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Total Members Voted: 17

[PTTG??]

This is a test of a new way to post Ideas. This should make it much easier to "second" ideas you like, or gently let someone know how bad their idea is.

Now then: my suggestion.

I find the mechanics elements to be a lot of fun. What I would enjoy would be a wide variety of uses and sources of mechanical power. Some brainstorming, some of which I have picked up around the forum:

- Bellows: Increases the speed of production in adjacent forges/smelters/kilns.
- Lathe: Increases speed in standard large craft shops (mason, carpenter, Mech, Siege)
- Cutter: Increases speed in fine craft shops (craftdwarf, gemcutter, clothier, gem)
- Fan: attracts 'gases' on one side, repels them on the other. (clears Miasma, Smoke, boiling Mule Leather if used right, blows it into the noble's quarters if used wrong right in a different way.)

- Crank: generates power relitive to cranking dwarf's strength. "Machine Operation" skill replaces pump operation.
- Treadmill : can be loaded with a creature- operates relitive to creatures' strength.
- Capstan :several creatures can be attached for more power- requires rope for each.

-Gate:   \
             } Both of these activate when power is applied. Gates slowly open/close. Bridges raise and
-Bridge: /   lower.

There is room for a lot more, but these are the basics.

[Salbrismind]

Good ideas, I understand these are a bunch of ideas from many people but good ideas none the less. In addition to the treadmill, how about conveyor belts made of skins? I especially like the idea of the productivity enhancing machines, something to put that power to use?

[qwertyuiopas]

This might actually be good, at least some of them.
But they probably will not appear in the game anytime soon, although I think they will eventually.

[Draco18s]

We do need more uses for power, and I do like those.  Lathes, bellows, and "cutters" as well as rotational saws (cutting wood, specifically, though they only date back to 1777) are relatively simple machines.  Bellows and Lathes have been around for thousands (lathes were invented by the Egyptians in the 13000 BCs).

[PTTG??]

I was thinking of a cutter as something you could use for anything from lumber to leather to  gems- it would probably use a Serrated Metal Disc. I don't know what a lathe would need, but bellows would need probably metal/wood, cloth/leather/silk, blocks, and maybe something else besides mechanisms.

Hm, with these speed enhancers, perhaps regular workshops should be slowed to provide more incentive.

[Techhead]

Or powered versions of some of the main workshops that grant double production speed, such as:
Sawmill: carpenters workshop, requires a large serrated metal disc and 1 mechanism
Powered loom: weaving workshop, requires 2 mechanisms
Blast furnace: Forge, requires 1 mechanism
Magma blast furnace: Magma forge, requires 1 mechanism

And in the interesting curiosity department, concerning the history of water wheels:

Around 1150, the astronomer Bhaskara Ach?rya observed water-raising wheels and imagined such a wheel lifting enough water to replenish the stream driving it, effectively, a perpetual motion machine.[10]

[Valandor]

I'd like to see someone build this in DF

[Chthonic]

They're good suggestions (animal power would be very nice to have underground for milling and whatnot, for example) but as far as powered mechanisms for workshops I'm not so sure.  Legendary dwarves crop up fairly often, and their rates of production are so quick that I have trouble keeping large fortresses busy all the time (which is good, I suppose, 'cuz the lazy bastards spend most of the time partying anyway).  Most of the time production seems to far outstrip resource gathering.

[Salbrismind]

I'd like to see someone build this in DF

You sir, are not helping!

[Techhead]

Yes, but the ability to cut the time required to obtain a legendary dwarf is cut almost in half. (There is still hauling raw materials involved)