Wonder if it'll get finished in time for 55th anniversary?
No, definitely no. The fort is 59 years old for now and it's a long way to go to complete everything planned. It may be 100 or even 200 years to complete everything.
For your water freezing in buckets issue, maybe start using nether-cap buckets?
Great idea, thank you!
The view from beneath the transparent icy deck, camera stands on the magma bomb shell:
It's time for the ship to get armed. Miners dug out four ditches along the deck, one ditch has been equiped with a dwarven impulse railgun. I plan to load it with cages so POWs and wild animals may play Icarus:
The view to the railgun from beneath, it's not fully completed in this photo:
First test with empty minecart, everything seems to be OK:
Dwarves obsidianize map edges in lower caves, I'm trying to dry out this sea so it'll be easy to obsidianize magma 1 z-level below:
I could not do it properly at first attempt because decided not to wait for magma to fill the corridor so it flows out too slowly and dries out too fast:
Second attempt succeeded:
I noticed strange effects, probably of quantum nature, in the highest layer of magma being drained. Where last droplets of magma skim over the lower layer, there something crazy happens:
Dwarves drilled holes in the end of railgun's barrel, now it's possible to load it and shoot. Unfortunately, dwarves refused to load it with a cage. I suppose that job has a very low priority.
Miners dug out a ring-shaped tunnel 55 z-levels deep. Somebody pulled a lever, approximately 50 kilotons of rock and ice fell into subterranean subvolcano:
All the rock completely disintegrated in the very first quantum of time. Dwarven physics are weird.