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Author Topic: Advice for damming a river?  (Read 461 times)

Derakon

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Advice for damming a river?
« on: March 13, 2008, 12:44:00 am »

I have a river I want dammed. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a huge issue, but I have two big constraints:

* Everything must be done non-permanently, with the exception of digging access tunnels (since it lies at Z-1 compared to ground level) and new flow paths (ideally these should be kept to a minimum, but as long as they aren't visible from the surface I don't really care).
* The river never freezes.

I was able to dam a similar river using this setup to reduce the depth long enough to install floodgates (idea and diagram stolen from ToxicFrog):

code:

  #####
~~~#+++<<~~   *: gear mechanism
~~~#+++<<~~   W: water wheel
~~~#+++<<~~   ~: water
~~~#+++<<~~   <<: pump
####   #*      W   =: axle
      #*======W   +: floor
      #       W   #: wall
########

However, that river was already shallow thanks to the nearby rapids, and even then it barely worked. The basic concept here is to re-route part of the river's flow into the nearby mini-lake (a confluence of rivers, actually) so that the amount of water flowing through any actual point is less. I tried setting up a similar set of four pumps on this river, and while they did move an impressive amount of water, they didn't make any noticeable difference in the depth of the river. This makes a certain amount of sense; if I were to distribute the water of the river evenly to a depth of 1, I'd need seven times the volume for it to flow through.

Before I go to the rather massive effort of making seven of these setups, does anyone have any better ideas?

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Mlittle

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Re: Advice for damming a river?
« Reply #1 on: March 13, 2008, 08:11:00 am »

What about rerouting the river into a large enough chamber underneath it?
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ToxicFrog

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Re: Advice for damming a river?
« Reply #2 on: March 13, 2008, 09:16:00 am »

I'm surprised it barely worked for you; the river I used it on was at 7/7 before I activated the pumps, and they drained it far enough to install floodgates.

I don't have a 7-tile-wide river to test on, but in theory simply building seven pumps across it, feeding into a flow path 7 tiles wide, should be ample.

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Derakon

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Re: Advice for damming a river?
« Reply #3 on: March 13, 2008, 09:57:00 am »

quote:
Originally posted by Mlittle:
<STRONG>What about rerouting the river into a large enough chamber underneath it?</STRONG>
That would work fine until the chamber filled. It'd have to be pretty large, and if I screw it up, I get to start over from scratch (except now there's a big underground lake in the way). I'm calling that my backup plan.

TF: it did manage to bring at least one of the tiles down to 2/7, now that I think about it; it's just that there was so much mist in the way that the tiles where it actually had an effect were obscured unless I used the 'k' key. I suspect I also had some problems with backwash from the lake, since I need to build the dam level with it.

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Inquisitor Saturn

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Re: Advice for damming a river?
« Reply #4 on: March 13, 2008, 10:17:00 am »

Use pumps, and drain the water off the edge of the map.
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Jayfrin

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Re: Advice for damming a river?
« Reply #5 on: March 13, 2008, 11:24:00 am »

Perhaps using the same structure just turning it around so it will be draining from 2 directions so it looks kinda like
code:
<..>
     <..>
     <..>  


Then install your gates on the little .'s
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