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It was fun for a long time but towards the end it just started to drag

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Total Members Voted: 28

[Eric Blank]

[Major battles or skirmishes/individual firefights within overarching conflicts? 53 major battles is more than enough for an entire war, but accomplishing 53 strategic goals over a year split between the two factions, or 53 minor conflicts within an important battle seems reasonable. What's the timeframe, anyway?]
Eric left the cursed dining hall, now effectively walled in, and made his way back to the panic bunker, relieving Cog and the mining team from defense duty. It was time to let everyone out so they could get back to work. Especially on that damn curtain wall. Even without a primary keep prepared to house artillary and anti-air defenses, they need some defenses. The first couple meters of wall at head height serves as a minor obstacle and good fortification for marksdwarves, but by the time it's the full 3-5 stories tall it will provide excellent defense from ground troops and effective fortifications. Once the tower was complete, it would be a real chore for any army to break through. An attacker would never gain enough wealth, political prestige, or strategic advantage from the destruction of the fortress to compensate for the sacrifices such a siege would demand. Only the goblins would bother, and only to appease Armok.

They needed special plans for the dragons, if they ever showed their ugly mugs again. They defied all rules of conventional dwarven warfare, more akin to the digital age of warfare he'd grown up with. With air strike capabilities and nearly half of their number being large enough that they could simply bound over the walls even if flightless, the fortifications would be useless. Their breath attacks and the fact that some unknown fraction would likely have magical potential meant that siege engine crews wouldn't be safe no matter how small the openings for their weapons were, as a dragon could easily latch onto the walls and breath right through, torching or freezing them with minimal effort and only the risk of the first dragon to attempt an attack on each crew being impaled by a pre-loaded bolt. Even with the advantage of the great range of the ballistae and legendary warriors of every variety, a single battalion of dragons could overrun the entire fortress and have just enough number remaining to occupy it until reinforcements arrived. No matter what, it was a losing battle. Actual firearms would be necessary, but they couldn't even produce enough suitable explosives to assist in mining operations, let alone operate enough .50 caliber machineguns to stop a flight of dragons short of the curtain walls. It would end up looking like ground crews trying to stop a bomber raid in WWII.
Steam-operated ballistae and crossbows? Or designing better rockets... The ostrich egg bombs and rocket barrages had worked wonders on every sieging force the old fortress had encountered. They could be adapted to shoot down airborne threats with relative accuracy, or deal heavy damage to larger units before they could close.

Nononono, I've got this! Magma rail guns! The explosive force of the pressurized magma deep below the fortress was great enough to lob small projectiles thousands of feet straight into the air from a "barrel" that didn't offer any extra pressure. If they used that power to lob a projectile from an actual rifled barrel, it would effectively let them constuct cannon turrets operating off pipes connected to a pressurizing chamber deep below ground, if the magma reservoir was great enough for the task. The turret could possibly be completely sealed off besides the barrel, protecting the crew and part of the equipment. Using adamantine plating and barrels, the turrets would be nigh-invulnerable to absolutely everything, including anything the dragons could wield, and require little material to construct, although no adamantine had been extracted so far. There were some deposits available, though, and they could technically spread out underground as much as needed to collect more.

[WillowLuman]

Why bother with obsidian pump stacks at all? Obsidian is brittle, and magma takes a long time to flow. We know the formula for concrete, we have the means to make steel, I propose we build our walls of rebar! No medieval weapon will get through it, and it takes modern artillery to scratch it. We ought to build one of these:

As for propellant, pressurized magma is good if you want to destroy us as well. I'm pretty sure that given enough time, assistance, and resources, Weird could synthesize a large quantity of nitrocellulose propellant (modern smokeless gunpowder). In terms of story, though, any kind large scale fortification, or any incredibly durable construction would take months of work. However, I don't think we'll face major threats for a few anyway.

[wierd]

If you don't mind the heat, the smell, and the corrosive vapors that is.


I need an actual lab, and a real shipment of platinum. The easiest process to mass produce nitric acid is the Ostwald process which turns anhydrous ammonia into nitrogen oxide and water vapor, which then gets bubbled through columns of water.

