setbacks due to collapses caused by me deconstructing bits of the water tower while changing designs for the pump tower. Kinda sucks but eh.]


[UPDATE 2: Sadly the project has been put on temporary hold due to a goblin ambush. I've got to clean up the bodies and keep folk from tantruming before I can worry any more about the water tower. Shouldn't take long but still.]

[UPDATE: Back on track. I'm trying to implement my modified version of the wiki's multi-level pumping scheme here-hopefully it works!]

Testing the first level of the pump tower!

UPDATE: Pump tower design is A-OK, and it looks like the existing windmill farm will power the entire tower with quite a bit of horsepower to spare. Now I just have to weather these damned goblin ambushes while I finish the actual water tower.

[kefkakrazy]

Updating again: I'm almost totally done with the water tower. As soon as that's done, I'm going to start opening tests: I've already set things up so that anything entering the fortress has to pass through a wide area designed to flood and either drown or wash away anything that tries it. It will all drain into the pits-luckily I have a well-placed bottomless pit, right below where I sited my tower. Adding new taps to the tower will be a simple process: shut down the pipeline, shut down the pump tower, open the hatches in the bottom which drain the water tower into the pit below, and if necessary, open the floodgates to empty the pump tower. There's nothing on this thing that can't be reached by dwarves with a little lever work.
On that note, Toady, if you read this, the addition of notes is probably my favorite add-on to come along since Z-levels. Admittedly I said this about wall construction, and the ability to designate large numbers of wall constructions at once, but THIS TIME I MEAN IT.

Water tower complete!
http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/movie-857-watertower

[illiterate]

Hrm... Is being washed away faster than walking?

I've had this idea of using water pulses (triggered by pressure plates) as a way to move dwarves quickly from one fortress area to another.  Seems likely it would cause them to drop things or gain unhappy thoughts.  Also a problem when two way traffic is traversing the deathtrap dwarf-mover

[Ivefan]

That would have been fun if 7/7 squares was considered flowing.
"all travelers inside?"
"Close entry and release the water!"

A sight to see, wet dwarves poping out at the end in mach3.
the other fast travel would be catapults but thats more goblin style than dwarven ^^

[kefkakrazy]

http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/movie-860-dwarvenswimminghole

The first test, the Dwarven Swimming Hole, an attempt to give my dwarves a swimming education. Unfortunately, I apparently didn't plan for the effects of water pressure.

I may work on the Swimming Hole later, but for right now I rest easy in the knowledge that I have an epic load of water pressure working here for the pulseomatic (or if that doesn't work, the Drown O Matic)

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I'm not surprised by that pressure... you got a friggin lake in that tower, man!   

[kefkakrazy]

Tower is, as hinted in the other video, about 5 Z-levels high. So yeah.

I've actually replaced one of the floodgates on the Pulseomatic with a door-from what I can tell, if I try doing it with floodgates, the cycle time on the gates will keep it from working exactly right. The door is on its own lever, so if the rest of the pulseomatic is working too slow... well, I can always find a mean-spirited dwarf willing to play the Slot Machine of Doom.

EDIT: I counted. Five z-levels. So yeah, water be under a *teensy* bit of pressure. Just a bit.

I also learned a valuable lesson about pressure: the pipeline that was gonna feed the Pulser is mostly underground, but part of it isn't, and I neglected to roof that.

Ooops.

Luckily, the tower is not right on top of my fortress, and the water that did trickle in didn't cause a crisis-the fortress is rigged to drain in an emergency like this.

My only problem right now is the fact that the pump tower fills the water tower very slowly. It takes a loooong time to fill, partly owing to the sheer amount of capacity (3,360 7/7 tiles of water, I think). On the other hand, that is likely to make a fun present for some poor bastard, and the sheer pressure means I could probably flood any given section within seconds.

[kefkakrazy]

It doesn't seem to work very well for its original purpose. In fact, for some reason the water is flowing very slowly into the drowning area. It's almost like it's leaking out the drains even with them closed, or something-the top half is all water and it's not draining very quickly if at all, the bottom half is shallow water that's draining slowly.

Also, despite efforts to the contrary, the water tower is, frankly, weak sauce. It empties too fast and drains too slow... on the other hand, it appears that creatures immersed in water that doesn't cause drowning may in fact be slowed by said water. And there's also the awesome bit of one stray elephant wandering in during my tests, hitting a couple traps, and limping around in deep water while its blood literally fills the entire outer ring of my fortress.

Be that as it may, I may wind up scrapping the defense as currently slated, because it's not doing the job I need it to. I can't pulse fast enough to push things back, so the effect seems to be rather negligible. I may try the dropping water thing someone previously mentioned, or I may scrap the flow pusher aspect, build a ceiling, and convert the outer ring of the fortress into a drowner.

I may wind up scrapping this fortress at this time-it's served its purpose as a testbed, and I'm ready to move on to other ideas. Both the Dwarven Swimming Pool and the Flow Pusher have failed their tests. I HAVE learned a good bit about large constructions and about water dynamics in general from this.

I think I might actually tackle an aquifer in the near future-I've never tried one.

Now begins the search for a desert embark site with a magma pool! Glass Citadel HOOOO!