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[Sadrice]

1) You could make the space between the two doors longer to prevent dwarves from slipping through, but that's not a particularly pleasing solution.  Floodgates could be used instead of doors, so the opening wouldn't be instantaneous, but they have the same jamming problem.  You're right, bridges would be better.
2) I'm sure there are more appropriate latches, but that one looked like it would work well enough for testing, and seemed simple enough.  Didn't stop me from mislinking it, though...
3) Tightly closed doors would help, though I know occasionally cats will sneak through after a dwarf.  (Would more than one tightly closed door placed in series keep cats out?  I've used doors in series to keep dwarves from letting a puff of miasma out of the refuse room, which seems like a similar situation.)


I assumed that the longer pathlength would keep the dwarf off of the offset pressure plate on the way in.  I originally had a design more like the one you showed, but I simplified it, thinking it wasn't necessary, however, I'm more than willing to trust your judgment on the behavior of creatures around hatches and pressure plates.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Hope I didn't sound critical.  It's a good design.  I was just sharing my thoughts on how it might fail, given enough years of operation.

You can trust in a long corridor to keep wayward dwarves from following the food through the airlock, but I'm just not sure if it would never fail.  Eventually, you might get a dwarf that wandered around idly, as they sometimes do, and maybe made it through, and I think you could avoid that.  Just using delayed bridges instead of doors doesn't quite do the trick-- then you have an open at 100, and a close at 200, and there's still 100 ticks in-between, but oppositely functioning buildings (doors and hatches) would keep switch the airlock at the same exact moment, which would be nice for my peace-of-mind.

Tightly closed doors would help a lot-- it means that cats would have to follow dwarves through, and if they do that, they're likely to get dropped at the entrance hatch.  More than one tightly closed door doesn't help so much as delay any problems, because the animals just get stuck at the second tightly closed door, and follow the next dwarf through instead of the first.

Are you going to build it now?  If you don't, I might have to   It occurs to me that it would work for any kind of stockpile, and I'm imagining a equipment room to store all of the useless crap fortresses can't seem to get rid of....  Of course, food is a nice application too, you could have a few dwarves making stuff on repeat, let the excess rot, it'll never make it across the airlock.

[DuckBoy2]

!!SCIENCE!! COMPLETE!

I have made Grate new discoveries!  About Grates!  Wall Grates in particular.  I have opened a new field of quantum urist atomic teleportation!

I have prototyped an unbounded size + hauler number probabilistic quantum stockpile.  And post to you the as yet untested full design, which I shall continue to revise over the coming days.  It looks like this:

Z0


GGGGGBGGGGG
GBBBGBGBBBG
GBBBGBGBBBG
GBBBGBGBBBG
GBBBGBGBBBG
GBBBGBGBBBG
GBBBGBGBBBG
GBBBGBGBBBG
GBBBGBGBBBG
GBBBGBGBBBG
GBBBGBGBBBG
GRRRGBGRRRG
SSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSS

Z -1

SSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSS
...

R:  Wall
G:  Wall Grate
S:  Stockpile
B:  Bridge


All bridges are retracting.  All bridge tiles can be automated by repeater or lever puller.  Wall grates do not need to be linked up to anything. 

NOTE: The central bridge is on top of floor tiles, the side bridges are supported by real wall tiles. 

NOTE: There is nothing supporting the wall grates.  This is critical in the preservation of food.  (Otherwise food will get stuck in the grates)  In order to construct these wall grates, you can channel a hole, remove the remaining ramp, build a wall, build the wall grate on top of the wall, and then deconstruct the wall.  You may also be able to simply build the wall grate and then dig a ramp up from below, I am unsure. 

There are two major problems with the current pinnacle of dwarven quantum technology: The Undump. These problems make it very difficult to use in chute designs and parallel hauling designs. 

1.  A large amount of junk to be undumped is dumped on the pressure plate that closes the the path to the stockpile.  As pointed out by GirlInHat, the only reliable automated way to get this junk off of the pressure plate is to flood the system with moving water, greatly reducing the ability of your dwarves to use your undump if successful, and more likely, greatly increasing your fun. 

2.  When the 'lure' stockpile size is increased, lots of dwarves will path to it at once.  But as soon as the first one hits the pressure plate, ALL of them will drop their junk on the ground and go do something else.  Besides spamming you with pathing problems and slowing down your computer, they tend to leave these items on the ground, making it impossible to stop large amounts of food from simply rotting on the ground. 



Now, how does the Atomic Teleporter work?  Well Urist, I'm glad you asked.  We are all familiar with atom smashers.  But recent research in the field of atomic bridge colliders has revealed several new and interesting properties. 

