Upright spikes detracts and retracts as soon as the lever is pulled, without delay. You could just link all the spikes to a single lever and then order a dwarf to pull the lever repeatedly.
What? Easily proven not to be true. Spikes have a 100-tick delay like bridges and floodgates, so you can use a repeater with a 100-tick interval.
In practice, that looks like a pressure plate with a floodgate and water source on one side and a 1x1 drawbridge (not retracting bridge) and drain on the other. Control it by turning the water source on and off.
This. You might need a separate floodgate and lever to shut it off by blocking the water source. There is a video of this floating around somewhere.
Never having experimented with one I wonder though if you actually need the drain, could not the correct set-up of the bridge (1x2, lowers towards the pressure plate (but not onto it)) act as an Atom-Smasher?
This is also not true. U spikes retract instantaneously the
first time after being built, then retract and extend 40 steps after being triggered by a lever or pressure plate. I used '.' to advance step by step and count this myself. (using a soldier to trigger the plate)
The fastest repeater I can build is two pumps one atop the other, and separated by floors so they don't share power. a pressure plate is set on the output of the bottom pump so that it will trigger when the pump pumps one chunk of water. The pressure plate turns off the gear powering the lower pump and turns on the gear powering the upper pump(or you can leave the upper pump always on), the upper pump takes the chunk of water and drops it into the pit that the lower pump draws from. When the pressure plate untriggers in just over 100 steps, it will send an 'off' signal, begin pumping again, move the chunk of water onto the plate, and send an 'on' signal, for a net result of a near simultaneous on and off signal every 102-105 steps. You could set up two of these repeaters and get them to be offset by 50 steps, and that would trigger very close to the latency of U spikes, giving you the a very fast on-off cycle without making something REALLY elaborate.(like, say, a very large ring of pumps moving a single chunk of water around so it lands on an appropriate pressure plate every 42 steps... you'd need to make it take more than 100 steps for a full circuit so that the plates would have time to reset before the water got around to them again.. and lots and lots of gears) of course, that also means that each spike trap needs to be connected to each triggering pressure plate... the two repeater design needs 4 gears per spike trap instead of the normal 2 gears, and something more elaborate would need 2 per pressure plate... atleast 12 per spike trap if you want to get really close to the native latency of the spikes.
one thing for sure; cover a very large area with low latency spike traps, and you will certainly have a legendary mechanic in the end.
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Topic: Repeater (Read 1501 times)