I just had another idea for a "safe" drop chute. It requires that you have a steady supply of whatever you are dropping, such as logs. You set up a long timer connected to the hatch in your chute and a door in the access hallway to the bottom. So stuff builds up in the chute for a while, then gets dropped all at once while access to the bottom is blocked. then the hatch is shut and access to the bottom is reopened. Since your haulers should have it all cleared away before the next drop, there is no reason for anyone to be underneath when the drop happens.
Since no one has any possible reason for being there, you will of course lose an occasional dwarf who decides to just hang out where he has no reason to be. But that sort of dwarf would otherwise decide to hang out somewhere on the surface when an ambush is arriving, so there is only so much you can do. It is inevitable. But the casualty rate should be far, far lower than just dumping stuff down with no protection. And the ones you lose are morons with death wishes, so it's probably for the best.
One possible timer is a captured were creature sitting on a pressure plate. Since were creatures are trapavoid, the plate will send an 'off' 99 ticks after it converts to were mode, and an 'on' when it converts back to normal, for a very reliable once a month timer. An alternate would be a cistern that slowly fills, with a plate that triggers when it is full that starts it draining, and another plate that closes the drain and opens the fill. It might need to be a pretty big cistern. You could also use a smaller cistern hooked to some counting logic.
Whatever you use, it needs to send an 'on' signal to the hatch, followed shortly by an 'off' signal, then a long delay before starting over. So you'd need to invert a were-clock, but the 99 tick delay in an inverter wouldn't matter, since we're dealing with much longer timing cycles. You'll need an inverter anyways, since the door needs to be connected to a signal that's the opposite of the hatch. You want the door to close when the hatch is open, and vice-versa. Ideally you'd want to close the door no later than the hatch opens, so there is no chance for Urist McAgile to notice the stuff at the bottom of the chute and get past the door before it closes. But it's probably not that big of a risk as long as you don't have a meeting room right next to the door for idle haulers to hang out. Or you could just have a hole in the floor in the access hallway, with a hatch cover over it. An 'on' signal opens it (and thus prevents access) at the exact same time that the 'on' opens the hatch in the chute.
So stuff gets dropped down the chute whenever, and stacks up on the hatch, which is closed most of the time. Then the timer goes off and the access door at the bottom closes and the hatch opens, dumping the accumulated stuff to the bottom. A little while later the hatch closes and the door opens and your haulers can come in and safely grab the stuff and haul it to a nearby stockpile. They should be done long before the timer triggers the next dump, so nobody has any reason to be at the bottom of the chute when it triggers again.
The downside is that you have to make sure you plan far enough in advance so that you have a month's worth of stuff in the chute every time the hatch opens, since it's not easy to get more down quickly if you run out. But it's easy to cut or mine faster than you use logs or ore, so this shouldn't be a problem as long as you pay attention.
You can also have a lever hooked up so you can open the hatch (and close the door) whenever you want to. But then you should also rig up a way to disable the timer so you don't have the next scheduled dump happen while your haulers are still in there clearing out your emergency dump.
Keith
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Topic: Dwarves at war (Read 3007 times)