The Axioms Of Atomic Teleportation
First, a retracting bridge that throws an item on the ground will fire that item through fortifications and wall grates. 

Second, if that item should land on a fortification, it will remain there, even if there is nothing below the fortification. 

Third, if that item should land on a wall grate, it will remain there only if there is something below the grate: if there is a channel beneath the grate, it is as though the grate were not there at all. 

Fourth, a retracting bridge that throws a dwarf will not fire that dwarf through fortifications.

Fifth, a retracting bridge that throws a dwarf will fire that dwarf through wall grates.  Being "thrown" by a bridge, similar to being crushed by one, is really being disintegrated.  But when a dwarf is not crushed under the bridge, he is able to reform on the other side of wall grates.  I hypothesize that all dwarves have drank enough booze to be able to maintain themselves in a liquid form for just long enough to travel up to 3 Urists before resolidifying. 

Finally, a dwarf hauling an item will not let go of said item when thrown by a bridge, even if he travels through a grate.  He will let go of said item if he sustains injuries while falling, but while hilarious, this mechanism of chuting food tends to quickly run out of haulers. 

So how does it work? 
You have a busy fortress.  You make room a gigantic food stockpile at the end of a single tile wide hallway of length ~10-20.  The floor of the hallway is made of retracting bridges on repeat.  The walls of the hallway are not walls at all, but Wall Grates.  These wall grates, while preventing any "solid" dwarf from pathing through them, will allow "liquid" dwarves through without issue.  As soon as you place your food stockpile at the end of the hallway, hundreds of "solid" dwarves will begin pathing towards your stockpile carrying food. 

Any "solid" dwarf in the hallway at the time of Atomic Bridgeapult Deintegration will liquify for several Urists, and then reintegrate up to 3 Urists away in a random direction.  Any dwarf who reintegrates in the wall grates of the hallway will immediately path back into the hallway.  However, any dwarf who reintegrates beyond the wall grates of the hallway will now find himself unable to path.  He will immediately cancel his current hauling job, dropping the item on the floor, and await Deintegration.  His deintegration will come quickly, as he is standing on another retracting bridge, whether he goes flying through wall grates, or simply falls a Z level into your quantum pile is irrelevant. 

The greatest challenge is in timing the bridges such that liquid dwarves are capable of reintegrating on the far side of the hallway successfully.  Mechanisms that do not require use of complex repeaters are an excellent place to continue research.  The higher the percentage of dwarves that do not fall through the outer bridges, the higher the percentage of food will remain on the bridges, and thus the higher percentage of food that will fall into your stockpile when the dwarf reintegrates. 

Conclusions

Atomic Teleportation is the study of throwing dwarves through grates with bridges.  It is a fresh field for new research.  It will quickly surpass the greatest dwarven technologies by harnessing the parallelism of unbounded haulers.  Even its clunkiest early designs require no more than 2 levers and 40 Grates.  It has three major advantages over current automatic stockpiles:
First, hauled items are dropped in areas within 3 urists of a bridge, as opposed to 0-1 urists of a pressure plate.
Second, only haulers within a short distance of the destination stockpile will cause cancellation spam. 
Third, an unbounded number of haulers can use the device at the same time, and due to inability of two dwarves to walk at the same time through a single tile hallway, the more dwarves using the system, the shorter you can make the hallway while still having a negligible probability of any items reaching the lure destination stockpile. 

[DuckBoy2]

Hmm... realized I didn't actually answer the question of how to get the food into a chute...  But I had to make my discoveries known.  Once its on some random bridge and separated from haulers, I assume the design can be extended to fling it wherever is desired.  Chuting upwards may actually be desirable, as dwarves will not be flung upwards after it, so you can actually make an outer wall 1 z level high to stop dwarves, but leave open space above it, and then have chutes straight down immediately afterwards.  The dwarves won't be flung through the wall, but the food will eventually be thrown over the wall and down the chute.  Engineering it to happen before the food rots will still be a good trick, but may be simpler than trying to make the odd even repeater necessary for the quantum dump under the outer bridges version I described. 

Wow, I'm starting to just make random walls of nonsense, its too late/early.  Tomorrow I guess. 

[rtg593]

... Thought retracting bridges drop you, raising bridges throw...

Also, my dwarves always seem to go to the lowest numbered activity zone, passing 1-2 higher numbered, but closer, zones on the way. I assumed this was intentional... Are my dwarves being dumb? :p only way for me to get an item to closest dump is to deactivate all other dumps.

[DuckBoy2]

Retracting bridges throw.  Raising bridges throw farther (11 Urists last I checked), but when they come down you get smushed.  Both of them drop you, if you happen to reintegrate above a hole. 

