Well the recovery system works great. It's not at all automated yet; but that may not be necessary.
First the machine in operation. The following vid shows a 4-z column of water being held suspended above the lowest level by the action of the pumps. The next z up from the bottom is the lower most pump. If you look at the vid you'll notice a lever.
http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-2588-suspendedfluids (Might have some possibilities as a death trap that automatically blocks any further movement through that a tile once a hostile toggles off that pump. I don't have time to play with it right now, but it should work for that purpose just fine.)
That lever disengages only the bottom pump. Forcing whatever fluid that is left to descend rapidly through the drop channel and into the bottom cart in the stack; filling it as the final action of the loading phase.
Might have some possibilities as a death trap that automatically blocks any further movement through that tile once a hostile toggles off that pump. I don't have time to play with it right now, but it should work for that purpose just fine.
The reason I developed this pump configuration was in order to recover the water from a two-z deep hole. This design does that; and more...
I inserted the original water from 3 z-levels above the main drop channel. I did this drop in two sections. The first drop was a three z column of fluid and the second was a single tile worth of water. The pumps handled the three blocks of water with no problem. They cycled very quickly. But I wanted to see what happened if I dropped another block. The pumps run and the water appears suspended one z above the bottom. For giggles, I built a bridge one z above the drop channel. When it's open you can see the water rushing by one level down.
When I close the bridge it forces a block through that bottom pump and restacks it up top. Just a bit of information that might turn out to be useful. Dropping mine carts into this thing also disrupts the hanging columns of water; but in a more random way.
The cart will not load even if you drop it all the way through 4 z's of 7/7 water. It's wheels must be on the ground or resting on another cart. Once that happens the cart will load.
This is why the setup I built has a absolute low point that holds the bottom cart in the stack. In that configuration as long as 7/7 water passes the cart the cart will steal a slice and load.
So there are 28 slices of water Eschering around inside that pump setup. I was able to fill 23 mine carts from the 48 slices of water. That's 46 slices back from 28 invested. 162%. Pretty cool.
23 carts take 24 slices of water to load when in a Quantum configuration. The bottom carts loads normally and pulls two slices for itself. The other 22 carts create 'magic water'.
The machine is not much harder to build than a four pump mister; the multi level digging complicates things a bit. I had to rewire it a bit to keep the inside path clean. I didn't want to lose the odd slice of water here or there. Once I got it built and start playing with it I saw a better way to build the machine that will make recycling both water and carts much more simple.
Instead of dropping the cart through. Run the carts through the intake of the bottom most pump. Since the cart is touching ground while 7/7 water passes it; it loads. I've confirmed this using this machine; by placing the carts before I began pumping water. The test carts loaded as soon as the water level reached 7/7.
So that means I don't need a bunch of extra z's to fill the thing or recycle the cart. I think I see a way to run the cart around the outside of the machine; through the bottom intake and then impulse ramp up and around to the next side of the machine. At the top, I put a Track stop that dumps back into the machine that all the carts run by. I disable that stop once the water level in the shaft reaches the appropriate level for a recycle. The rest of the carts loaded with free water, pass without dumping and onto the cistern or water cannon or whatever. That step might be a bit tricky and I haven't worked out the details yet. I'd like to accomplish it without much complication. This section of the fluid creation process is the final hurdle to overcome before achieving the goal of a portable fluid supply.
Refilling the 4 z hole in the fluid creator will take around 11 carts; leaving 12 loaded carts to use however you wish. Higher capacity should be as simple as running the pump spiral around a few more levels. I'll leave that to the individual designer. Twelve cycling carts will fill a big hole given enough time. And it will be a proof of concept. We'll go for hella dwarfy later...
For anyone that wants to build one of these things loaders; it's just a regular mister with each leg on a different Z. I was tempted to write it up as a separate article. But I've been sort of spamming the front page a bit. If anyone is interested I'll provide a diagram. Still haven't actually drawn one up.
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Topic: Fluid Generator? Close. Seem to have a dwarfish fluid recovery system. (movies) (Read 2475 times)