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[Burmalay]

I think i found the way to avoid accident with the minecarts. You need to build this:

[]S[]                               [] - Shaft
[]  []                               S - Stop
[]  >>>===========[]      = - Tunnel with track
[]                       []S[]      > - Rollers
[]==========<<<[]


It's a primitive example but you can build a track loop which are isolated from any traffic areas where dwarfs can be injured. Minecart would be dropped into shaft & moved in tunnel to the next stop & then repeated.

[penguinofhonor]

I prefer the slight chance of occasional collision and death. Wouldn't be as fun without it.

[TerryDactyl]

Is manual unloading of minecarts via "give to stockpile" broken for everybody or it`s just me doing something wrong? The only way I can empty the minecart is to dump the contents on a stop.

I had this same experience in .08.  I can't test it now, but is it any different in .09?

I was unloading just fine in 08. Did you remember to set a stockpile link from your route>stop panel?

[webber]

Is manual unloading of minecarts via "give to stockpile" broken for everybody or it`s just me doing something wrong? The only way I can empty the minecart is to dump the contents on a stop.

I had this same experience in .08.  I can't test it now, but is it any different in .09?

I was unloading just fine in 08. Did you remember to set a stockpile link from your route>stop panel?

Aw, it was just me. Didn`t pay attention that the "give" menu says "kept items", not "desired", and was always ordering to keep in cart all items I wanted to unload.

[jwest23]

I bet that was exactly my problem, too.  Thanks, webber.

[Sadrice]

Did a bit more science with pushed carts (no rollers so far).  A pushed cart goes 18 tiles when every tile is a turn.  They go 179 tiles when only two tiles are turns (ran out of room in my 2x2 embark).
If my math is right, turns apply about 11 times as much friction as ordinary track tiles, and if I had a larger embark area the cart would have gone about 200 tiles in a straight line.


We need a way to describe a cart's speed.  The obvious is direct velocity (tiles per tick or the inverse, whichever is more convenient), but since pushed cart travel seems to be at uniform speed, with cart weight, material, and dwarf strength and speed having no effect, I think a more useful descriptive unit would be how far the cart will travel in a straight line.  Thus a pushed cart travels at a speed of 200.  I'll do a bit of research on rollers and ramps and what speeds they generate, and I think I'll end up reporting it all in tiles traveled.

[TinyPirate]

Rather than a ramp to the bottom of a fort, can you just plunge a cart down a hole and have it land on a track with, say, rollers, and then it keeps going to its destination? You could then define another track to return it to the surface, or just let a dwarf cart the cart.

[Scelly9]

Rather than a ramp to the bottom of a fort, can you just plunge a cart down a hole and have it land on a track with, say, rollers, and then it keeps going to its destination? You could then define another track to return it to the surface, or just let a dwarf cart the cart.

Yes. But it won't be going extremely fast when it gets to the bottom.

[khearn]

Did a bit more science with pushed carts (no rollers so far).  A pushed cart goes 18 tiles when every tile is a turn.  They go 179 tiles when only two tiles are turns (ran out of room in my 2x2 embark).
If my math is right, turns apply about 11 times as much friction as ordinary track tiles, and if I had a larger embark area the cart would have gone about 200 tiles in a straight line.


We need a way to describe a cart's speed.  The obvious is direct velocity (tiles per tick or the inverse, whichever is more convenient), but since pushed cart travel seems to be at uniform speed, with cart weight, material, and dwarf strength and speed having no effect, I think a more useful descriptive unit would be how far the cart will travel in a straight line.  Thus a pushed cart travels at a speed of 200.  I'll do a bit of research on rollers and ramps and what speeds they generate, and I think I'll end up reporting it all in tiles traveled.

But it can be pretty hard to tell hard far a cart would go in many circumstances. How do I measure how fast m cart is going partway down a helical tunnel to the bottom of my fort? Digging a straight stretch of track a couple of hundred tiles long to see how far it will roll isn't very practical. pausing the game and using '.' to advance things one tick at a time and counting how long it takes to move a tile is easy. I think something that is easily measured is more useful than something that is very difficult to measure.