[Sadrice]

Retracting bridges do indeed throw upwards, just not very far, and with no risk of total destruction.  I'm afraid I don't quite understand how the hauler returns to the fortress.  Are you just waiting for him to eventually be thrown back onto the central bridge, and then hopefully get off of it before being thrown back off it?  Throwing with bridges stuns creatures, so that might take awhile (or is that only if they're thrown into walls?)  I think that you would have a lot of rot problems with throwing food upwards.  A while back I was messing about with making bridge based conveyor belts, and I found that, due to the probabilistic way things move on cycling bridges, if you add enough stuff, there's a fairly steady rate of flow, but individual items can remain in the system for a long time, and it's takes a long time to fully clear it after you stop adding things.  I also ran into problems with needing an even/odd repeater to get uphill conveyors, and couldn't figure out a reasonable design that didn't kill fps, but I'm a bit of a noob with DF logic systems, and was using a needlessly complicated water based design.
 

Hope I didn't sound critical.  It's a good design.  I was just sharing my thoughts on how it might fail, given enough years of operation.

Not at all!  I have next to no experience with creature logic type things, and absolutely no experience with the practical consequences of long term operation of such systems, so I'm sure there are many things that need improvement.
I'll try and build it, but don't hold back on my account.  I don't usually have the patience to do much with pressure plates (what I would give for the ability to unlink one without deconstructing it, or check what it's linked to without hunting through all the doors in my fort, or just set them to act like a latch in the first  place...), so it may take me a while to actually build a fully functional one.

[DuckBoy2]

Oh, the hauler just falls one Z level into the stockpile when the outer bridges raise. 

It occurred to me that the wall grates are completely unnecessary; they have the same properties as open space tiles: thrown dwarves pass through and walking dwarves wont path. 

So basically you can make the quantum food pile with 3 floating bridges

If length of hallway is N, it should be

N tiles of wall
N tiles of bridge, with no floor underneath
N tiles of empty space, still no floor
N tiles of bridge, with floor underneath so it wont inturrupt pathing
N tiled of empty space, no floor
N tiles of bridge, no floor underneath
N tiles of wall

In other words, go wb b bw as a crossection of the hallway and repeat for as long as you want the hallway to be. 

Center bridge and outer bridges must alway be in opposite states.  I think you can achieve this by linking one lever to all 3 bridges, and one lever to only center bridge.  Flip the center bridge once, then start auto toggling all 3, I dont think theyll fall out of sync. 

Any time a dwarf is thrown to the outer bridges, which should be about 25% of the time accounting for times when outer bridges arent there and how many dwarves will be thrown into the holes, theyll drop their food on the bridge, and then they and their food will be thrown again, hopefully down ibto the stockpile below.  You can probably up the percentage by doing a second layer of toggled bridges below to prevent falling more than 1 zlevel while also giving another place for haulers to drop what theyre doing.  Im not sure if they drop their hauled item immediately, or wait until they stop being stunned first.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Wow, duckyboy2, that's some crazy science.  Is there a thread on this somewhere that I missed, or did you just figure all of that out right now?  I'm going to have to do some experimentation myself!

I'm thinking this is a crazy enough effect, even if it isn't good for food chuting, it's good for something.  Maybe a teleportation-based fortress entrance?  Do floor grates work the same as wall grates?

[DuckBoy2]

Just figured out the bridgeapulting through wall grates.  I knew some of the bridge catapulting distance stuff from my previous work on conveyer belts.  I want to do some more tests with floor bars, vertical bars, glass windows, floor grates, and statues, then if theres anything new and interesting, I think i'll take the highlights from this thread and make a better one for the good of dwarven science. 

I do need a better name than Dwarven Atomic Teleportation...

First things first though, I need to see if the simplified designs actually work and approximately how many times an item needs to be hauled through before it lands properly. 

So much science to do!

[Tharwen]

Water may be used to "flush" stockpile contents to another area without having them forbidden.  The advent of the "vampire monthly clock" may be applicable for frequent flushing.

Wait... do you mean vampires... or werebeasts?

Put a werecursed dwarf on a pressure plate and drop booze on him occasionally. When he changes every month, he gets heavy enough to trigger the plate and release food to the starving orphans! WE HAVE A RELIABLE MONTHLY TIMER.

Is that what you meant...? If so, I'll go and feel unoriginal on my own.

[DuckBoy2]

Hmmph, well my food chute works...  But it loses about 1/3 of the food/items permanently, and lags every time the bridges toggle for reasons unclear to me, but probably recalculating something relating to pathing.  On the plus side, it doubles as a quantum stockpile on the high end of the chute and doesn't spam job cancellation.  Final design is boring in that it doesn't send dwarves flying through grates (I know I'll find a use for that somehow!) but it does work...


