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[Niyazov]

Will spilled contents have velocity/do damage? Since there's an arc, I'm thinking a minecart full of spears set to crash just short of the expected goblins could make a cute little grapeshot cannon.

or a minecart full of speargoblin prisoners

dwarven high-speed prisoner exchange

[Uristocrat]

I think now that we have railgun technology, the next logical step would be nuclear weaponry.

Or a reactor. That would be pretty badass too.

Believe me, we'll be making a lot of supercolliders as soon as possible.  And it's good to know that Toady is making sure they do satisfying levels of damage.

[Uristocrat]

Will spilled contents have velocity/do damage? Since there's an arc, I'm thinking a minecart full of spears set to crash just short of the expected goblins could make a cute little grapeshot cannon.

or a minecart full of speargoblin prisoners

dwarven high-speed prisoner exchange

Actually, I like the thought of flinging a minecart full of angry housecats into someone's face.  (Or something like that, anyhow....)

[Tsuchigumo550]

Why use a magma fall, when you can just send the cart through a magma filled ditch?

Devlog:
Projectile units and vehicles have more resistance moving through water and magma now, and they can skip across the surface of liquids. That'll leave intermittent splashes at the points of contact depending on the speed and nature of the objects.

The ditch will slow down the cart, and since you'll need to descend into the ditch, a high speed cart is likely to just skip over the top - plus the splash effects interfering with who knows what. How will splashed magma affect the rollers, etc? The ditch would work fine if we're filling the cart before accelerating it to speed, but I suspect that for the non-magma safe cart shots it wouldn't give us enough time to accelerate it before it melted.


The magmafall, just given the nature of how falling liquids tend to be, I think is more likely to just fill the cart without affecting its trajectory, slowing it too much, or creating too much mess. And you could have the fall immediately before the ramp if needed. Plus, the magmafall would protect the railgun barrel as an approach for fliers.

I only wish that you could dump water on them and end up with obsidian/lead statues....

Why not? Have the entrance come from the side, so you have a solid wall in the killfield at the end to shoot against that's a dozen or so tiles past the side approach. Build a 2nd rail line a z-level above the solid wall at the end that sends a cart full of water a short delay after each railgun shot to auto dump the water there at the end. Each shot then gets followed by a water dump, makes obsidian, and forms a new wall for the next one to slam against. Eventually the water won't flow out to reach them, but you'd get a few good tiles to mine out. Would make a nice exercise for timing two lines.

This alone gave me a very different idea, one involving moats and !!FUN!!

If you had a magma moat, you could position a "blank" railgun- carts only, filled with whatever you want to get magma'd, sent at superhigh velocity to skip across the magma sea's edge to splash all the awaiting goblins at your entrance. Bonus points if you can get it to land on track afterwards and reuse the Dwarven Magma Shower.

[Uristocrat]

This alone gave me a very different idea, one involving moats and !!FUN!!

If you had a magma moat, you could position a "blank" railgun- carts only, filled with whatever you want to get magma'd, sent at superhigh velocity to skip across the magma sea's edge to splash all the awaiting goblins at your entrance. Bonus points if you can get it to land on track afterwards and reuse the Dwarven Magma Shower.

Interesting thought.  I wonder if higher density carts will splash more, or if we'll want low density carts that move faster to make them skip?  And the carts themselves can do damage, so that's always a bonus.  I wonder if Toady knew that by adding minecarts, he was giving us new superweapons?  I mean, we weaponize everything, even giant sponges, but minecarts?  We just have so many options here.

And that's to say nothing of the new options for repeaters/logic/etc. we can make using minecarts.  Remember, there are pressure plates that can detect them.  And powered rollers to move them.  So we can make new kinds of timers and controllable signal generators!  Dwarven !!science!! is about to take a great leap forward.

[Tsuchigumo550]

Yes, the thought of the moat and cart combo came from a desire to combine sciences, but imagine our already crazy amount of ways to kill something multiplied by Minecarts.

Giant spike launchers, anyone? No more relying on catapult siege operators that hopefully don't get scared off, pull a lever in the dining room and watch as invaders get impaled upon death spikes.
(That's Class I Science, using one mechanism with semicomplicated engineering)

Flaming or Melting giant spike launchers:
Class II science, adding a lava-fill or a flaming granite track/loading bay. Note the need for reignition and re-graniteification, I think.

