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[Urist_McUnoriginal]

Hi, finally decided to stop lurking and make an account.

My idea is that if magma forges exist, why not power hammers?

It would just be a forge with mechanical power routed through it that can work faster.

I also think there should be some way to get power underground without a massive engineering project.

Is this just a stupid idea that would break the game, or could it work?

[Shonai_Dweller]

Sounds kind of steam-punk, which Toady mentioned he doesn't want to do (that was a while ago of course, before talk of fantasy sliders and such).

[anewaname]

Consider the quality of machinery that would be required to apply a hammer as accurately and as consistently as a trained smith. The hammering machine's components would need to survive higher heat and stress than the materials being worked. They would need adjustment to maintain accuracy because each strike would misalign the machine, unless your hammerer is working a material softer than bread dough.

Look for information about iron and steel forges from 14th to 18th centuries. Until steam-power was actively worked, most machines were just applications of force using the basic "Inclined plane, Wheel and axle, Lever, Pulley, Wedge, and Screw(see this)", with the force coming from man, beast, or water. But these machines were not accurate enough to hammer metal in a heated environment into quality things like weapons and armor. Maybe arrow heads, studs, and nails...

[Wedolko]

Sounds kind of steam-punk, which Toady mentioned he doesn't want to do (that was a while ago of course, before talk of fantasy sliders and such).

Not at all. The Japanese had Power hammers that ran on a waterwheel at least as far back as 15 BC but perhaps sooner back to the Zhou Dynasty in 1000 BC



Although I'm not entirely sure if this could or even should be implemented into the game, but it would make for an interesting addition.

[FantasticDorf]

Heh, a autosmith.

Attach to a watermill power station & power with magma or fuel with a furnace operator to have it autonomously pump out metal equipment without need for a smith, but is capped at exceptional quality max based on the quality of the component parts of the machine. We already have hydraulic pumps, but we could invent a way of doing this in saying that furnace operators/mechanics use pulleys to hammer the metal in a way similar to the heavy manual labour of hydraulic pumps until water/wind power is added.

Uh something like this

   X
  ⌂◘⌂()
  σ σ

Metals go in bin at the top via a specific entry tile (hence its a bin, you can say that the bin stacks up the metals as being nessecary to construction), magma compatible if under the forge tile with two anvils meant to represent where the hammers should be forging (accounted in cost) and the brackets being a diagram explanation where the machine drops off its products.

Refilling the machine could be a seperate prompt to actively forging a object as to say you have 30 iron bars in the machine, and then with a furnace operator you set a order to make metal figurines on repeat & enable the function to make doubles at a time, so now your artifact or masterwork quality parts machine under supervision is pumping out lots of exceptional quality figurines until it runs out of metal.

[Starver]

I think the concern about coming out of the (core, if not absolute) historic era-of-equivalence is something to be noted, but dwarven-tech could well stretch to Ye Olde Dayes hammers, etc without too much difficulty...

The problem I have would be that it needs to be useful in opening up a new industry (like improving carved minecart rails or the ones constructed with 'boards and rocks and blocks' into something better via mechanically hammered/rolled metal rails) or be like the Forge->Magma Forge aspirational incremental improvement of initially available capability without going so far as leading up to the kind of auto-manufacturing that the Springfield Duplicating Lathe achieved for rifle-butt manufacture in 1822, and everything that arose since then.  It could get a bit too modded Minecraft, and thus potentially  "Dwarfless Factory Cities" for which calls to create "automining machines", added to fortresses mobility (which would have to follow Toady's own wished-for boats'n'ships improvements, anyway) and suddenly we're in Mortal Engines territory.

[anewaname]

Not at all. The Japanese had Power hammers that ran on a waterwheel at least as far back as 15 BC but perhaps sooner back to the Zhou Dynasty in 1000 BC

Those powered hammers were made out of wood and used to pound grain to de-husk it. That is a powered quern and probably less efficient that DF's powered millstones.

Powered hammers like that existed in many forms in history, just like the grindstones (water-powered or mills that dehusked or ground grain existed in many forms. They were all methods of applying force to a material with some degree of accuracy.

Those ideas existed, but could not able to be applied to most metals, because the machine that could apply the force, in that metal-softening heat, without the machine deforming itself, could not be made.

The fable of Icarus came thousands of years before something similar could be built that would give a consistent result.

[MrWiggles]

The fable of Icarus came thousands of years before something similar could be built that would give a consistent result.

Thats true. Now folks fall out of the sky fun, and its mostly they live.

[dwarobaki]

It's from Wikipedia:
"Water-powered and mechanised trip hammers reappeared in medieval Europe by the 12th century. Their use was described in medieval written sources of Styria (in modern-day Austria), written in 1135 and another in 1175 AD.[19] Both texts mentioned the use of vertical stamp mills for ore-crushing.[19] Medieval French sources of the years 1116 and 1249 both record the use of mechanised trip hammers used in the forging of  :)wrought iron.[19] Medieval European trip hammers by the 15th century were most often in the shape of the vertical pestle stamp-mill, although they employed more frequent use of the vertical waterwheel than earlier
Chinese versions"

[19] Needham, Volume 4, Part 2, 379.

[Zammer990]

Reading the thread title I imagined something akin to Fallout's Super Sledge, but sure, mechanical forges.
It'd be nice to see some more uses for mechanical power, and we already have millstones as faster querns.

[FantasticDorf]

Its fair to say that dwarves without the exact knowledge of nature (dont need to know about gunpowder or electricity but are aware that there is something about it they can harness), exceed the technological scope of normal races in the delicate traps and mechanisms they make.

Put it down to a fact that dwarves are aware to the functionality of moving parts and how they interact in order to move machinery, ontop of other factors such as trajectory & inertia (as seen in minecart tracks & ballista's) and dedicate themselves to studies of mechanics in that they have a good knowledge about the field to be the *experts* of that period, so a 12th century simple hitting stick attached to pulleys for cheaply forging cheap/laborious metal (nobody cares about the quality of pig-iron before it goes into making steel) or grinding up ore into finer pieces is the least practical application of thier skills, arguably lines upon lines making lines and lines of gears is a harder technical challenge.

> Have you considered that instead of forging you could use it for its original purpose of dividing up ore rocks into finer nuggets for smelting with one bar each, given that gold ore is already a 'nugget type' but really a nugget is just a part of the larger ore that is extracted from the vein.

[MrWiggles]

Well, DF doesnt really need do anything with ore needing to be purified. So there no need to pound off the rock of the ore. The ore, as far as DF is concern is mostly metal. DF also doesnt have any slag.

[FantasticDorf]

Well, DF doesnt really need do anything with ore needing to be purified. So there no need to pound off the rock of the ore. The ore, as far as DF is concern is mostly metal. DF also doesnt have any slag.

The conversion rates of just dumping a ore rock in the smelter though might be more inefficient than breaking it up into pure metal nugget parts if you can say that slag etc. decreases the ratio of usable metal when it is poured into bars using DF logic under heat.

Tetrahedrite for example is 20% silver, meaning that it can take multiple smelts sometimes or with some silver already in the smelter from melting down silver objects in order to procure silver, while the copper is consistent. Grounding it down would ensure that there is always substantial amounts of silver in the metal & also plenty of guranteed copper ore.