First off it's 05:00 am (now 05:47) here and I'm just in from The Pub... (when I say just I've been trying to write this for about an hour (and 47 more minutes now) but I got distracted reading up on finite element methods of modeling aquifers and water flows for hydrogeology... damn you Darcy, Damn you Laplace with your laws and transforms!!!! And Damn you MODFLOW and so on...
) so this post may not be too coherent or well thought out or well spelled.
Don't just dig a trench because horizontal flow is hideously slow. Once you figure out how to effectively use pumps you'll never, ever go back.
Go on! Do dig a trench... you'll save time over building walls all across your map... when you've got all 16 embark map tiles to get through you don't want to waste too much time building walls... you'll still need pumps to get it up one last level before the bridges at the edge of the map to take your magical fluid across the boundary and on it's joyous mission towards it's final destination... far far away.
Kiffer, your magma pumping setup is pretty inefficient.
To be honest I'm more interested in effectiveness rather than efficiency... Power is cheep, a few more logs and a few more rocks... the extra logging annoys the elves which is a plus.
Sadly my method is also not very effective as of yet... but when the extra pumps come online all will be well. MORE PUMPS! More windmills! More Wood! Take that Elves! Don't make us pump the magma onto you rather than across the ocean! Making an Island is stage one... stage two is another magma duct, Across the Haunted Ocean! . Lay on MacDwarf!
The magma has to flow horizontally to get to your pump intake. Your proposal to put a screw pump every 10 tiles on future pipelines would not help very much; you need to tap right into the magma pipe.
You want to find the lowest possible point where one level of the magma pipe is narrower than the level below, and put your initial intake pump in the overhang. You can have a long tube after that to your pump tower, in order to get clear of the higher levels of the magma pipe; the important part is that you are pumping magma right out of the pipe, in a place where the higher levels of magma will quickly fall into the empty space created, rather than having to slowly trickle into a long tunnel in order to reach your pump in the first place.
the thing is you see... the aquifer is 2 layers thick and so I cant just go straight up beside the pipe... there isn't room. I need to move the magma across before I move it up, as I didn't want to bother wasting time with a complicated breach of the aquifer when I could just come up at the beach with out any faffing. There SHOULD be pumps in place to do this ... but I thought initially that the many levels of magma in the pipe would provide some pressure to move things across to the pump spiral. Since then several additional routes for the magma have been mined out and pumps installed... in a manner which is no doubt sufficiently inefficient to drive you to distraction. Big wide tubes for the magma to flow down... pumps poorly placed... it's chaos down there in the deep dark bowels of the Earth... where the only light is from the glow of the magma and the sparks from the picks of the miners. (Copper picks don't spark... which is good if you want to avoid explosions ... but we've got Iron and Steel picks, now all we need are explosive gasses oozing out of the rocks and forming pockets of firedamp... then we need Davy lamps and ... this is off topic ... need to finsih post before dawn! damn...)
And for Armok's sake, learn to stack pumps! That circular pump setup is an enormous waste of logs and power.
The pumps are arranged in a spiral deliberately. I like the idea of a corkscrew shaped array of screw pumps, it's like one big screw pump and I like the way is looks as I go up through the levels...
Power is cheap, just more logs... more logs annoy the elves. So what if I need to build an extra few windmills just to power the extra gears and axles.
In short... I considered straight vertical stacking of the pumps but that was boring. I wanted a giant screw pump... made of screwpumps... if it could menace with spikes of screwpump it would...
See this fort: http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-17951-magmaintake
That entire fort is basically a perfect prototype of the standard high-flow magma pumping system I build in all my forts (see also: 1, 2). It managed to find multiple places on the bottom level of the magma pipe to put pumps, and then pushed the magma through a long tunnel to go around an aquifer. Note that the pumps are flooded, because magma flow tiles on the bottom level will create magma above themselves if you channel over them, so if you get all the way to the bottom of the pipe make sure your pumps are safe for magma immersion. Might happen if you have a direct vertical line to a magma flow, too, I haven't tested it. I just always build magma-safe pumps.
You're only really pumping magma short distances there...(unless I'm mistaken which at this point of the night I might well be... Damn you alluring dancefloor and redbull fueled madness... Crazy pink haired women and strange over abundence of midgets...) and once I get into adventure mode for the actual cross border pumping I would prefer it if there were plenty of pumps to keep things moving quickly rather than relying on slow waves of magma jumping round the place like spastic children. Heck once there are more subsurface pumps hooked up there may be no need for pumps along the main line... but I don't care. The Architect and Carpenter Dwarfs aren't doing anything else anyway... so they might as well build more windmills and pumps. They'll keep everything flowing nicely once I'm out and about in adventure mode.
EDIT : well crap, the sun is up...
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Topic: Transcontinental Magma Pipeline (Read 10750 times)