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[rtg593]

You'd first have to get the booster carts to maximum speed, in which case it's pointless to trycand make them bump the other one raster. 

[Girlinhat]

Minecraft boosting works because each cart is slightly larger than 1 block in size.  When two carts move past each other, they collide.  You can observe this by sending one cart north and one cart south, on different tracks, right next to each other.  Collision physics could be abused though, if you mash them together in a certain way, their hitboxes overlap and they keep adding momentum to each other.

DF minecarts are exactly 1 tile in size, no such tricks may apply.

[Dawnofdarkness]

Right well as i said it was a suggestion

[kaenneth]

Has there been discussion of using Mine Carts in computations?

Could you build a 2 tile mine cart memory cell, by shifting a cart between two positions, with a pair of rollers/pressure plates?

That is, can a cart sit in one spot holding a pressure plate triggered until it receives a signal to push the cart into the other tile, which waits for a signal to push it back to the first position...

How about using Carts for data transmission from a memory block? a line of 8 tracks, sending a combination of 'bits'? (probably hard to beat the instant transmission of data by mechanisms...)

Any thoughts on logic gates built with cart physics?

[Qmarx]

So, you normally can't build a cross-continental road because of site boundaries, right?  You get nasty gaps every now and then.

I think making a cross-contental railroad should be possible if you put in strategic jumps at the edge of your site.

Seems like a good idea for a challenge.

[Aviator CJ]

@kel

Ya know, that design is very much more like a mechanical laser than a railgun. Increasing levels of energy input until it reaches sufficient power to be emitted.

Just pointing that out :p

Minecart Locomotive Acceleration by Steady Application of Rollers. Urist McLASER?

[Urist Da Vinci]

Imagine a situation where you repeatedly fire fast empty featherwood/addy carts at the back of a fully loaded and slow to accelerate platinum cart, until it is going fast enough that the lighter carts can't catch up.

So, you normally can't build a cross-continental road because of site boundaries, right?  You get nasty gaps every now and then.

I think making a cross-contental railroad should be possible if you put in strategic jumps at the edge of your site.

Seems like a good idea for a challenge.

No-one mentioned embarking nearby a human town/castle so that you could jump their walls?

[Girlinhat]

Computations run into one big problem.  You can't have a pressure plate and a roller on the same tile.  If a cart is on a plate, then it's stuck on the plate and there's no way to move it off, aside from things like getting a dwarf to push it, slamming another cart into it, or perhaps water movement.  All of these suffer though, because it's generally just easier to use the movement method than to use a minecart with the movement method.

However, I can think of one situation that may work.  If you put a pressure plate on a ramp, and a door beside the ramp, then you should be able to have a cart go downhill and stop when it hits the door, letting it rest atop the pressure plate + ramp.  To "unlatch" the memory, you open the door, causing the cart to roll off the ramp via gravity, and probably go onto some rollers and enter a large recycling area where carts are stored for logic use.

The door+ramp may also provide an ammo clip for railgun designs, although it would only be possible to rapid-fire the whole clip and it would take some strange design to allow single-fire mechanisms.

[Sadrice]

For the memory cell, you could have a small powered loop, with a minecart careening around it, retriggering a pressure plate before the 100 tick delay.  To change state, shut a door to stop it on a roller.

[Urist Da Vinci]

I finally got around to getting minecarts to blow through corners if they are going really fast (if there's a wall blocking the way the cart would fly off, it will stay on).

For the memory cell, you could have a small powered loop, with a minecart careening around it, retriggering a pressure plate before the 100 tick delay.  To change state, shut a door to stop it on a roller.

If doors, floodgates, bridges, etc. count as walls for the purpose of preventing carts from derailing on tight turns (or simply forcing it to turn instead of driving straight out on a track), a cart could exit a perpetual loop on one of many paths when a door/bridge/etc. is opened, and then begin executing a series of precisely timed pressure plate hits to cause operations to happen.

We could build a cart counting stack, where each time a signal is received, a cart is launched into the stack. Later, carts are removed from the stack one at a time, sending a delayed but equal number of signals. If you can add or subtract weight from the carts, you could be sending binary bits into the stack.

[xmakina]

(if there's a wall blocking the way the cart would fly off, it will stay on)

Adjust your railgun designs accordingly. If the cart is encased it will keep going around the loop. We know from previous discussion that if there is a only a small gap then mine carts can derail and reattach to the tracks. Perhaps this will be an option:

Code: [Select]

/-HHH-\
|     |
|     |
\-----/

With H being a hatch.

If this circle is walled in, perhaps with a hatch above to deliver the next cart and the hatches drop open, wouldn't that launch the cart at MAXIMUM velocity, since the cart can't derail on those corners?

[SmileyMan]

Although minecarts probably won't be much use for the actual computation, they seem like an excellent medium for user programs.  A 'tape' of loaded and empty minecarts could run through an input processor, representing a binary stream.

Retrieval of the programs post execution would just involve running them round in a loop to the storage siding - you could then have several program trains queued up for different situations.

[Sadrice]

I can see minecarts being extremely useful in computing.  Most animal logic gates will probably only have to be slightly modified to work with minecarts, and minecarts can be built, rather than caught, and have regular, not random, speeds.  This will make an n-step repeater utterly trivial.  Just a cart on a loop with a pressure plate.  Also, carts can have a great many more states than an electron or an animal, so you could maybe even do pseudo quantum computing, or just ternary computing with careful use of weights.

[FearfulJesuit]

Can you really do ternery computing, though? My understanding is that binary is easy because of the small number of logic gates. You'll have to design a lot of new ones for ternery.

[Rose]

The russians had a ternary computer during the cold war.