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[Silverionmox]

Rolling boulder:  a 3x3 machine, drops boulders through a down ramp in the center tile.  Reloaded by dwarves.  Boulders are made either by smoothing natural boulders, or from stone blocks by a mason.  Like other things, they have a "direction" they fire in (imagine the ramp beneath them as being roughly cone-shaped).

All you need to do that is a boulder stockpile on a trapdoor, linked to a pressure plate. And code to handle rolling momentum of boulders.

Rolling Powered carts:  Bins with a mechanism attached.  Lower the weight of the objects inside for easier hauling.

Graviton cutting is somewhat too advanced for 14th century tech, to put it succinctly.

[The Architect]

Rolling Powered carts:  Bins with a mechanism attached.  Lower the weight of the objects inside for easier hauling.

Graviton cutting is somewhat too advanced for 14th century tech, to put it succinctly.

Smoking something?
If you're going for a tongue-in-cheek version of "rolling carts are too advanced for DF-level tech", I don't think I even need to bother voicing my disagreement.

[Uristocrat]

Rolling Powered carts:  Bins with a mechanism attached.  Lower the weight of the objects inside for easier hauling.

Graviton cutting is somewhat too advanced for 14th century tech, to put it succinctly.

Smoking something?
If you're going for a tongue-in-cheek version of "rolling carts are too advanced for DF-level tech", I don't think I even need to bother voicing my disagreement.

I think he means that a rolling cart wouldn't actually lower the weight of the items inside.  I meant that as the mechanical way of accounting for the fact that the cart is easier to move, rather than a description of the physics involved.

In other words, I'm pretty sure he's joking.

If they really wanted to be crazy, though, they could make it so that rolling carts were *harder* to move down stairs, but so that they could easily be moved down ramps.

Then again, knowing this place, I can only imagine that if rolling momentum were included, carts could escape and crash into things, scatter items, etc. ...

[RAM]

Then again, knowing this place, I can only imagine that if rolling momentum were included, carts could escape and crash into things, scatter limbs, etc. ...

I don't think this place usually saves the good bits for an etc....

[Narmio]

So, I actually kinda dislike a lot of the more automated suggestions in this thread, but playing with .31.0X has made me want to get on my pulpit and trumpet the importance of one particular thing that's been mentioned here:  Lifts.  Having your smelters 150 levels below your fortress tends to consume rather a lot of haulers.

I'm talking about a pair of workshops, a lift base that can only be built on solid ground and a lift platform that can only be built over a 3x3 channel that extends downwards any amount but has at the bottom a lift base.  It would consume ropes or chains proportional to its depth, and the "top" building would require power.  The platform could then change position when a dwarf entered it from whichever end the platform was currently at.  The platform would be loaded and unloaded by haulers, presumably up to a maximum load limit.  The dwarf would stand on the elevator and raise or lower it.  I'm not sure how you'd make that dwarf pass *through* the space between the two buildings, without a buildings rewrite I'd suspect the operator would stand in one place then teleport to the other after a particular amount of time, but if multi-level buildings became possible, the operator and the "platform" could pass through each level of the shaft and then arrive at the destination. 

I'm not certain how deciding what should be put on the elevator would be handled - I suspect one option would be to make the lift count as a sort of stockpile to which hauler jobs were generated, and on arrival at the destination - top or bottom, the lift would then be emptied according to the "take from" orders ascribed to its stockpile settings.  Messy, given that dwarves would have to know not to take things from the stockpile before it had been moved, and there are also some issues with starting to load the stockpile before it's been "unloaded", so I suspect this would be a custom implementation of a lot of things, and possibly not a high development priority for Toady as a result.  At least not until buildings rewrites, or hauling upgrades, or the Caravan Arc or whatever.

But I think, given that how far away my forges now are, it's suddenly more important that we have a way to move items long distances over the Z axis. They're certainly period - they were mentioned by the Roman architect Vitruvius, for example.  Also widely used for transporting ore in early shaft mining.   Whilst not in widespread use in the real world for carrying parts and products until well into the industrial revolution, parts and products didn't tend to be constructed deep underground in medieval times, and it wasn't until production lines and factories that moving large amounts of goods up and down long distances was really necessary outside of mines.

Anyway, I think this falls sort of between this issue and the improved hauling suggestions.  I thought I'd post it here, though.

[immibis]

A much more simple variation: Dwarves can path directly from the top to the bottom of a lift with a cost of 1. If the cost is any lower than 1, the pathing algorithm won't work properly and they'll sometimes favor stairs over lifts. Every time a dwarf enters a lift, they teleport to the opposite end (as if there were two very fast lifts, one at each end at any given time).