[Sadrice]

Why would digging a tunnel out not be practical?  I've been using distance traveled specifically because it's easier and more accurate.  A straight tunnel would be (slightly) time consuming, but once we have better data and a more exact conversion factor than my rough 11:1 ratio you could dig a quite small zigzag tunnel.  I suppose advancing tick by tick is not very hard, but as you approach top speeds you lose precision very fast (I'm pretty sure there are valid speeds between 2 ticks/tile and 3 ticks/tile), and while you could keep doing it until you have, say, 10 tiles traveled and take the average, more things will keep happening to the cart, affecting its velocity.  By digging out a runoff tunnel, you could test the speed at any point in the path and close it back up later, unless you are in a very constrained environment. 
If you're worried about the tunnel being too large and labor intensive,  the maximum speed I achieved with rollers last night (in 34.08) would stop without hitting the end of a 2x25 zigzag corridor.  I haven't messed with ramps yet, but I'm about to.

EDIT: also, having speed in the remaining number of tiles travelable is much more convenient for planning purposes.  Knowing your cart is traveling at 5 urists/urist is only directly useful for knowing how long it will take it to get to a destination (assuming constant velocity), which might be useful when planning timing sensitive track switches, but knowing your cart will travel 400 straight tiles, 36 curved tiles, whatever number of upward ramps, or fly whatever distance without further added energy is very useful for deciding whether you will need to add more rollers or ramps to your proposed path.  Either way you would need a lookup table to find the information contained in the other units, but I think people will want to know how far their cart will go a lot more often then they'll want to know when it will get there.

[Martin]

I think you need both, depending on what you're trying to do.


Ultimately we need to reverse engineer the formula for how ramps add/reduce velocity, rollers, and how they accumulate speed, how much corners take off, etc. People are likely going to be dealing with combinations of ramps and rollers and turns, and being able to estimate things will matter.


However, much of the benefit of mine carts is also in their timing. If I want pressure plate to lower a drawbridge, and that takes 100 ticks to activate, how far back does the plate need to be? That kind of thing.

[TerryDactyl]

Why would digging a tunnel out not be practical?

It is both time-consuming and labour-intensive. And requires materials. While the accuracy of this practice is undoubtedly higher, this sort of scientific approach can be very costly to the long-term viability of a fortress, especially in the early years. Put me down in the measure-by-tick camp, for now.

Nevermind cannons... I'm learning how to use tracks as a central part of my fort's design. To *transport items*.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

We struck the earth next to a set of ponds, our only source of water. An intake valve preserves a minimum depth, water is cleaned automatically, and flows north towards the planned future site for 'the city'. Food and drink are prepared here, at the entrance-hub, along with bins, barrels, and other carpentry items.

A track was laid alongside the waterworks - a convenient road with the safety of the tunnels. Power runs alongside the track, with a 1-tile gap. Rollers are planned for this track, and the gap permits them to be turned on and off without cutting power to the mainline.


Basic facilities were dug around a track stop which is to act as worksite for the next few years. Efficiency can be improved by burrowing workers in this zone - provided that supply lines are steady. I have yet to strike the right balance between each work-camp. There is another zone dedicated to logging, to the east, which may later become farm-central, given how crowded the hub has become.

Science can wait. I'm busy engineering.

[Girlinhat]

Engineering is science applied.

[Buttery_Mess]

Engineering is science applied.

Engineering is the practice of designing and maintaining systems.

[penguinofhonor]

I have confirmed that carts still don't go up ramps properly.

For anyone who doesn't know what this means, to get a cart to go up a track-ramp, you have to make the ramp's track direction only go in the uphill direction. For instance, if you have a cart going north up a hill instead of building a NS track-ramp, build a N track-ramp.

One dwarf was harmed by a minecart in the confirmation of this fact.