The dwarven stagecoach driver cracks his whip!
Draft horse has been struck down X4
Only in Dwarf Fortress. =P Love those whips. This is why you never see whips in bedrooms - they're too lethal.
Okay, first. I just read through this thread. How has nobody mentioned the possibility of fast-moving carts jumping from one track to the next? If you had a cart travel down a ramp and then up a short jump, I assume the cart would travel upwards diagonally, reach the max range and then fall straight down, like arrows do. If they have the same physics as arrows, this would imply you would NOT need a ramp to get them flying across chasms:
>
_______ ___ ____ _____________
This would be just as traversable as anything else - you could have minecarts fly straight over pits of magma.
If you made a minecart fly diagonally upwards and then back downwards onto a sloped track, you could start it moving again. This makes it NOT necessary to have holes in the walls of your fort. Granted, you would need some well-planned aiming techniques to make sure it lands where you wanted it to, but you could simply launch minecarts both ways over your walls, without ever needing to open the gate.
I highly doubt dwarves will be able to climb into minecarts. If you're allowed to put creatures in them at all, I have a feeling that it will be non-dwarves only, similar to cages. It's be possible he'll combine the stockpile UI with the cage UI to give us both, but somehow I lean towards stockpile-only, as much as I hate it. Perhaps he'll enable creatures later - the idea of dwarven rollercoasters seems to be very popular (and I admit, that does sound awesomely fun).
Nobody has mentioned the idea of giant eagles flying from tower to tower carrying minecarts. You could have a self-sustained fortress completely in the sky - without the weakness of needing caravans or fighting goblins (barring flying mounts). You could have multiple towers - like I was saying - and the pack routes would be completely through the air. Thus, if you lost a tower, you wouldn't lose your fortress. You could simply go back and reclaim it after they left, since they wouldn't "move in" (though I'd really like if they did). (unfortunately, this would take a few bugs being fixed, namely the ones with fliers
) (oh, and the sky is broken too - did you know?)
Unfortunately for the minecart, they would be worthless when going downhill. This is because it's far simpler in every way to simply drop large boulders down shafts to their destinations. If Toady implemented rolling boulders crushing people like he has in the devlog, and the boulders bounced when they landed, this could prove dangerous and ineffective, unless you put a 1 z-level pit at the bottom of the shaft. The boulder would land, have nowhere to bounce/roll, and stop. Your dwarves could easily access it after that.
I'm wondering if the beasts of burden will be pulling 1x1 carts. Wagons are 3x3. Would horses pull 1x1 carts, or 3x3 wagons? How many horses would it take to pull a single wagon? Or is it possible they'll act like yaks in trading caravans and carry everything magically on their backs?
While it's possible to compress infinite matter into a single tile, I doubt it'll be that way with whatever these beasts are hauling. It's just not Toady's way - he'll make them like bins. You'll only get to put a set amount into each. This, in turn, would necessitate multiple minecarts on the same track - leading to Fun if you weren't careful. Likely, highly explosive fun with boulders flying everywhere, killing dwarves left in right if they happened to be standing in the way. This would unfortunately make putting a minecart track through the dining hall to entertain your dwarves a very, very bad idea. You might put it through the noble's bedrooms, though. You know... just to amp up the value... I'm sure every noble would love to have wonderful model trainsets running through their bedrooms.
I think Toady is planning on making it so dwarves will be a lot slower at carrying stones, yes, as people have stated elsewhere in this thread. He said, "For minecarts to make sense for mining, we'll have to change how mining works, but I want to get the carts moving first." Since changing mining itself wouldn't make sense, it would have to be hauling, I think, which would likely be moving boulders much more slowly. Hauling a giant forgotten beast to the butcher's shop would be a horrible, horrible task - it might make more sense to build a butcher's shop near the corpse.
There is an incredible amount of !!SCIENCE!! to be done here! Absolutely insane. This will change the way people play Dwarf Fortress. I can't wait to get my hands on the next release to start my next round of testing. This will be far more interesting, complex and involved than figuring out how animal domestication works (though that was fun).
Finally, my apologies for the wall of text. tl;dr: !!SCIENCE!!
Also,
the thread on minecarts got derailed!! LOL 
Okay, a lot of things in this thread made me smile slightly. This made me laugh. Loudly. People at work look at me strangely now :/
This. I laughed loudly too.
Author
Topic: Holy Crap Minecarts (Devlog Quote) (Read 250323 times)