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[Melting Sky]

There definitely isn't any need to waste high quality metal on traps.

Well, there's also no need to waste "high quality" metal on armour and personal weapons, you can automate all your defences. Really, if you have 1000+ bars of weaponable metal, what's the point of saving it and spamming glass instead? Glass performs adequately, no doubt about that, but once you got the goblinite imports rolling, metals stop being scarce and you can spam those just as well; and metal trap components perform a fair bit better than glass. If you have a ten long, five wide trap field, the efficiency of individual components is largely irrelevant; but if you want to secure a narrow, short hallway, quality/material matters. I usually install very few traps, as supplement to other installations, and in those cases, the difference between glass and metal is notable.

I don't think the OP would be asking this question if he had a couple thousand bars of steel sitting around, but yeah your point is valid. If you have loads of extra high quality metal lying in the stock piles then you might as well use it in your traps as well. My point was simply that you can make perfectly functional weapons traps out of trash materials.

[thecrimsonbeard]

I'd say Bridget from guilty gear is pretty standard trap material, but I don't know much beyond him and Lin from Vocaloid.

[edit] wait, this isn't 4chan [/edit]

[Sadrice]

Urist da Vinci has a very interesting thread over in the modding sub forum about material properties and game mechanics as analyzed by dfhack.  Here he's talking about weapon momentum in traps:

Unrelated, about traps:

The velocity of a weapon trap attack is always 200, so the momentum is:

momentum=200*(weapon weight)

The mechanism quality doesn't seem to change the momentum of a hit (but does affect trap accuracy). Note that creatures will swing heavy weapons slower, but traps swing all weapons at a fixed speed. A weapon trap swings an axe about 10x faster than a dwarf could. Therefore, weapon traps will perform better when equipped with the heaviest weapons you have available.

Apparently, due to some oddities of trap mechanics, all weapons in traps move at the same (fast) speed regardless of weight, unlike wielded weapons that have a swing speed dependent on dwarf strength and weapon weight.


Therefor dense, low grade weapons metals like copper, silver, and bronze would make excellent trap components. Make war hammers, maces, and spiked balls from silver.  Spiked balls are largest, so should be best (requires testing), and are technically edged, but will be converted to small contact area blunt against armored targets.  Make serrated disks, axe blades, and other edged things out of copper, or better, bronze.