Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Ghidorah]

Hello everyone. Today I'm going to share with you some of the work I have been doing over the past hour or so. This is nothing major, but I found the wiki was a little lacking on how to properly weaponize minecarts in cannon form. The methods they gave were rather lack luster in my opinion. The only suggestion was " As soon as the enemies are approaching the other side of the corridor, change the departure condition to 'push' and 'always'." This is an annoying step that can easily be either be done by lever, or by pressure plate. This allows the removal of the often slow and inept dwarf from having to drag his bearded butt anywhere, possibly missing the chance to bludgeon the enemy before they arrive. So I did some testing with this.

Test one: Bridge Mediated Impulse Ramp Method

Okay. So in this method, a minecart is placed and loaded on an impulse ramp. If you don't know what that is, please visit the wiki.
Blocking the exit port of the impulse ramp is a drawbridge lifted up, connected by lever. Once the cart is loaded, a dwarf may lower the bridge and in theory the cart would shoot out, and connect to the other ramps. Then it's your run of the mill minecart cannon.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Z+1 of the track.
The Z+0 of the track

At the end of the track is a few fortifications so that the contents of the cart (some 14 stacks of 500 lead coins) may shoot out and hit the dog at the end of the chain. Once I was satisfied, I ordered the lever pulled.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The result was less then phenomenal. The minecart, though able to be loaded on an impulse ramp, only moved a single tile. The dwarf decided to place it back on its loading spot, and the following damage was given to the dog. (Because we're monsters here in Dwarf Fortress and if we don't see blood at least once in a post we're sorely upset.)
This also led to the dwarf that returned the minecart to be killed on the spot when the minecart ran him over, and the bridge that was supposed to have already been raised: atom smashed him.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The dog did in fact live through the experiment. Saddened by this lack of progress, I tried a different method, that was vastly more effective.
Test Two: Hatch Drop Method
This method was vastly more successful. I forgot to take pictures until after I had test fired it, so that is why you see the blood in the track.
This method relies on placing the minecart on top of a HatchCover linked to a lever or pressure plate. When pulled, the cart falls a z level and is then accelerated on the impulse ramps.
The blood speaks for itself here, and you can see the basic setup in the images.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I will state that this minecart killed one engineer and one dog. If you're curious the final weight of this lead minecart was 554 urists.(when completely empty they are 453 urists) I was not as interested in the shotgun effect of launching coins, and instead filled it up with glass serrated discs that the fort happened to have lying around. At only 9% full, these 40 serrated discs (and 5 wood corkscrews) if made of silver would have massively increased the potential mass of the minecart. They would also be an effective method of dealing with invaders as many could be launched in a single volley.

So, the Tl;Dr of this round of !!Science!! is this:
Loading on impulse ramps is possible. It's also largely useless.
I'm sure this has also been tested previously but it bears repeating: coins are not split via a minecart de-rail.
Placing a minecart on an impulse ramp by a dwarf may result in the dwarf being injured. (needs more testing)
Dropping a minecart onto a IR is likely possible with a bridge, but the random horizontal velocity prevented me from doing so successfully.
Setting this up to work on a pressure plate is trivial, and depending on the desires and skills of the user may become totally automated. If connected to water or magma this system becomes both rapid and dangerous.

Now go play roadrage with your elf neighbors, pets, and children. You know you want to.

[Fleeting Frames]

If you're still interested in having stationary minecarts on ramps, you may be interested to know that they don't accelerate when they're covered by a bridge.

True, the bridge may still throw things around, but it can't open doors. This is useful for overseer-triggered levers such as ╔╣B╠=╣b╠╝.

The reason why minecart only moved 1 tile after bridge was lowered while it had come to rest against it is checkpoint effect.

[Ghidorah]

The mine cart being on a ramp was honestly my own interest in seeing if a cart may be loaded while on what is normally an impulse ramp. It's all just a means to an end, but the use of the bridge does seem a little slower, as the cart must go up then land back on the track. The hatch seems to be a more reliable method.

**Edit**
An extra advantage of the hatch is that it will always trigger on the same tick as the pressure plate, and has no delay. This is useful for traps where a miss opportunity may present itself.

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

If you want precision, don't drop things from a bridge. IIRC, it imparts a small sideways velocity upon the object.