Synthesis of nitrocellulose propellent is then easy, but refined cellulose works best. Normal plant matter will work fine though. Milled up wheat chaff, processed with a strong alkaline agent to remove all the protein would work. Ammonium hydroxide in a pressureized vessel might work, given proper refrigeration to get the concentration high enough. (Ammonia water, basically.. but ammonia is a gas dissolved in the water. Increasing the concentration at low temps where it is more soluble will increase its chemical activity.) We could recycle the gas, and use it in the ostwald reactor later. It could be a continual process, since we could ferment the protien solution we get from the plant material for more ammonia.

Might I suggest a more powerful propellent though?

Nitrocellulose is smokeless black powder.
Solid rocket fuel is PETN. (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate)

It is synthensized by nitrating pentaerythritol with concetrated nitric acid.
Pentaerythritol can be synthesized using calcium hydroxide (can be obtained by kilning limestone until it melts like glass, then bubbling air through the hot "syrup"), formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, oxallic acid, and distilled alcohol.

More sophisticated than nitrocellulose, but also way more explodie.  A few ounces can send a model rocket 50,000 feet.

This will require a very well stocked chem lab though.  It also means training dwarves in industrial chemical synthesis. The dwarven kingdom will never be the same again if I let the secrets of modern high yeild explosives out of the bag....

(You can make something similar to detcord or primacord out of PETN, and plasticised nitrocellulose, such as using camphor as the plasticiser. Necro towers wouldn't stand a chance.)

[Oliolli]

The dwarven kingdom will never be the same again if I let the secrets of modern high yeild explosives out of the bag....

I see so many ways this can go wrong... and so few reasons to not do this.

[wierd]

But these are dwarves we are talking about.

You know... the drunken idiots who wall themselves in enclosed spaces, mine out the floor they are standing on, and who run after socks at the foot of waterfalls.

............

Do we really want them making dangerous, high yeild explosives?


..............

Really?

[Oliolli]

Survival of the fittest/smartest 

The ones who wall themselves into an enclosed space with food, drink, a still and farming capabilities get to pass their genes on.

[WillowLuman]

Solid rocket fuel sounds like a bad idea for making ammuntion with, though. Missiles, maybe, but I'm pretty sure there's a reason they don't use it in shells or bullets. Any dwarves would of course need training before they could make this stuff on their own, and arguably it would only be possible to train the smart ones in this kind of chemical industry. Anyway, [meta argument about DF 1.0 and RP], so while still ignorant and occasionally very stupid, they'd more likely make different kinds of mistakes. I think that given an RPG, they'd try to fire it in an enclosed space and thus fry themselves with backblast.

[wierd]

The difference between a chemical rocket, and a demolition charge, is the shape of the device.

A rocket is long and slender, with a reaction constriction neck. A small part of the explosive is ignited, and it burns from that one end only, and has a ready means for the biproducts to escape: the nozzle.

A demolition charge ignites nearly all of the exlosive simultaneously, and the housing focuses the percussion wave to maximize the intensity of the charge onto the surface to be demolished. The onlyv way for the products of combustion to escape is by rupturing the housing.

Detcord works by burning 100% of its length all at once. Otherwise it would burn like a really fast fuse. It does this using electrical resistance based ignition.

In the case of an exploding shell, PETN would work fantastically. The shell just needs to be made appropriately.  Its what you find in, eg, RPG shells.

Launch one down a dragon's open gullet, and watch the chunks fly.

[Gizogin]

[Hooray, I have Internet access again!  Not for long, though.]

Gizo X heard a knock on the hospital door.  Though he didn't know who it was, he knew it was probably safe.  His scrying earlier had told him that there wasn't any immediate threat of a siege.  As such, he'd been meaning to open the hospital up again anyway, but his work on a second G-Core had distracted him.  He got up from the half-finished core, went over to the door, and shouted, "Who's there?"

"It's Hugo!  I need to talk to you!"

"Alright, just stand clear!  I have to disengage the security measures!"
Gizo X went back to the workshop.  There, he went through the procedures to disable the traps, locks, and other mechanisms protecting the hospital from attackers, siegers, and door-to-door salesmen.  Finally, he pulled the lever to open the doors.
"There you go.  Now, what did you need?"

