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[GavJ]

WIll things falling into a minecart tile go into the minecart? If so way simpler solution: set up a route to push every 4 days dropping from above, then wait 2 days and set up a route every 4 days pushing the lower one, and they'll never be there at the same time and never have any other reason to be standing in that dead end hallway.

[greycat]

WIll things falling into a minecart tile go into the minecart?

From Minecart#More on Track stop:

Items falling on top of a minecart will not fall "inside" the minecart.

[krenshala]

There was a thread about safely dropping items into a sealed off mini-fortress a while back.  If I remember correctly, the safest (but by no means completely safe) solution ended up being a one z-level deep pit that the supplies were dropped into that had a hatch as the floor. One z-level below the hatch was a one tile stockpile to hold the food/drink with a door as the only way to the stockpile.  If I remember the setup correctly, there was a pressure plate a few tiles before the drop off point that is tied to both the hatch and the door below.  When the plate is triggered the door closes and the hatch opens, dropping anything it was holding into the stockpile below while not letting the dwarves down below into the stockpile. It triggers again when the person dropping something off walked away.  The down side was that anyone in the stockpile when the pressure plate gets triggered is most likely going to get badly injured but I believe injuries were relatively rare.

[GavJ]

That would be the same system I described above, although using a hatch with zero delay makes it better, yes.

If you make restricted traffic on the stockpile, people shouldn't ever linger there, only go if they need to grab stuff then head out again, thus you shouldn't ever have anybody standing on the stockpile for a long time without having recently been on a pressure plate, so they should never fall through the cracks.

Any injuries that occur with that are probably due to using only one plate. You want several, starting far enough back that any changes you want are guaranteed by the time they get to the door, and so that nobody in between possibly gets forgotten if, for example, they decide to stand there and repath or something for too long.

[milo christiansen]

Shoot a minecart across a water gap, if going fast it will skip and fly through things like fortifications, then you can land it on a section of track on the other side of the gap and bring it to a controlled stop, easy.

[greycat]

Shoot a minecart across a water gap, if going fast it will skip and fly through things like fortifications, then you can land it on a section of track on the other side of the gap and bring it to a controlled stop, easy.

Hmm, I think that might actually do it.  As long as there is only the one minecart on that entire track, with the prisoners responsible to send it on its way back, after unloading the contents into an area that the minecart can't possibly roll through when it comes back again.  And as long as you can ensure no prisoners will be on the tracks, ever.  (My minecart-actually-carrying-goods experience is severely limited, so I'm not sure how to go about that last part.)

[Panando]

A while back I invented a pump-powered quantum stockpiling device.

It looks like this:

Code: [Select]

#######
#####ds
~pPfdds
#####ds
#######Where pP is the pump, d is downstairs (with openspace underneath them), s are floors and f is a fortification. The same stockpile should cover both the downstairs and floors (d and s tiles). The pump will pump water which generates 'moving water' on the d tiles, the 'moving water' pushes items to the right, due to a quirk of dwarven physics, the items are pushed to the right, but the water itself falls down the tile, meaning the items end up on a dry tile the water never actually reaches. In normal Quantum Stockpile use dwarves drop items on the d stockpile tiles, and water pushes those items onto the s stockpile tiles.

At a minimum the pump powered quantum stockpile (PPQS) requires a pump and an aquifer for water source/return. If you don't have an aquifer handy, you can use a water return loop. The PPQS suffers from evaporation, you can easily water one with a murky pool, and rainfall will replace evaporation losses, you can use automatic refilling by including an infinite or indefinite water source connected diagonally at the point where the water is 7/7.
Example water return loop with auto top-up:

Code: [Select]

########
#####77# <- Water supply.
####7###
0##76#
1###5#
23345#

The PPQS works absolutely superbly in most cases, but unfortunately I invented it at about the same time minecarts came out, and the minecart dump is, well, better. But the PPQS still has one advantage - it does not require dwarves to move items. This means it can push items which have fallen from above from dangerous to safe tiles without dwarven intervention. The dangerous tile can be made off-limits to dwarves through the use of burrows. The system is simple to set up and very flexible, the simple rule of moving items with water is as long as water moves into a tile, items are pushed out of the tile (this means the pump outlet tile does NOT move items. Water does not move into the pump outlet tile, it is created there. The same probably goes for tiles where water arrives from above, it's where the water flows in from which counts, not where it leaves).

The PPQS also has one serious limitation - items can be divided into two categories, light and heavy. Light items are moved instantly by water, and heavy items take a long time to move (from several days to several seasons). There is a sharp abrupt transition from light to heavy at exactly 100 units. Most things in the game weigh less than 100 units, exceptions include stones, the corpses of large dwarves and large animals, very large pieces of food (i.e. from forgotten beasts), stone furniture and so on. However virtually all consumables are in the light category. Note that water will eventually move heavy items too, it just takes longer, hence while it's appalling for a platinum furniture stockpile, it's fine if you just get the odd forgotten beast meat roast.

A cool thing about the PPQS is it doubles as a mist generator and if it's your food stockpile dwarves have to regularly go there and get misted and cleansed. It can be easily configured to power itself by including a waterwheel on the water return loop, this turns it into a Water Reactor with around 70 surplus power (you could of course add more than 1 wheel as well). It can also, at least in principle, use magma instead of water since the tile the items end up on are actually 'dry', this would cause it to incinerate corpses and clothes but push iron and steel items onto the stockpile. Using it in magma mode is probably stupidly dangerous but ya know, you can if your philosophy is everything is better with magma.

So anyway with a PPQS you can make a completely safe zero-maintenance item conveying system. When using it to move dropped items, the items must land on a floor, grate or floor bars as they will fall straight through downstairs. The water will then simply push the item off that tile, onto a safe tile (which can be a downstairs since items never fall down stairs if they aren't already falling).

[noodle0117]

A while back I invented a pump-powered quantum stockpiling device.

Awesome. Until I understand how minecarts work, this will be what I'm going to use.

One question though since I'm a bit rusty on dwarf physics.
Should I also build an "upstairs" underneath each downstairs, or should I leave it as a completely empty space? I imagine the items would get washed downstairs, but then again this is DF.

[Panando]

Either will work as will up/down stairs for that matter. Dwarves can move through downstairs under their own power if and only if there are upstairs under them (ramps under downstairs don't work). Items and dwarves who are already falling (but NOT merely dodging or sliding horizontally) will fall straight through downstairs. Basically if an object isn't falling, a downstairs acts just like a floor, the upstairs underneath only determines whether dwarves can use it to traverse levels.

A curious little fact about staircases is they are actually Short Range Dwarven Teleportion Devices. Don't believe me? Try this. Dig out a room so there is a floor. Now build a downstairs on the floor, and an upstairs on the level under. As you would expect, dwarves can use the new staircase. Now de-construct the downstairs. Lo and behold, the floor is still there, intact and perfectly obstructive! In other words, a downstairs permits dwarves to teleport to a upstairs on the level below (it will also allow liquids and falling objects to pass through regardless of the presence of an downstairs underneath).