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[mete]

Yes!

Personally I love ballistas, but is pretty hard to use one since you can just build a ballista and shot something directly in front.
Obviously to move ballistas over minecart tracks, they should be resized to 1x1 (or maybe not?)

Since this is a very simple suggestion, I dont have anything more to say.

Thanks for reading.

[StagnantSoul]

Nope. Just make big tracks and metal/wooden platforms for the ballistae.

[Zarathustra30]

I like this idea, but it I don't think it will go in until moving fortress sections. Now imagine a ballista on a crane.

[GavJ]

This is a great idea. It would make these a lot more useful and interesting. Though probably still not competitively useful with other things but whatever, people would still do it for fun.

Details:
Small ballistas would be fine, there's no real reason for them being large to begin with.

Large tracks: no, that significantly undermines the usefulness and coolness of this idea, since it invalidates lots of cool designs and contraptions you could do by having multipurpose tracks.

A third option which keeps it closest to the status quo is just ballistas moving based on only their center tile being on tracks.

[StagnantSoul]

How would large tracks undermine the idea at all? I think if they went on tracks, they should need more power than minecarts, for balancing. Several designs exist to make stationary ballistas effective, but they're ugly and costly. If you could order them to shoot 1 Z level down or up, moving sets of ballistas on a wall could be incredibly useful. Until a giant, skinless Titan comes over and smashes them away.

[GavJ]

How would large tracks undermine the idea at all?

I said why: It makes it so that you can't have one track that runs siege engines and minecarts both, which means fewer options for complicated dwarfy contraptions.  Modularity and interchangeable components in general = better contraptions, in any game. Imagine minecraft, for instance, where pistons had to run on bluestone, and everything else ran on redstone, or something. It would make them less useful and fun for no real gain. Similar deal here.

It doesn't remove 100% of the dwarfy potential of the suggestion, no, but why remove any if you don't have to?

[StagnantSoul]

I'm not saying siege engine only tracks, I'm saying three tracks laid out side by side. And if the bluestone you're referencing to is lapis lazuli, it's even more common than redstone, and I normally have too much of both. 

[GavJ]

3 tracks side by side is better than what I was imagining. That addresses the contraptions possibilities issue. It also, however, sounds kind of nightmarish to deal with all those menu selections, and also rollers and switching directions and blah blah (how do rollers even work? And how do T junctions work? And what happens if one of the rails is pointing in some random direction but the other two are straight? etc.)

[StagnantSoul]

That would make it rather complicated. Controlls be selected from the middle rail, power from all. I don't even bother with minetracks though. I may learn if ballistas moved on them, or even bothered with ballistas. I generally find metal is better put into axes and swords.

[GavJ]

You can carve tracks into stone floors, you know, without any material used.
(Not for this if you're saying you want to require rollers, but just in case you don't know, in general)

[StagnantSoul]

I was talking about the bolts. Wooden bolts do work, but I've seen iron bolts barely hurt a goblin in copper.

[GavJ]

ah.

Catapults would also be a lot of fun with this too though. Not for their useless defense skills (although those could be boosted as part of the suggestion), but also for all the hilarious shenanigans you could probably pull off  with catapult computing or printers and stuff (throw stone, falls 1 z, shift according to programming, print out an image on the bottom stone collection floor, lol)

[StagnantSoul]

I used the trick to mine slade, then launched a piece of slade at an elven trader. Her rope reed fibre glove took the full force of the impact.

[Bumber]

I'm not seeing the benefit. Ballistae are dirt cheap to build, while tracks are complicated to use. It would be easier to build ballistae everywhere you could possibly want one than to haul a few into place before your target moves. Needless to say you're going to have difficulty loading and firing a moving ballista.

Why not just give them a better firing arc? Most have wheels, so you can rotate one 360° given adequate time:

Spoiler: A ballista: (click to show/hide)

[GavJ]

I'm not seeing the benefit. Ballistae are dirt cheap to build, while tracks are complicated to use. It would be easier to build ballistae everywhere you could possibly want one than to haul a few into place before your target moves. Needless to say you're going to have difficulty loading and firing a moving ballista.

Why not just give it a better firing arc?

You don't AIM. Come on, you call yourself a dwarf. You set up complicated predermined inescapable firing patterns, like a carpetbomb.

If this were implemented, the tracks themselves would definitely have to have a firing mechanism built in too, not manual. Possibly even reloading.