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[Urist Da Vinci]

Toady hasn't yet said how the carts would be emptied of fluids. The simplest would be some kind of setting at the hauling station to have dwarves tip the cart's fluid into an adjacent pit. You'd also expect the carts to spill their load if they tumbled or landed after a long projectile motion.

Why hatches? Assuming that a cart can't derail into a closed door/bridge/floodgate, you could do this:

Because that's quite an assumption. Doors and floodgates can be taken down by building destroyers, a bridge you might have something with but I'd be curious how the anchor tile is handled (since you'd need the bridge to open away from the circuit if it atom smashes engraved tracks and rollers below it).

...

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/#2012-04-06
Bridges will act as tracks. As mentioned above, you can't build rollers below bridges.




Did it occur to anyone that we could build a trap similar to this now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db5rRtOExbA

[Girlinhat]

That's been flouted in the thread already, so yes.

Toady's already said that when a cart derails it can lose it's contents, yes?  I presume the same would happen if a liquid-filled cart slams into a wall.  Considering all I've seen so far, this looks like a safe assumption that the "slam unload" method would be viable.  Although even without it, we can burn goblinite automatically now!

[Rose]

Toady also said that if a wall is in the way, the cart won't derail, so that makes it less likely that a cart will derail when it hits a wall.

[SmileyMan]

Bridges act as tracks.  Carts can be filled with liquids, hopefully magma.....

(whirr, click of my brain)

Magma-filled cart rolls onto raising bridge.  Bridge is raised.  Start playing Adele.

[slink]

Maybe if he figures out how to let us non-catastrophically empty fluids from carts, he can do the same for buckets and barrels.   

[fluffhead]

At first I picture a cart dump like a stop on the way.  However as I think about it more, I picture it being a zone.  You can zone it over the tracks and next to them.  However big the zone is the carts will dump into them.  If the first tile gets filled, it can then dump in the 2nd tile that is zoned appropriately.  In the zone settings you could choose what type of items are allowed to be dumped in that zone.  I am not sure how to justify the ability to dump specific objects.  Maybe make the zone require that there is a dwarf riding the cart to do the dumps?  Then you could dump just water in this zone, lava in this zone, food in this zone, booze in this zone, etc etc etc  Heck with a dwarf riding the cart, you don't have to stop it either, he could be dumping stuff while it is rolling.  I assume you wouldn't be able to go to fast or he wouldn't be able to dump, or the dumps wouldn't land in the right spot.

[rtg593]

And I said railgun in the very literal sense of the word; a gun that is powered by rails. Suggestions of laser or particle cannon are not my own.

Lol, I was just commenting on the acceleration loop being more of a laser (or particle cannon, I guess) type principle than a railgun, which is normally pretty straight. Of course its not one of those :p Dwarven Railgun for the win

[Kel]

What's probably gonna end up happening is the cart slams into the wall, doesn't spill, and a dwarf decides to empty it. He does so, but not without getting !!Hands!!

[Mrhappyface]

So, minecarts through magma falls? 

[Maxmurder]

If flying carts spill when they hit the ground (not on tracks), could you use them to build an obsidian cannon?

ie. two tracks run side by side down a long ramp and ending in a ramp jump. Two carts are placed on the tracks. One cart is filled with magma the other with water. When a goblin triggers a pressureplate in the landing zone (with a kitten as bait obviously), the rollers are activated. The carts speed down the hill and off the jump. They both land simontaniously in the landing zone spilling their contents and the goblin is instantly incased in obsidian.

This would likely be a useful trap for unkillable FBs.

[Triskelli]

If you're going to go for a ternary system, wouldn't full cart (1), empty cart (0), no cart (-1) make sense?

The problem I see with any "full cart/empty cart/no cart" system would be that it would necessitate a continuous flow of carts to prevent a constant "0" entry.  What happens if a cart is late?  The entire calculation goes haywire and you get a garbled mess as your result.  Personally, I think filled="0" part-filled="1" system would work best, with empty carts returned to the "top" of the computer to be re-used.



That said, I do think we should at least attempt a ternary logic or higher computer.  It would elegantly reflect dwarven logic in the sense that a statment could be True, False, or Hell-if-I-Know.  There's already been some documentation for three-state logic problems, but I'll boil it down.

In Boolean (and binary) logic, we assume that a given statement is either True or False.  In Łukasiewicz logic, we accept that there are things that cannot be proven true or false and represent it as another value of validity in the statement.  So True, False, and Unknown.  (Depending on the question asked, Unknown can also mean irrelavent, both, or maybe)

So if we say that "Urist is a Dwarf", that would True.  "Elves are cool" would be False.  But something like "There are Goblins outside" is a definite Maybe.  We simply don't know one way or the other, and can't determine the answer without additional information.

If this was implemented with carts, a Filled/part-filled/empty system would work best, to prevent the continuous null entries that using "no-cart" as a valid entry.

[rtg593]

Nice. Reminds me of the trinary computer that was in a Russian university for a while. Very elegant, for its time. Due to binary being the common "language," no one knew how to program for it. So they replaced it with binary computer that cost more, was slower, ran hotter, and used more power. Boolean logic is just simpler, I guess.

[Triskelli]

Nice. Reminds me of the trinary computer that was in a Russian university for a while. Very elegant, for its time. Due to binary being the common "language," no one knew how to program for it. So they replaced it with binary computer that cost more, was slower, ran hotter, and used more power. Boolean logic is just simpler, I guess.

Yeah, even Donald Knuth has said that Balanced Ternary is probably the prettiest number system.  Definitely useful for simplifying simple math functions.

[King Mir]

If you're going to go for a ternary system, wouldn't full cart (1), empty cart (0), no cart (-1) make sense?

The problem I see with any "full cart/empty cart/no cart" system would be that it would necessitate a continuous flow of carts to prevent a constant "0" entry.  What happens if a cart is late?  The entire calculation goes haywire and you get a garbled mess as your result.  Personally, I think filled="0" part-filled="1" system would work best, with empty carts returned to the "top" of the computer to be re-used.

This is not a problem for syncronous logic though. You could even switch back and forth between no-cart-0 and empty-cart-0 for different parts of the circuit.

[kaenneth]

I posted in another thread, but:

Can a cart skip a couple times, then land back on some tracks, and keep going?

air jumps are one thing, but Dwarven Hovercrafts (filled with caged eels) are a step beyond.