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[DuckBoy]

A new invention has been brought to me by Urist McArchimedes.  He has claimed that by use of a single lever, he can move every item in the world.  With the flick of a lever, he can send trade goods to the depot, bones to the craftsdwarves, goblins to their deaths, and leave the haulers to fish and drink ale with the philosopher. 

I told him he was full of it. 

He brought me back these plans for a first prototype.

.o.
. .............
. . _ . _ . _x
.  _.  _.  _. 
. _.. _.. _..
._..._..._...


The plan is from the side.  Every _ is a single tile bridge, and every _ is linked to his single lever.  Spaces are space, and .'s are walls, natural or otherwise. 
The o is a garbage pit, and the x is the output.
From my initial experimentation, the prototype is sound.  Dropping in wooden cups on the left side and repeated pulls of the lever eventually resulted in wooden cups appearing, almost by magic out the right.  When the cups first started pooring out, Urist  whooped and hollered, and ran down to the grand dining room to throw a most excellent party. 

Alas poor Urist.  The haulers union took him in the night, and several hours later, his skull was found in a tower cap mug just beyond the output of his prototype device. 

Several haulers were hammered as a result, and many haulers were put to work carrying large stones back and forth purposelessly as punishment.  The hammerer has informed me that such incidents will never happen again. 

But all I have is this prototype plan, and I am no McArchimedes.  There are a multitude of problems with this... conveyor belt of his, and I don't think I can solve all of them alone. 

Now, I have surmised that the entire purpose of his design is to move items back and forth around a very large fortress without the need for dwarf interaction.  It also has to be simple to build, repeatable, and placeable nearly anywhere.  This means that a simple cascading set of bridges forming steps downwards is impractical, as the design could not be repeated indefinitely, since it would not be able to move objects back up and would thus hit the bottom of the mountain before crossing the fortress. 

The problems I see with his design are as follows:

It appears that the amount of time it takes for the cups to reach the end of the design is approximately proportional to 2 to the power of the number of levels with bridges * the total number of times an ascending set of bridges is repeated.  (A statistician philosopher could probably give a much better answer for how long on average it would take to move up x times with equal probably of moving up or down, I'm not certain it is exponential)  However, this only works when there are bridges which cannot (or can only with low probability) fling objects back to the left.  This was the purpose of the 3 tile drops.  Without these drops, the cups are incredibly unlikely to make it to the end of the conveyor belt.  However, if the three tile drop could be removed in some way, through timing of some other method of blocking travel in certain directions, the design could be shrunk down, maybe even to a height of 2.  If that were so, the cups would truly fly through the conveyor. 

Cups could be flung from the bottom level to the top level, and even back out the input on truly rare occasions.  I believe some kind of grate or hatch could be put in the way of the larger falls, preventing items from coming all the way back up, however, finding a place to put such a grate is quite challenging even in the current design, never mind any flatter design. 

Haulers were still needed to dump items into the input of the device.  Perhaps another of the Archimedes family can could come up with a way dwarves moving towards a stock pile would drop their items (or themselves, if they can escape the device, which should be possible if there are ramps under the bridges) on a particular square thus allowing true automation of the device. 

I beg you, inventors of the world, do not let the only life claimed by this conveyor belt be dwarven.  Our fortresses must pile the bones of our enemies directly in our craftsdwarf's shops, our fortresses must pile our crafts directly in our depots, and they must continue to do so, even if no dwarf remains alive to trade.  For otherwise, how can we truly call ourselves dwarves?

[mattie2009]

Add in a hatch cover at the output over a lava river and it'll be almost too awesome.

[Tallefred]

Couldn't you just build this on a flat surface and drop floodgates behind each bridge?

Like this:

OOOOOOOOOOOO
GXGXGXGXGXGEND
OOOOOOOOOOOO

Drop the floodgates after the item is thrown forward. The problem is if it's thrown backward, it will get caught under the bridge....

Put the final stockpile on the bottom floor, and leave the area under the bridge open. Repeat the same design on every floor, so if it falls it lands on the conveyor belt below. Hopefully it will reach the end before it runs out of floors.

I know this is kind of a silly idea. It's 10:30 in the morning and I haven't slept yet.

[ed boy]

Couldn't you just have it on a single level like this (side view):

Code: [Select]

#=wall
I=input
O=output
_=retracting bridge with a floor underneath
 =open space

 I
# #
# #######################
#______________________ #
                      #O#
The retracting bridge would retract, flinging the items in a random direction. They travel in this random direction, the bridge gets put in place again and retracted again, flinging them again. The only way out of the system is dropping down to the output hole, and the laws of statistics stat that eventually all the items that input will find their way to the output.

