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[Suoli]

You'll need to force the pathing of invaders for efficient aiming, altough if you combine retracting bridges with derail ramps you should be able to make a cannon that has variable range. You need to hit a wall though if you want to spill magma/water/spears out of the car, and not just hit them with the cart itself.

Yeah, I have the general mechanics of the cannon worked out. The part I'm worried about is the maximum range and variability. Hopefully, the guys in this other thread are working on that so I can steal their results.

[Suoli]

It's perfect! Emus love shiny objects, and goblin invaders have all that shiny goblinite on!

Not sure how to get them to trigger an automatic artillery strike though.

The idea was to first figure out the positioning system and then link it up to a currently hypothetical variable range parabolic magma cannon.

[Swonnrr]

Anyone want to help test some of this stuff? It seems like useful information for other projects as well.

I'm creating a fortress now to test this and help.
Once i have a fortress up and running, I will first test the basical setup, then upgrade to animal behaviour and LOS science.

[Kofthefens]

You should be able to triangulate for a general area like this:

Code: [Select]

^XXX~~
^ is a pressure plate linked to the firing mechanism for the area. Each X is a floodgate, each linked to one animal trigger plate. ~ is water, released when all three animals in the area see an enemy and trigger their plates.

[Suoli]

Another minor update.

* Looks like creatures prefer to flee in the opposite direction from hostiles, as expected.

* Creatures will sometimes path to a meeting area, sometimes next to it. This can be worked with but will seriously complicate the detector design where a single animal sits at the center, with line of sights at every direction.

* The more space there is to flee, the more erratic the fleeing behaviour seems to get. I set up a 50 tile long corridor with a goblin, fortification and a meeting zone at one end, in that order. When I dropped an animal one tile away from the goblin, it kept fleeing in the opposit direction for exactly 30 tiles, returning 30 tiles back and then fleeing for 30 again. Dropping at 10 tiles, it fled for 30 tiles, returned maybe 10-15 tiles, fled 10-15. Thankfully, all of that should be irrelevant for this project so I don't have to figure it out.

* Unfortunately, war animals do not move towards hostiles unless there's a walkable path to them. This would have made things very easy. I suppose a vampire marksdwarf, with infinite ammo, burrowed at the center square of a 3x3 pilbox, would be the ideal spotter but that seems impractical.

* Somebody has built the variable range artillery cannon, with a very good looking maximum range.


Next up:

* Pin pointing the distance at which creatures will start to flee from approaching hostiles.

* Preliminary testing on how the relative power levels of the detector and the hostile affect the fleeing distance. If an emu flees when within 20 tiles of an approaching goblin, will it also flee within 20 tiles of a crundle? Or a Titan? This might be hard to set up. Titans don't grow on trees.

[Suoli]

I'm creating a fortress now to test this and help.
Once i have a fortress up and running, I will first test the basical setup, then upgrade to animal behaviour and LOS science.

That's great! I won't be able to play DF for the next few days myself but I'll keep an eye on the thread and try to suggest useful test setups in the meanwhile.

[BoredVirulence]

If this could possibly work, its a beautiful idea. I don't know how you plan on aiming it though.

You could set this up with an artillery corridor though instead. Instead of trying to cover a whole plane, you restrict it to a 2 dimensional line, and force invaders through that corridor instead.

Want more directions? Screw 3 dimensional targeting, go for 2 & 1/2 D! Several 2 dimensional artillery corridors should provide a similar effect.

[Suoli]

You should be able to triangulate for a general area like this:

Code: [Select]

^XXX~~
^ is a pressure plate linked to the firing mechanism for the area. Each X is a floodgate, each linked to one animal trigger plate. ~ is water, released when all three animals in the area see an enemy and trigger their plates.

Yeah, that might be the easiest way. Except I might try it with a minecart. With water, some might get trapped in the middle if only the first two gates open. Then the pressure plate could trigger when only the last two gates are open.