Meanwhile:

Gizogin cursed silently to himself.  How had he managed to get lost so badly on the way up from the bunker?  As far as he could tell, there hadn't even been any branching paths on the way down.  Now, though, he had absolutely no idea where he was.

[WillowLuman]

[Did you wander into that lost city that the miners trying to excavate Roead's tomb discovered? BTW, different civ made that city.]

HugoLuman entered the hospital. "Thank you. It's just that this is the only place I can sleep, what with the cloth stockpile being in here."

[Corai]

Corai, unsafely out of the fortress walls was relaxed, calm. He had no reason to be aware, noone would be stupid enough (or paid enough by Joykill) to attack him. Meanwhile, up ahead the two kobolds waited behind trees.


"Regeth, Corai no die good. Legs, legs."

"No kill, leg go byebye."

The two kobolds snuck around to flank Corai, and not very good at it either. Corai stopped, picked up the pup, and began looking around.


"HE SEE US, THROW POINTY STICKS" Frigulish screamed, throwing his copper spear as a javelin. Regeth followed. Corai threw the pup into a tree and rolled away. Frigulish charged him, Corai sweeped him off his feet with a kick, caught him, and knocked him out with a upper-cut. Regeth was smarter and readied his copper blade. Corai drew his uzi and began taking shots at the kobold. He fled behind cover, which was a tree. Corai took out his bluemetal dagger and snuck over to Regeth.

Regeth had no helmet, good Corai thought, sneaking behind the panicked kobold. Corai grabbed him from behind, put his hand over his mouth, and sang a lullaby, which put the idiotic kobold right to sleep. He snapped his neck and went over to Frigulish, still asleep.


"YOU GET DAWWBABY DOWN?"


Corai smiled at the adorable pup dangling from a tree, moving to save her, a eagle came and took her away. "Dawwbaby can handle herself." he said, removing Frigulish's armor.


-I got the idea from ZTG, civil war among the kobolds. Thats adorable, isnt it?-

[Corai]

-A kobold thief stole my internet and made this do a double-post.-

[wierd]

Weird shuffled down the hallway like one of the walking dead. Stumbling up the ramp, and around the corner into the initial hall of the living quarters, and through the second door on the right. His room.

He was so ready to find his bed, that he moaned loudly with realization just moments upon entering.

There on the floor, was a mound of gutted pillows; drawn and quartered. Their downy intrails littered the floor in a white feast of the macabre.

This is why he hated emergencies. Quick thinking always led to getting bit in the ass later.

He groaned, and sat on the bed, pulling his boots and gloves off.  He could at least get out of the heavy-assed hazard suit. At least he hadn't needed to waste the precious bootstrap reagents he had loaded it with.

Noode-armed, tired, and full of "gawd kill me now" morale, he practically oozed out of the stiff, reinforced structure of tthe hazard suit, white chalk dust clinging to his now naked skin. Clumsily, hung the suit up on its hook, then slipped on some nightclothes.

The lack of showering fascilities in this fortress was attrocious. Then again, the idea of a communal shower in this place, given some of the off-the-wall fettishes the dwarves had... was enough to give him the creeps.  Maybe he could convince eric that he needed access to an independent chemical wash shower, "for emergency use"?

Grumbling, he snuck out of his quarters, and into zanzetkuken's now vacant pemises next door. If he had gone off on some damned fool errand to go blow himself up, then he wouldn't be around for a very long time, and wouldn't notice nor care that his pillows were missing.

Stealthily,sneakily, and quietly, he ducked into the room, and attempted to make off with the pillows.  The first two came away easily, but the third.........

Weird scratched his head.  The pillowcase went straight into the wall, and was tightly wedged between the blocks of masonry in the mortar joint.  He knew for a fact that the furniture was installed *after* the rooms were completed, so how the hell could the pillowcase be wedged so deeply in the damned wall?

Angry that his plan to steal pillows was being foiled by nonsense, he set about trying to find out why.....

[Corai]

-Weird Joykill-Crime, stealing. Injured party, Zanzetkuken. Witness, the all mighty all seeing eye of justice. Punishment,100 hammerstrikes-

[wierd]

I challenge you to prove that zanz didn't say I could have them!

(Also,  no hammerer.)