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[Monkeyfacedprickleback]

I'm quite fond of my marksdwarves. They have saved many a fort from goblin siege and they can be crosstrained as hunters. With the advantage of Fullplate steel and fortifications they have prevailed over even elite goblin and elven bowmen and crossbowmen. I also like how you can Shoot you foe's with bits of their brethren. but they waste to much ammo. So i was wondering does anyone have any special setup for their archery range that helps cut down on bolt loss. Right now i'm using a intensive labour setup which (i think) minimizes bolt loss at the cost of being hard to build. this is roughly what it looks like:

WWWWWWWWW~
W                  ^~
WX...................~
W                  ^~
WWWWWWWWW~
W                  ^~
WX..................~
W                  ^~
WWWWWWWWW~

W= walls
X= Archery target
.= floor
space=Empty space
^=Ramp up
~=any significant distance

And repeat as neccessary.

 So i was wondering does anyone have anyone else special setup for their archery range that helps cut down on bolt loss. This setup salvages every bolt that doesn't hit the target so I can reuse them of melt them down.

[Starver]

Similar to you, but slightly more compact.

More or less in your notation:

Code: [Select]

WWWWWW  ~ ~ ~    WWWWW.
W       (for        >..
W X...  ~ ~ ~    ....W.
W        the        >..
W X...  ~ ~ ~    ....W.
W        max        >..
W X...  ~ ~ ~    ....W.
W       length      >..
W X...  ~ ~ ~    ....W.
W       needed)     >..
WWWWWW  ~ ~ ~    WWWWW.

                    ^ ^
dowm to bolt stores-' |
                      |
      main corridor---'

The space behind the target is not necessary for bolts fired at the target itself (all destroyed, anyway) but bad misses that stray across shooting lanes might have hit the wall behind, and this way it lets them land in the lower area as per less/more inaccurate misses.  (Not entirely sure if "just bad enough to hit adjacent target" misses destroys the bolt.  Probably.  It should be testable, even without gluing one's eyes to the screen, by having an inactive range in the midst of the set and seeing if destroyed bolt icons eventually appear on the ground in front of it, fired from adjacent (or further!) lanes.)

Whether I have a lower-level bolt stockpile defined all the way from the access stairs to the archery target end, or not, differs.  If I don't put one all the way from end to end, I tend to put a smaller one at the stair end, giving haulage dwarfs the task of getting loose fallen bolts to the end more quickly accessed by the archers needing more ammo.  Alternatively, putting it at (or fully extending to) the target-end might count them as being stockpiled already, if I was bothered about hauling times or distractions from some other moving job.

I don't actually see why I couldn't make the target walkway into a line of stairs-down floors (counterparted with stairs-up on Z-1, of course), or keep some of the ramps created on Z-1 by the initial "channel away" part, rather than remove them all to allow stockpile existence on those tiles) to allow quicker travel to all places the missed bolts land, but I never have.  Probably more an aesthetic choice.  As is the fact that I smooth all walkways (even under the spot the target will be built) and walls.  At least on the archery level, if not also on the drop-level.

Thus my design is comparably intensive in labour (shared 'channel' walls save miner-time, but the engravers spend more time in there and the Architect might not be called in until later than he really could be), depending on how you weight the various efforts and if you use micromanagement burrows or exploit the intrinsic job-prioritisations to get a better critical-path workflow in your creation.