This is basically the same principle, with a constantly looping minecart instead of water, hatches instead of floodgates and z-axis instead of x-axis:


If any of the hatches are closed, the minecart will loop back to the top without reaching the pressure plate at the bottom. The cart can't get stuck in the middle: it will either go to the bottom if the last hatch is open or back to the top if it's closed. With enough impulse ramps for acceleration on the return path, I bet this could get a pretty low latency.

This could be done on the x-axis with doors instead of hatches but carts can jam a closing door.

[Suoli]

If this could possibly work, its a beautiful idea. I don't know how you plan on aiming it though.

You could set this up with an artillery corridor though instead. Instead of trying to cover a whole plane, you restrict it to a 2 dimensional line, and force invaders through that corridor instead.

Want more directions? Screw 3 dimensional targeting, go for 2 & 1/2 D! Several 2 dimensional artillery corridors should provide a similar effect.

Aiming along the four cardinal directions is easy. All you need is a barrel pointing at each direction and railroad switches. Beyond that, it's indeed going to be tricky. The cannon has a 40 tile wide spread, though. I'm hoping that it's possible to restrict it with an adjustable barrel at the end of the firing point, without losing too much range. That would give me a 40 tile wide firing arch at four directions, possibly more if I add barrels.

And if that doesn't work out, I'll still have an useless awesome war room!

[Swonnrr]

Fortress Up and Running.
I have a test field composed of 4 rooms disposed in a square.
This is to simulate zones with LOS loss by distance.

In zone A1 is a detector, still in design phase.
In zone A2 is a locked-in goblin.

On the upper stage are the outputs:

Above the test field: Maintenance aera.
         South-East corner : War Room.
            It is composed of retractables bridges (one per zone).
            The objective is to have bridge laid-down when aera is clear, and retracted when the aera is occupied.
            This part might require some dwarven computing.

Final objective is a simple to build, easy to maintain Command And Control System.
Objective Alpha is the design of a Goblin Detection and Tracking System.
Alpha - 1: Design of a goblin detector with usable output.
Alpha - 2: Design of a reusable detector.
Alpha - 3: Design of a usable War Room, and linking to the detector.

Objective Bravo is the improving of the map resolution using emu triangulation.

Objective Charlie is the weaponization of the sytem, including but not limited to:
-Minecart artiller;
-Deadly Forgotten Beast Bomb guidance and activation;
-Minefield, with diverse technologies of ordinance;

[Swonnrr]

After countless trials and errors, i decided to come back to the basics.
Alpha 1 is a success, and Alpha 2 is a same time.

#####
#xPn#
#####

x is a stair to an underground network leading to the forteress.
P is the pressure plate, calibrated to activate on civilian(tamed animals are civilians) the size of the chosen animal.
n is a pen to wich is assigned an animal.
# are fortification.

Yeah. It's -that- simple.
Maybe replacing the pen by a meeting zone even remove the need for the stairs.
What happen is that the animal stay quietly in his 1x1 pen, until something scarry enter LOS.
It then proceed to GTFO to the inside of the fort. It then can be reloaded manually.

The only difficulty come from finding an adequate animal.
It need to be non-grazer and coward enough to run from a goblin (that exclude lots of animals).

The flaws of this design are: vulnerability to ranged attack. a moot remove most marksman threats, but not elite ones. It does not protect against !!fun!! ranged attack either. Windows instead of Fortification might fix that, but then we would be vulnerables to Building Destroyer. Maybe multiple layers?
Vulnerability of the dwarves, and of the fortress when reloading. If a meeting zone is possible (dwarves might try to path to it...), this problem is fixed.

[Suoli]

Vulnerability of the dwarves, and of the fortress when reloading. If a meeting zone is possible (dwarves might try to path to it...), this problem is fixed.

A meeting zone will pull the animal on top or next to it, which introduces some unwanted randomness. To always get the animal on the same square, you can designate a hatch, covering an unpassable pit, as the meeting place. Then you place a pressure plate in front of it and link it to the hatch. The animal will try to get to the meeting zone but when it steps on the pressure plate, the path is blocked and the animal will always stand on the plate instead.

Code: [Select]

####
#mP.#
####
m - meeting place on top of a hatch covered pit
P - pressure plate

You can keep dwarves and unwanted animals out with a locked door.