A device to automatically input the items would be as such (top down):

Code: [Select]

#=wall
F=fortification
+=floor
B=retracting bridge over input pipe
S=stockpile of input items
G=goblin POW

###
#G#
#F#
#B#
#+#
#+#
#+#
#+#
#B#
#+#
#+#
#+#
Firstly, you have to pit the goblin POW in the chamber - make sure to take away all his weapons first. Secondly, you want to designate the stockpile as accepting whatever you want to put into the conveyor belt, let us say food. The hauler picks up the food, and starts making his way to the stockpile. Before he gets there, the is scared by the goblin, drops his food and runs away, before trying to bring some more food. The bridge is positioned so that the dwarves are over it when they drop their food out of fright, and it is periodically retracted, dropping the food into the conveyor belt. It a dwarf happens to be onit when it is retracted, he will be dropped in himself, but he will be transported along himself even if you do not build an access doorway.

[100killer9]

Put the conveyor belt on a repeater.

[Overspeculated]

I have an idea on how to get stuff from one place to the other surely and efficiently, use dwarves!

Aside from that, I once toyed with the concept of a "dwarven subway" or "fling-transporation machine". It has two basic parts, the flinger and the timer.

The flinger looks like this:

UUUUUUUUUU
LlLlLlLlLl
DDDDDDDDDD
U= upward rising drawbridge (or wall)
L= leftward rising drawbridge (part that turns to wall)
l = leftward rising drawbridge (part that lifts)
D= downward rising drawbridge (or wall)

the timer is a basically a watertunnel with a screw pump and a drain. The pull of a lever will release the presurised water (for even flow) into the tunnel. The tunnel is filled with pressure plates, each pressure plate is connected to a leftward raising bridge and the two upward rasing bridges and downward raising bridges orthogonal to the leftward raising bridge.
The basic idea is that a dwarf stands on a leftward raising bridge, the water reaches the first bridge and shoots him up in the air. Statistics show that a thing flung from a raising bridge will most likely land away from the direction in which the bridge is rising (because there is a wall there). When the dwarf lands on the second bridge the water reaches this second pressure plate and catapults him again.
This is repeated until he has reached his destination.
"Stops" can be added to this system via doors that block the waterflow, allowing him to get off at a certain point and not doing the entire circuit, for example a long system that goes all the way to the far off magma pipe could also let the dwarf go at the brook that is between fortress and magma pipe.

The probability of working per use is probably quite low though, I'd guess roughly 20% for a mid-sized transporter.

This can be used for your conveyor belt, each leftward raising bridge is connected to a repeater in such a way that when it raises the bridge to its right is down, allowing the item to land there. It will allow for faster travel and surer travel than any current models in this thread.

[mattie2009]

I have an idea on how to get stuff from one place to the other surely and efficiently, use dwarves!

Aside from that, I once toyed with the concept of a "dwarven subway" or "fling-transporation machine". It has two basic parts, the flinger and the timer.

The flinger looks like this:

UUUUUUUUUU
LlLlLlLlLl
DDDDDDDDDD
U= upward rising drawbridge (or wall)
L= leftward rising drawbridge (part that turns to wall)
l = leftward rising drawbridge (part that lifts)
D= downward rising drawbridge (or wall)

the timer is a basically a watertunnel with a screw pump and a drain. The pull of a lever will release the presurised water (for even flow) into the tunnel. The tunnel is filled with pressure plates, each pressure plate is connected to a leftward raising bridge and the two upward rasing bridges and downward raising bridges orthogonal to the leftward raising bridge.
The basic idea is that a dwarf stands on a leftward raising bridge, the water reaches the first bridge and shoots him up in the air. Statistics show that a thing flung from a raising bridge will most likely land away from the direction in which the bridge is rising (because there is a wall there). When the dwarf lands on the second bridge the water reaches this second pressure plate and catapults him again.
This is repeated until he has reached his destination.
"Stops" can be added to this system via doors that block the waterflow, allowing him to get off at a certain point and not doing the entire circuit, for example a long system that goes all the way to the far off magma pipe could also let the dwarf go at the brook that is between fortress and magma pipe.

The probability of working per use is probably quite low though, I'd guess roughly 20% for a mid-sized transporter.

