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[Girlinhat]

Weight plays exactly zero difference in minecart physics.  An empty featherwood cart would travel identically to a slade cart.

Carts lose their contents when they stop suddenly, hitting a creature likely does not cause them to eject, because minecarts tend to hit creatures and go through them.

As far as direct weapons go, you have two main options.  Water, or spears.  Water-loaded carts do significant damage, heavier than normal rocks and traveling very fast, to one target.  Spears can be loaded ~1000 into a single cart, with a random spread and doing damage as if thrown.  So the choices are essentially railgun or shotgun.  Keeping in mind that items do NOT unstack when fired, so coins and bolts are difficult to utilize directly.

Really though, for AA purposes, you'd want block launchers.  If you can manage to fire a 5x5 block of minecarts in perfect sync, then it becomes very difficult for flying creatures to avoid the block shot.  This should be your real goal for minecart AA.

[Tacomagic]

I'm thinking fire bin payloads would be appropriate.

Why complicate things?

Just use magma itself.  In fact, semi-related, I'll be preparing a minecart magma cannon for a new fort.

I'm just a fan of launching something that will burn for upwards of 8 months and kill pretty much anything that decides to get near it.

[BastiBasti]

So for AA we need to make a 5x5 block of mine carts in sync, I take it a 5 long line of launchers with a rapid succession of 5 mine carts each would work?

Also, as for the artillery cannon idea I take it loading ~1000 spears into a mine cart would be the preferred ammo, but as for getting the cart to offload it's contents mid-air with some sort of spread may be tricky. Hitting a live animal would work but tame flying animals lose their ability to fly, and getting the timing on dropping a load of animals from above will be notoriously difficult. Do mine carts that hit a ceiling spill their contents? If so we could do that, or simple hitting a suspended wall block could do, yet there may be the problem of limited cone of fire or the charge going straight ahead (yet possible useful for hitting enemies on a suspended bridge of sorts or perhaps a more aggressive AA cannon). Thoughts on this?

[Kofthefens]

So for AA we need to make a 5x5 block of mine carts in sync, I take it a 5 long line of launchers with a rapid succession of 5 mine carts each would work?

For launching a rapid succession of minecarts, you can have a bunch stacked up over a roller.

Code: [Select]

M
M
r         r is a roller, and the Ms are minecarts stacked over it.

When the roller is turned on, the bottom minecart is sped up onto the launching device. The second minecart falls onto the roller and is accelerated as well. One should be able to stack as many minecarts as necessary.

[BastiBasti]

Code: [Select]

M
M
r         r is a roller, and the Ms are minecarts stacked over it.

When the roller is turned on, the bottom minecart is sped up onto the launching device. The second minecart falls onto the roller and is accelerated as well. One should be able to stack as many minecarts as necessary.

I take it it would be possible to provide a consistent source of mine-carts from above? If so it seems like a possibility to simply use mine-carts as dumb-fire bombs, possibly falling onto a 1-tile wide bridge or even onto a track in a constant stream of death, firing it over to the battlefield as the separate the civilians from the battle. In conjunction to using traps to force gobbo's to dodge into said "train" of minecarts possible with items falling into the minecart, directly into out fort for easy collection? The wiki doesn't say what happens to items that land on a tile with a minecart on it.

[Girlinhat]

Only water and magma are loaded in by being near a minecart.  All other items must be placed inside by a dwarf.

[BastiBasti]

Shame, still it's worth testing the effectiveness of a minecart chaincannon as a defencive option, sadly no real uses besides that really.

Back in relation to the space station challenge, how could you get the dwarfs down again? Doesn't  minecart transmit force to it's contents if it hits something at speed, this case the floor? A dapening mechanism may be required.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Shame, still it's worth testing the effectiveness of a minecart chaincannon as a defencive option, sadly no real uses besides that really.

Back in relation to the space station challenge, how could you get the dwarfs down again? Doesn't  minecart transmit force to it's contents if it hits something at speed, this case the floor? A dapening mechanism may be required.

Drop the dwarf into a deep pool of water (by themselves, no minecart!). The pool depth required is 86% of the height fallen. A falling creature reaches the max speed in the game after falling 51 z-levels, so the deepest the pool would ever need to be is 44 z-levels. If the pool is shallower than this, injury may result. In any case, drowning is likely to result.

