, and you're not even going to be kind enough to let us murder the living fuck out of the bloody dragons and everything? You're a horrible person.
The "magma checkerboard" I was talking about was actually an underground defense against sappers. And I'd prefer to upgrade it to "two deep vertical trenches with a 1-tile-wide wall in-between." Stupid sapper swims through water to access wall, digs through it, suddenly the space is filled with magma and water, forming an obsidian barrier. It's completely impossible to cross in-game, serving as a very efective defense against HFS (if you use doors instead of a solid wall, they'll break down a door, path into the tile it occupied, then get encased in obsidian.) and even realistically, as long as the water didn't evaporate from it's side of the wall (or was under enough pressure it would remain liquid and suddenly explode down the tunnel the sappers were trying to dig, sweeping them away or crushing them into paste against the walls, and boiling non-dragon forces alive in the steam. Pressurized, superheated water would make a nasty trap for any species indeed. So many ways to kill a creature, all occuring at once. Hehehe...), the trap would make it impossible to move large forces through, extending the expected length of a sapping excercise by some weeks. Given the current viscosity of our magma, it wouldn't exactly seal immediately, but the water would provide enough cooling that if a dragon tried to swim through, they'd get stuck before they could get all the way through, and be left to drown in the magma. Any other creatures would simply get boiled alive in the water. Of course Wierd will probably have a more accurate and realistic interpretation of my plans. I just know it works in DF, and would make for a nearly impenetrable barrier. You'd have to spend the time to pump the water out (if it didn't explode outwards anyway), which could be excessively complicated if both reservoirs are designed to refill. You'd have to locate and block the pipes feeding them, which takes time, or have a pump powerful enough to out-pump a dorf's, which only our engineers would be competent enough to do. If the water reservoir was self-refilling, it would still act as a geyser, forcing anything trying to move down the tunnel to fight the pressure of the escaping gasses. Unfortunately, if the water reservoir exploded, I'd expect the magma reservoir to suddenly burst through the wall, filling the entire thing with lava. So they'd have fun with that, too. The walls could potentially be compromized by that, I suppose...
The reason I'm using obsidian is that it can be dense and harder than concrete. Even though it's brittle, especially in small quantities, it doesn't have any particular plane of cleavage and fractures conchoidally and thus it's rather difficult to tunnel through it, as every strike leaves you with a rather shallow, bowl-shaped depression. The magma we have access to offers a high silica content. Silica is somewhat tougher than window glass, compared to calcite, which is actually fairly weak, and a solid wall of uncrystalized quartz, laced with other minerals that don't really compromise it in their uncrystalized current state, is an obstacle that can't be discounted. During it's construction, and entering the hollowing-out phase, it'll take our miners a long damn time to get through it, even the legendary ones. You can't really shatter a wall of it without applying a large force to the entire mass, even though it's rather simple to break off any chunks jutting out. Sieging forces can overrun the external balconies from which the ballistae fire in short order (well, other than the task of reaching them alive and unimpaled on a ballista bolt/pincushioned by crossbow bolts/sliced in half/cooked alive/poisoned/microwaved/whatever else we can come up with that kills shit, and breaking holes in the fortifications, which are well-above ground level, to get inside.) but they'd spend a couple days trying to tunnel through the multi-meter-thick interior walls to gain access to the central keep. Now, we can definitely reinforce the obsidian with steel rebar before casting it. I'd wait to get wierd's word on that, too. Even if I'm supposedly a pretty good mason in-game, I haven't had practical experience building walls yet IRL. Of course, filling a giant mould with lava and rebar in place of reinforced concrete, and attempting to cool it rapidly enough to form a good, thick layer of obsidian with no other components is not normal human construction technique. I sincerely doubt I'll ever get the chance, or that anyone else will ever try. Nobody plays with lava anyway...
Although, that's exactly what those "Ancient Astronaut "Theorists"" said the aliens did to produce the granite blocks used to construct Puma Punku on-site, ignorant of the fact that flash-cooling the magma in the way they suggested would not produce granite, or even rhyolite, but beautiful, black obsidian blocks, and that a portion of the site is actually built of sandstone. Fucking idiots.
I actually want to uplaod a blueprint of the finished tower for this. i had a fort going and was building it in-game, but got interrupted, so I'll have to continue with that/cheat with DFhack.
Don't forget the actual minecart tracks that I used to escape with the dwarves and kobold populations. They weren't the ones you guys had, but they were part of the normal minecart system, that led outside and away form the fortress, but stopped shortly thereafter. I guess... I'm not really clear on all this anyway. It all made no sense to me at the time.
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Topic: If Bay Forum were a Mountain Hall, continued... FULL DISCLOSURE (Read 265507 times)