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[echonic]

When you encounter damp stone give the ability to simply drill a tube through the stone to the other side to allow access to the water without risk of rapid flooding. It would be a much slower flow of water than if the stone were removed and a mechanic could install a valve on it to turn the flow on and off.

Smoothing perhaps should be required first.

The valve could also be destroyed by a building-destroyer which would open the hole back up to flow freely.



I realize there are many larger threads involving water and/or mechanics but it's a bit difficult to sort through and this seems like something that could be much more short-term achievable without any sort of major overhaul to underlying systems.

[SuicideJunkie]

Alternative:
1) build a floodgate in front of the damp wall.
2) Link lever and open gate.
3) Smooth, and then carve fortifications into the damp wall
4) Miner flees from the water, lever operator turns flow on and off

[irmo]

When you encounter damp stone give the ability to simply drill a tube through the stone to the other side to allow access to the water without risk of rapid flooding. It would be a much slower flow of water than if the stone were removed and a mechanic could install a valve on it to turn the flow on and off.

I don't like this. Digging through stone with water pressure behind it shouldn't be entirely safe.

[echonic]

When you encounter damp stone give the ability to simply drill a tube through the stone to the other side to allow access to the water without risk of rapid flooding. It would be a much slower flow of water than if the stone were removed and a mechanic could install a valve on it to turn the flow on and off.

I don't like this. Digging through stone with water pressure behind it shouldn't be entirely safe.

I don't think so either. I think it should have a chance of failure based on skill of the dwarf doing the job!  Things accidentally going wrong are the best kind of things going wrong!

[irmo]

I don't think so either. I think it should have a chance of failure based on skill of the dwarf doing the job!  Things accidentally going wrong are the best kind of things going wrong!

Okay, then you're taking an engineering puzzle for the player and replacing it with a die roll. What does this accomplish?

[echonic]

Okay, then you're taking an engineering puzzle for the player and replacing it with a die roll. What does this accomplish?

Okay so then you support my idea in it's original form! Great! =D

edit: Yes I realize you don't.  Just being silly.

The main thing I was thinking and I talked to some friends of mine about was trying to get a way of getting small amounts of water out of something that seemed like something dwarves would actually do. It seemed reasonable that dwarves would have the means and ingenuity to come up with a simple piping procedure like this that could create a faucet on the end for doing things such as filling up buckets of water and such.

The point you appear to be trying to make while insisting on not saying it plainly is that the engineering aspect around acquiring a water resource would be circumvented way too easily by simply having the player have to select to smooth then build the device without danger.  This is a completely fair point.

Having a system setup that first required infrastructure to be created and then having a valve available on a piping network would seem to be the more sophisiticated engineering requirement I was hoping to avoid by such a simple and realistic solution, but alas.

[Di]

Wait, did I get it right? First dwarves install pipe, it starts the flooding albeit slow and only then comes mechanic to install the switch?
Ability to link pipes directly to aquifers may be desirable but only when we get lots of those pipes which improved mechanics thread is about.
Until then, SuicideJunkie's way is fine.

[blizzerd]

id like some piping system, would be fun to attach some "pipes" to a pump or something to have a 1 tile (instead of 3 tiles) wide water moving system

[SuicideJunkie]

Actually, come to think of it...

It sounds like what you really want here is a sideways/horizontal well.
Dorf brings a bucket to the Tap-Well, pulls water from an adjacent tile (but on the same Z level), Dorf walks away with a bucket of water.

To be constructed in practice, you'd need to build the tap before you let the water in, otherwise the task would fail due to dangerous terrain.

[ravaught]

Ok, so, does it fit..

A dwarf using a hammer to pound a pipe into a damp stone in order to create a faucet. I think it could work, but, in order to keep it balanced with other forms of getting water, I think it needs a bit of work.

First, I don't think it is over powered because of two things:

If you tap into a lake, it can/will run out of water.
If you tap into an aquifer, it requires that you first manage to successfully punch through the aquifer. And, supposing you manage that, it also requires that you clear a little bit of room around the faucet for it to be of any practical use.

So, practically speaking this would only have a major impact on the early part of the game. To be of any real use in the end game would require that the player already has some form of water transport system in place and simply wants a way to tap into it without flooding the fortress. So, I don't really see that as an unreasonable request.

The parts I think would need to be addressed specifically are:

A faucet item would have to be created.
Would the faucet be attached before or after the pipe section was installed? If it was attached prior to the pipe then how do you get rid of the trash in the pipe from the installation(all the crap that fills up the pipe as it is being driven into the stone)?
Alternatively, I could see it working really well like this, while reserving the potential for FUN:

Create the pipe section.
Create Mechanism x 2
Create Drill
Drill hole in wall(water begins to flow into the fortress, but at a vastly slower rate than is normal for a breached aquifer)
Pipe Fitted to Hole
Mechanism One ("Faucet") fitted to pipe (Water flow stops at this point, and the Dwarves can clean up the mess, but the water in the pipe is inaccessible)
Mechanism Two is used as a link between "Faucet" and pipe.

So this could in theory be accomplished using items that are already in the game. When the faucet is successfully completed, the wall section becomes what is essentially a floodgate with a greatly reduced flow, that can be used for filling buckets and what not. The tap could be auto resetting, so that it normally switches on when a Dwarf uses it, and switches off when he doesn't. Normally I wouldn't even bother with that, but it leaves some interesting possibilities open for FUN in the form of some mischievous ass running through your fort leaving all the faucets on. 

The only major code items I can see with this are perhaps flags for controlling the flow and setting it up for filling buckets and what not, but I think you could get away with using the Well mechanics for that. The auto-switching might need a bit of work too.

Seeing as how this does not traverse Z levels, I do not see how this would imbalance the game in any significant way.

On other thing that would need to be addressed is whether the water that comes out is filtered or not, as is the case with the well and the screw pump. I personally think that those mechanics need a bit of tweaking, but that is up to Toady.

[PlainTextMan]

I'd say this is a reasonable request.

However, it is more of a backseat-request IMO since it is more of a gimmick than something that would add a new element to the game mechanics.

Also, there is the question as to the tools that dwarves have to drill (realistically/SoD-wise speaking) fairly deep holes into walls that are under pressure.