This can be used for your conveyor belt, each leftward raising bridge is connected to a repeater in such a way that when it raises the bridge to its right is down, allowing the item to land there. It will allow for faster travel and surer travel than any current models in this thread.

Just remember that anything + rising drawbridge + Floor = SPLAT.
Even if you could time it so perfectly that it would literally be able to fling a Dwarf from A to B without splatting him until the end, you still have to account for the random flow of water and the 100-step delay. If you set it to water 6, then if the water moves too fast then that drawbridge isn't going up. Dead/ critically injured dwarf paste, back to the drawing board. If the water moves too slowly, then the drawbridge won't rise until two steps after your other dwarves start to scrape their injured buddy off the drawbridge. Two flying dwarves and a couple of dwarf giblets are now in the air. Also, Drawbridges are notorious for causing an army of goblins all piled onto a two-tile wide, three tile long bridge to go flying across the map and spell out "WE SURRENDER", all in one line, with the resulting corpses. The dwarf in question could be either moved a singe tile or skip drawbridges three, four and five. Then you'll have another coffin to put in your ever-expanding graveyard of victi- I mean unlucky test subjects.

Nobles, however...

[Overspeculated]

Suddenly I feel retarded.

[Halceon]

Depending on whether items fall through grates, you could make the whole system water activated.

Code: [Select]

X = floor
_ = grate and hatch
| = door
X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X
|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|
X X X X X X X X
All doors are open by default, as are all bottom hatches. The top hatches default to closed. When the transportee lands on a hatch, the bottom hatch is closed, the top hatch opened and the door behind it sealed. The transportee is whisked away by the water to the next hatch and the process continues for as long as necessary.

[Sphalerite]

I have been attempting for some time to design a working conveyor belt.  It's not easy.

Water can be used to push objects, and appears to be the only way to cause an object to move in a specific direction.  Water only seems to push objects when fluctuating at a level below 7/7, but in theory a pulsed water flow down a corridor should work to shove objects along.  Unfortunately water's ability to push an object is weight-dependent.  As far as I can tell water will not push stones at all, and really only likes to push lightweight objects.  What's worse is that in the current version of DF there is an odd bug in which objects pushed by water sometimes end up stuck in a weird limbo state where they still show up on the stocks screen but are not anywhere you can access them on the map.  That makes water unsuitable for conveyor use.

Retracting and raising bridges both throw objects.  The direction thrown is completely random, so you need to somehow make it more likely that the objects will be thrown in a preferred direction.  Raising bridges throw objects further - 11 squares maximum versus 3 - but raising bridges will destroy objects that are in the wrong place when they raise or when they lower.  Unless you're willing to accept your conveyor destroying a good percentage of the objects traveling down it, you need to use retracting bridges only.

I have come up with a design very similar to Urist McArchimedes's design, using a sawtooth arrangement of bridges and walls to cause objects to move only one way.  And I have come to the same conclusion as DuckBoy that this design will be very slow to move objects from start to finish, with objects spending a long time randomly bouncing around inside each valley in the sawtooth array for a long time before making it over the tooth.

One thing to keep in mind is that this device must be considered three-dimensionally.  Objects thrown by bridges move up to 3 squares in X,Y, and Z, but stop moving and fall if they hit any obstacle.  You cannot use walls to force them to move in a specific direction, but only to stop them from moving a direction you don't want them to.  This means that objects on a wider conveyor will travel faster and further than on a narrow conveyor, because they will have less of a chance of hitting the side walls of the conveyor and stopping.  On a 1 tile wide conveyor most of the thrown objects will hit the side walls before moving more than 1 tile.

Using door or floodgates might help.  The problem with doors and floodgates is that they won't close if an object is in the way, so an object that ends up thrown onto a space occupied by a gate will stay there forever.  But you can build floodgates and doors floating in midair, by constructing them on top of a wall then deconstructing the wall under them.  You might be able to build a phased array where floating doors or floodgates are opened and closed in sync with retracting bridges such that objects tend to be thrown one direction.  It's going to take a lot of floodgates and some fancy mechanical logic to make it work, especially if your conveyor is more than one tile wide.

For those considering using this type of design to throw living creatures, keep in mind that living creatures stay on the same z level when thrown.  Only objects can be thrown upwards by bridges.

[Amalgam]

Doesn't dust from cave-ins push items? You might be able to use one of those fancy obsidian rock-droppers to push items and dwarves. It'd be spammy though. Still, I'd like to see someone send a dwarf through one of those things.