""I ain't dead!" said the thread...
I just thought of a new solution to the dilemma of massive minecart capacities that IIRC hadn't been mentioned in this thread (I have read it all, but not in the last few days). The specific case is these sandbags:
I'm trying to have a minecart route to take sand bags from a stockpile next to my glass furnace near the surface, and dump them down a shaft to land near my magma glass furnace down by the magma sea. The problem I have is that 11 sandbags only makes the cart 3% full, and the lowest setting I can set is to have it move when 25% full. It looks like that will be about 100 sandbags, and I don't really want to fill that many. I could just make it go after a time period, regardless of how full it is, but then I'll end up with an empty cart being shuttled back and forth when I'm not doing any glassmaking. That seems kind of silly. Am I missing a way to set the departure condition to something like 5% full? Or some other solution?
So, someone mentioned that minecarts that hit other minecarts that are on the track will transfer their momentum to the minecart in the front. My preliminary testing with the few dwarves I have left (6 alive; 2 kids and a babbling baroness included) in my minecart science fort indicates that minecart A (the one with speed initially) does indeed transfer most of it's momentum to B, often even coming to a complete stop.
In any case, the specific setup that I tested, and which works, is as follows:
GABR===Where G is a gear bringing power to A. A has tracks, 1 tile of rollers, whichever speed you want (low is equivalent to a dwarven push, high will push your cart about 4 times as far), a hauling route stop with no settings, and minecart A. B has (surprise!) minecart B, tracks, the site of another hauling route stop with the orders to fill up the cart at it, but no push/guide/ride orders. A also has the key to this scheme, a
pressure plate that turns on the gear G when triggered. R is another (optional) set of 1-tile rollers, which can be powered continuously if you want. = are tracks going off to the right.
So basically, dwarves will fill up the cart at B. When it's full enough, the pressure plate will cause A to slam into B, sending B off, either on it's own momentum, or with an extra boost from R. Pressure plates can be set with intervals of 50 Urists (sand bags weigh 3 Urists), so you should get a lot more control over when to set the carts moving than the 0/25/50/75/100 available with hauling orders.
Note that if your gear is transmitting power when you link it to the pressure plate, you'll have to set the plate to be triggered as long as it's under your desired weight; if it's disengaged when you link them, you can set it to trigger when your desired weight is exceeded. Also something to take into account is that you should only use carts made out of the same material (well, most wood is relatively similar, so that might be ok), so as not to screw up your finely-tuned weight criteria.
So, feedback/questions?
P.S. About that minecart science fort I mentioned earlier: I've got loads of minecart science related to friction amounts, general minecart behaviour verifications, and the strength of rollers to post. Also suggestions for further research areas etc. I was thinking I'd do it in this thread, as a more expansive followup to what Sadrice and xmoffitt have already written (posts #200, #230, #441 and #488). By loads I mean that my full write-up is currently about 7½ pages, but I'll be editing it some before posting here (and will probably partition some of the setup details into spoiler tags, so you can just skim the results). I'll get on it once this fort dies to the tantrum spiral.
edit: note that if you have A&B right next to each other as above, you should probably have something less than highest rollers at A, since with highest A still rolls for quite a while. You really only need A to push B 1 tile, so weak rollers should be fine.
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Topic: The "How Does Minecart" Thread (Read 336256 times)