Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[nutsshearer]

Is it possible to have reverse lever control?

For example, when my dwarfs pull Lever X, floodgate 1 opens while floodgate 2 CLOSES?

Could I build a lever first for floodgate 2, pull it so it opens, then destroy the lever, then hook floodgate 2 up to lever X?

[Quietust]

Not directly - the only way you can do it is to use fluid and pressure plates to invert the original signal, since triggers send explicit "on" and "off" events, not "toggle" events (the sole exception being gear assemblies).

[Sphalerite]

When I need to do something like this, I use a single-tile drawbridge instead of the second floodgate.  A drawbridge has the opposite action of a floodgate - it blocks when 'on' and lets fluids or creatures pass when 'off', while a floodgate does the reverse.  If you link a single lever to both a floodgate and a drawbridge, you can have one open while the other is closed.  The main downside to single-tile bridges is that you can't tell when looking at them if they're raised or lowered, so you may want to make it a 2X1 drawbridge instead.  The other downside is that unlike the floodgate the bridge will crush (nearly) anything in the way when it raises, but maybe that's a plus for your application.

[Sutremaine]

If you really want two bridges or two floodgates or two doors for something, you can set up a water reactor next to two pumps on top of each other (like a pump stack, but they're not connected to each other directly). Each pump has its own powering gear connected to the same lever, and the lever is pulled after the first gear is connected. Put two pressure plates into the water intake tiles and make sure they're set to activate at the same water levels, and the system just needs to be linked to something and the water added.

Note that because pressure plates remain active for 100 ticks after they stop being triggered, the buildings they're connected to won't do their respective things at once. There are a couple of ways around this. One is to hold the water somewhere else for 100 ticks so that one plate deactivates as the other is being activated and the signals go out at the same time. The other way is to use one door and one floodgate. Because floodgates have a delay and doors don't, pulling the lever one way will deactivate the door plate just as the floodgate is responding to its pressure plate. Pulling it the other way will result in a 200-tick delay between the door and the floodgate's respective responses.

Having both a floodgate and a door connected to each pressure plate would result in a system which takes 200 ticks to respond fully to each lever pull. For the first 100 ticks, only the door attached to the just-activated plate has switched states. At 100 ticks, the floodgate attached to the just-activated pressure plate responds and the just-deactivated pressure plate switches off, causing the door connected to that plate to change states and sending out a signal to the connected floodgate. At 200 ticks, the floodgate connected to the just-deactivated plate responds.

This would work out well for trade depot airlocks, since having the depot sealed off from both the fortress and the outside world for a little while is no big deal.

[Garath]

I think i'll stick to 2 seperate levers for now