Fists of Justice
(Not sure if Class II or Class II, note that classes are just the amount of different sciencey mechanisms in one place... This oune might could spray lava too...)

This one is like the old landmine traps but automated, and when set up, it's a sunroof for your dwarves. Make a minecart rolling down a track trigger some supports holding up a bunch of floor tiles over the most likely siege path holdup- like in front of your fort.

Pull lever, minecart begins it's journey of manliness.

Minecart reaches a station very close to a "port", a floodgate blocking an entrance where a rail is, activates floodgate

Minecart passes through gate then deactivates it

Minecart goes across some detectors, setting off the mines and crushing some goblins

Minecart does the enter/exit floodgates to get back in from a different port.

Minecart completes it's journey of manliness.

You could also set different levers to different mines, and have them much higher than your classic landmines. You could also hypothetically chain someone to the collapsing roof. Endless possibilities.

You could also have minecarts that activate other minecarts. This could mean putting a detector at the end of your rail and setting them up to fire five times for one lever pull. Fill with coins for the lulz!

[Martin]

Actually one of the best use of mine carts might be against those pesky near unkillable MB. Mine cart should be able to replace cave-ins and webs as ways to cage trap them just by being vastly easier to set up, and more flexible where it can be set up.

[Uristocrat]

Haha!  Even Toady is getting in on the action now:

05/12/2012 Toady One I was shooting debug minecarts full of battle axes at an arena colossus when Zach's actual fort got attacked by a cyclops. He ordered his squads out then set the camera to follow the monster. We had fun watching it run around causing trouble. Three deaths before the bolts started flying in. There's not too much more to do now.

I love the attention to weaponization he's putting into this release.  It looks like we can expect tons of !!FUN!! zooming our way.

Nobody's going to know what hit them.  I mean, the cart could hold goblins, bolts, coins, serrated discs, cobaltite, magma, sperm whales or all of the above!

[Tsuchigumo550]

I can see it now, somehow building a sperm whale nursery linked to a floodgate-release-to-minecart-system...

"Sir! The goblins have broken the second line of defense! Now all we have is the wall!"

"Project Whalegun is a go. Load the whale cannon!"

"Pulling the lever, sir!"

"Now wait for it...

(The sound of whale calls can be heard as their world rapidly goes trough sudden shrinking, into nothing more than a quantum minecart.)

Fire!"

"Pulling lever, sir!"

-At this very moment, the minecart goes running down it's path- gaining speed, more and more, possibly picking up some !!FUN!! on it's way-

Gobbo 1:
"Hey chief."
Gobbo Chief:
"What?"
Gobbo 1:
"There's a wall in our way."
Gobbo Chief:
"No shi-"
Whale:
BAWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[Itnetlolor]

Talk about whalin' on them.

* Itnetlolor mysteriously gets hit by a tomato from [DATA EXPUNGED], and suffered a concussion. Tomato clocked in at 250mph.

EDIT:
Ow.

[Uristocrat]

"Project Whalegun is a go. Load the whale cannon!"

Believe me, I've been studying the relevant research.  It seems that they were catching whole schools of whales ...

That said, suddenly it doesn't seem quite dwarfy enough.  Perhaps we should be shooting sea serpents at invaders?  And it would be incredibly cool if you could somehow chain animals into minecarts.

Imagine having a dragon riding around in a minecart, burning your enemies to ash ...

[Niccolo]

Imagine having a dragon riding around in a minecart, burning your dwarves to ash ...

Fixed that for you.

[ComradeGafarov]

A dragon in a minecart would be a pretty bad idea, unless the cart were made of slade, adamantine, or dolomite, which I think are the only dragonfire-safe materials.

[Uristocrat]

A dragon in a minecart would be a pretty bad idea, unless the cart were made of slade, adamantine, or dolomite, which I think are the only dragonfire-safe materials.

If you're going to cart dragons around as movable flamethrowers, you might as well splurge on an adamantium minecart.

Though I'm sure that someone will mod in slade minecarts.  With its density, I'm sure that collisions will be a sight to behold.

[Tsuchigumo550]

Toxic gas spewing FB cannons?