C F B . B . B F C
C F B . B . B F C
C F B . B . B F C
C F B . B . B F C
C F B . B . B F C
C F B . B . B F C
C F B . B . B F C
C F B . B . B F C
C F B . B . B F C
W W W W D W W W W
S S S S S S S S S


C is a chute, a set of empty tiles going as far down as you want.  Every chute should have a food stockpile tile at the bottom, to prevent food that drops inside from going bad. 

F is a fortification, items thrown from bridges can pass through fortifications, but dwarves thrown from bridges (and items held by dwarves thrown by bridges) will not.  The final step of the journey for chuted food is to travel through these fortifications and fall down into the chute.  Sometimes food gets stuck in the fortifications with no way to retrieve it short of deconstruction of the fortification.  Oh well, who runs out of food anyway? 

B is a retracting bridge, with a floor beneath it.  Leaving floors under every bridge means dwarves can fly across the gap and smack into the fortifications, then land on the outer bridge columns, even if all the bridges are retracted.  As soon as he lands, he'll immediately drop whatever he's hauling, crucially separating dwarf from hauled object, and allowing future bridge tossing to toss items through the fortifications.  All bridges are set to repeat, their relative timing is irrelevant, you can hook them all up to a single lever or repeater. 

. is a tile of empty space, no ramp allowed.  On the level below you can put a stockpile if you want to have an extra quantum stockpile, or you can just have two tunnels to force dwarves to run back up and try to stockpile their items again.  You should have at most a 1 zlevel fall, or your dwarves will start getting injured here. 

D is a door, W is a wall
S is your bait stockpile. 

I've found that with a repeater (or an active lever puller), 20 tiles -- 2 bridges, is enough length to prevent any dwarves from crossing the central bridge to drop off their item in a stockpile

I'm going to look into fixing the lag problems.  If I'm write about it recalculating pathing, the best way to solve it should be closing off the area.  We'll see if that works out.  Failing that it might make sense to rig the bridges to pressure plates, so they only go off when dwarves are actively pathing to the stockpile...

It would be easy enough to solve the loss of food in fortifications problem if food didn't rot, as you could just build a wall with another bridge on top of it instead of a fortification, but it may take too long for the food to make it up the wall and down the other side.  Seems safer to just take the hit on fortifications, but it might be worth testing. 

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Water may be used to "flush" stockpile contents to another area without having them forbidden.  The advent of the "vampire monthly clock" may be applicable for frequent flushing.

Wait... do you mean vampires... or werebeasts?

Put a werecursed dwarf on a pressure plate and drop booze on him occasionally. When he changes every month, he gets heavy enough to trigger the plate and release food to the starving orphans! WE HAVE A RELIABLE MONTHLY TIMER.

Is that what you meant...? If so, I'll go and feel unoriginal on my own.

No, I think it was about using a vampire on military scheduling to trigger pressure plates, but your idea is really really good!  You know, you don't even need to drop booze on him-- apparently, he won't die of thirst before he gets cured of it from the change.  Cool!  (Would have to verify that a change on a plate triggers it, but I bet it does-- I found that reanimation on a plate triggers it okay.

Hmmph, well my food chute works...

)

My god, that thing is horrifying.  In a good way.

[DuckBoy2]

Tharwen, that idea is so brilliant it makes me wish I didnt already lose my science fort full of food chutes and werewolves .

Stupid goblins, how dare you interrupt my science!

In case anybody cares, I finished testing with bridgeapults. 

Fortifications: items pass, but can get stuck, even if the fortification is floating in midair.   dwarves wont enter
Wall Grates + Vertical bars: items pass straight through, dwarves pass straight through, as if these objects dont exist at all. 
Floor grates + floor bars: Neither items nor dwarves will pass through these objects. 
Doors: Dwarves and items are blocked by closed doors.  Items are capable of landing on top of closed doors, unsure about dwarves.  When doors are opened, items stuck on top of them will fall. 

Doors in particular give me ideas for future science, since they create an unwalkable yet land on able tile when they are shut.  Should be possible to path dwarves over hatches on top of doors, open the hatches, have dwarf immediately realize he cant path, drop his item, and then open the doors to have dwarf and hauled item fall separately, or give dwarf another escape root to let him walk away from unpathable area, then drop items later....  Hmmmm

No more science today.  Too tired

[Tharwen]

Tharwen, that idea is so brilliant it makes me wish I didnt already lose my science fort full of food chutes and werewolves .

Well, in that case I think I'll go and make a thread about it