Why would you want dwarves to leave the station (except for the "airlocking" of unwanted or dangerous people)?

[Girlinhat]

A water drop could be used.  The principle: If you fall through air, into water, you only take damage for the air you pass through.  You could build a column, hollow, filled with water.  At the bottom, put a depressurizer and an exit ramp, or just link a pressure plate to a floodgate to open the bottom of the chamber.  Drop dwarf into water, falls through water and hits the bottom unharmed but stunned.

Alternatively, Catachutes.  If a creature falls onto another creature, the one being landed on is stunned, but neither take damage.  Common use is to pit a cat into 1x1, or pasture creatively, and drop creatures onto it.

I personally think a water-drop would work best.  Just fill a giant cistern with water, put a bridge above it.  Open bottom of the chamber (depressurized, to prevent sideways splatter), give it some time to drain, and pull the bridge so the dwarf falls straight down.  It provides some nice engineering, as well as a great visual effect.  A burst of water and an armored soldier descending the plume.

[Gentlefish]

Why not just have him catch a down ramp as his first fall? The game might read the track before the impact, similar to a parabolic launch over a chasm, except there's no horizontal in this case as it's just a drop from a minecart onto a track ramp into stoppers set to highest.

[Girlinhat]

Well in that case, the ideal is to kick the cart off the edge, and have it land on flat tracks below.  Air provides zero friction, so it's easy to judge how far to the side it'll fly.

[Urist Da Vinci]

A water drop could be used.  The principle: If you fall through air, into water, you only take damage for the air you pass through. ...

Not any more. Since the minecart update, the velocity of falling creatures/objects (anything with the light blue projectile highlight other than bolts/arrows/ballistae) is tracked, and there is a measureable drop in velocity when moving through water.

Why not just have him catch a down ramp as his first fall? The game might read the track before the impact, similar to a parabolic launch over a chasm, except there's no horizontal in this case as it's just a drop from a minecart onto a track ramp into stoppers set to highest.

Some testing later, unfortunately landing on rails or skipping on water do not negate the downwards velocity of the minecart or damage to the occupant.

I found that the contents of minecarts (including passengers), when shotgunned, retain the horizontal and vertical velocities of the cart at the moment of impact. I was able to launch a dwarf in a parabola by building a wall in front of the launcher so that the cart struck the wall after the cart was airborne and ejected its occupant. The cart was travelling at a 45° angle forwards and up, so the dwarf left at 45° while the cart remained behind. This does not happen if the cart is still on the rails at the moment of impact - it will just shoot sideways like the regular shotguns in that case.

This means that outdoors "shotgun" artillery with closed-loop reusable minecarts is possible. The projectiles diverge at the moment of launch, giving a wide possible spread, and the parabolic flight allows shooting over obstacles. You could shoot AA clouds of items at birds. Combine this the automatic watergun design, and you could drop a "rainstorm" on a siege across the map.

[blue emu]

I'm glad that I started this thread... there is some good !!Science!! being done.

Unfortunately, I'm still too wrapped up in my Super-Collider project to take part in the testing, at the moment.

[Toxicshadow]

Here is the 'national anthem' for the Goblin Space Program:

"The challenge for the Dwarven race: to send a Goblin into space!
We just send them UP, that's how we learn!
Where they come down?... that's not our concern."

Need a useless nub voice actor for this?

Also, PTW O:

[Tacomagic]

This actually has some interesting implications for filling magma reservoirs in a new dorfy way.

Launch a minecart loaded with magma up into an immediate wall in order to launch said magma up at a 45º angle.  Cart drops down to a retrieval system while the magma carries onwards and upwards.  Eventually it hits a receiving wall (a long wall with a narrow pit under it).  Provided you could fire off enough minecarts to fill that narrow channel, you could then have some kind of switching mechanism detect when you've collected enough of it which would then dump the channel into your reservoir of choice.

Of course, it would probably be more efficient to just catch the minecarts, dump them, and do a return run with the cart.  But.... I'd kinda rather throw magma.