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[kingubu]

In case you needed something to power 1000 screw pumps, I built this:


Underneath:


Screenshot of fps uncapped:


How it works:

  All tiles under the waterwheels are aquifer.  Water pumps from the left until all the water on the right is tagged as "flowing", then the hatch is closed so there's no more actual flow and no hit to fps.  The aquifer water keeps the "flowing" tag forever unless it's disturbed by digging or pumping of the water.  If that happens, just open the hatch until everything is running again.

  Waterwheels have to be built orthogonal to the pump to work.  I don't know why.  This is all powered by MAGIC.

  You can extend the design up, down, and right, if you need more than a thousand screw pumps powered. The sink water needs to be all one piece so the "flowing" tag can propagate.

  Oh, I guess you might want to power less than a thousand pumps.

Here's a minimal version that produces 75 excess power.


Under

3 channeled tiles
1 pump
1 gear
1 waterwheel
1 backstop. 

The red column stops the water exiting the pump ballisticly and making a mess.  You can hatch over the intake once it starts to save a little CPU time.  But the hit is pretty minimal with only 3 flowing tiles.

Here's the save if you want to play with it:
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=7819

[Matoro]

How much is a "negligible fps drop"?

Also, this is awesome. Fortunately my current fort is in aquifer, I can try this out while pumping magma into surface.

[fricy]

Hmm, not bad. I have one improvement to the design though: I found that's it's easier to build the the power connection to  waterwheels with the use of rollers instead of alternating gears/axles, as rollers transfer power on the side. And rollers support machinery on the side.

Your current setup to connect 6 rows of wheels:

• uses 6 gears and 16 axles, that's 46 power, and uses 6 gears and 16 wood.
  
• It can be substitied with 10x2 lowest rollers and 2 gears (to connect the two rollers on the side), that's 30 power and uses 2 ropes, 8 gears.
  

+ of course the power connection to your main machinery.

This connection method is particulary effective if you want to build a lot of logic gates: 4 newton cradles can be fed from a single roller for 10 power, while gears and axles would use about 18 power for the same setup. Then you can use axles to connect the rollers side by side.
Very effective grids can be built this way, and it's also cool, because axles don't transfer power on the side, and rollers don't transfer at the ends, so you can put power connection to places where a gear would mess things up because it connects any machinery on the side.

[kingubu]

How much is a "negligible fps drop"?

Also, this is awesome. Fortunately my current fort is in aquifer, I can try this out while pumping magma into surface.

Disassembling the dynamo results in no noticeable change in fps.  Fps stays around 280 running or not.
There might be a slight difference hidden the normal fps fluctuations, which is why I was unwilling to say zero fps drop.

Hmm, not bad. I have one improvement to the design though: I found that's it's easier to build the the power connection to  waterwheels with the use of rollers instead of alternating gears/axles, as rollers transfer power on the side. And rollers support machinery on the side.

You can also use pumps instead of gears to turn the power 90 degress, which allows the whole thing to be built with just wood.

And if you're really worried about parasitic loss, you can just build one long chain of waterwheels out from the first gear.  Then you can do the whole thing with one gear and one pump.  Or two pumps.
Edit:  Or a pump and a roller

But thanks for reminding me about rollers.  Totally forgot about those.

[fricy]

Lowering wood usage is one of the points of building roller based connections. At least for me. Lower power is just an added bonus.

[Oaktree]

Known use of aquifers - and one reason many overseers tolerate them.

And discussed in older threads as well:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=105988.msg3144604#msg3144604

Probably should be enshrined somewhere in a dwarven "tricks of the trade" area or something like that so that others can easily find it.

[KingBacon]

So you are gonna drain the magma sea or what? I am considering either mass pumps or Massive pillars with lips on the edges.

Decisions decisions.

[kingubu]

Known use of aquifers - and one reason many overseers tolerate them.

And discussed in older threads as well:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=105988.msg3144604#msg3144604

Probably should be enshrined somewhere in a dwarven "tricks of the trade" area or something like that so that others can easily find it.

Well damn, and here I thought I was a genius.    The wiki mentions the flow tag, but didn't have any designs, so I figured why not share.

I'm guessing someone has already figured out my drain-an-arbitrarily-large-hole-in-mult-z-aquifer-with-no-construction-cancellations method too.
This was actually a side effect of that project.
Another side effect seems to be pumping-magma-with-non-magma-safe-pumps.  Although, I'm still in the middle of testing that.

So you are gonna drain the magma sea or what? I am considering either mass pumps or Massive pillars with lips on the edges.

Decisions decisions.

Great idea, thanks!  Now I have something to do with all this power.