Ok, ok, I know it's undwarfy to think about safety, but I'd really like some ideas here.
So I've got a bunch of cool stuff--iron, coal, chalk, sand, fire clay--way up at the top of my fortress. And I've got a bunch of hot stuff--magma--60 levels down at the bottom. And what I've done so far is to build a straight 1x1 shaft all the way from the former to the latter, and set up simple guided minecarts to dump stuff down the shaft, and at the bottom is a quantum stockpile, from which my magma workshop stockpiles pull. So far so good.
Only problem is, twice so far, some dwarf has been down at the bottom picking up goodies when a load of stone comes down, and the results have been tragic, albeit spectacular and amusing. Right now I've got a manual safety system in place where there's a floor hatch one z-level up, walled off, with a lever to operate it, and every month or so I have to open and shut it manually. This is a pain, and if I forget to do it my industries shut down. Not optimal. This is the first version I've played where falling objects hurt, so I don't have any stock ideas for how to get objects from point A to point B without landing on point D.
I've come up with a few vague notions of what can be done, but they all seem, well, extremely dwarfy, involving burrows and water blasting from reservoirs and floor grates and probably flooding the workshop. I have to imagine there is a solution somewhere involving an airlock in the shaft, but my grasp of pressure plate logic is really, really shaky.
Any ideas how to drop things from a great height without squishing my dorfs?