[Narmio]

A much more simple variation: Dwarves can path directly from the top to the bottom of a lift with a cost of 1. If the cost is any lower than 1, the pathing algorithm won't work properly and they'll sometimes favor stairs over lifts. Every time a dwarf enters a lift, they teleport to the opposite end (as if there were two very fast lifts, one at each end at any given time).

Nice and simple to implement, but that wouldn't give the idea of a bunch of haulers loading up a big lift and then slowly pulling it, groaning with the spoils of the deep, up to the surface.  It would be more like a dwarven teleportation booth, which is awesome, but beyond the technological scope of even this thread.

[Vertigon]

Maybe the weight inside the lift affects the speed of it?

Also, rolling cart traps. Shut the door behind the enemy, roll tons of carts at them

[Atanamis]

I'd say the last few posts seem closely related to the number 1 eternal suggestion:
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/eternal_voting.php
(891)     Improved Hauling
Wheelbarrows, mine carts, stacking, all goes here.

This is likely to be among Toady's first priorities after the stability fixes. I'd definitely agree that a faster way to get stuff up and down in the fortress is important now though. I'd much rather see "real" lift mechanics that require power than a teleporter. How did period mining equipment work?

[Narmio]

How did period mining equipment work?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining#Ancient_Greece_and_Rome and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining#Medieval_Europe have some very interesting sounding stuff, in particular lines like this would appear to be relevant:

Use of water power in the form of water mills was extensive; they were employed in crushing ore, raising ore from shafts and ventilating galleries by powering giant bellows.

There's also this really awesome image showing that the Romans removed water from a mine in Spain (the Rio Tinto copper mines) using much the same approach as we'd use to drain an aquifer!  Really cool:



This is from Vitruvius's "De Architectura", the only fully-surviving Roman architecture treatise, written 25BC.  It covers loads of machinery stuff - pulleys, hoists, cranes, pneumatics, pumping, mining with water pressure, etc.  We should see if we can find a copy and donate it to Toady or something.  It sounds really appropriate.

[jokermatt999]

Not to be a tightwad, but legal free versions exist, even translated.

Good idea though. I occasionally email Toady articles I find interesting and dwarfy. Usually he's already read them though.

[The Architect]

We've always known that human beings were not dumbarses in ancient times, even in "prehistory". I don't really understand what Toady is aiming at with his technology time period (except avoiding things that are obviously new ways of looking at things (like mass-produced antibiotics and modern biological sciences in general) rather than rediscovered ancient ideas (like cog-based machines).

In truth, the ancients were quite as intelligent and capable as we are (or in some cases moreso). They just had little motivation to move life/technology in that direction. The industrial revolution, mass production, quantity and convenience over quality and enjoyment, the pursuit of technology for its own sake: these were/are motivated by ideas and philosophies, not necessities. Increased human competition is the simplest way of explaining it.

Now, if things had been as difficult for the ancients as Toady is making them for dwarves, we'd have seen more application of technological solutions to problems! This is as obvious to me as simple arithmetic, so I don't know: Is my reasoning faulty, or am I right on?

[Narmio]

Not to be a tightwad, but legal free versions exist, even translated.

Good idea though. I occasionally email Toady articles I find interesting and dwarfy. Usually he's already read them though.

Aye, while the forums were being moved I had a look around and found this version:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Books_on_Architecture/ , with a direct link to the bit on machinery here:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Books_on_Architecture/Book_X

Very cool stuff.  Including a 25BC description of an odometer!

[Starver]

I don't really understand what Toady is aiming at with his technology time period [...]

He's not really going for an ultra-realistic 'snapshot' of 14C (or whenever) society, on either global or local level, but creating a game that has the right kind of 'look and feel' to have a suitably feature-rich tech-level that still maintains the fantasy-world setting.  (For one thing, a full-on ultra-realist copying of 14C times would probably feature far fewer dragons and bronze collossi, right?)


There's a balance to be made.  If someone suggests "can we av a lever-type thing, that when we pull it, all hostile creatures instantly die?" with some justification based upon some lost old-style technological art or other[1] then the issue is not whether it could have been implemented either by a tooled-up or by fantasy-context 'magical' means, but whether such a trick should be accomplishable by a simple "build" task or two (followed by a "Pull!" one) or should be the dwarf-effort (and era) equivalent of putting together a seawater hydrolisis plant and then centrifugally separating out the deuterium and tritium in order to obtain the materials for a full-on neutron bomb...


If I'm looking at possible enhancements (either staying within the 14C boundaries, or elbowing out the walls a little speculatively) I at least try to put in my own balance into the suggestion.  Over-sized siege engines?  That'd mean a lot more material and possibly even being a construction fixed and unrotatable.  Conveyor system?  Bar the potential for infinite stacking exploits (on either belt or 'end tile') and slow it down the more weight it carries.  That sort of thing.

The game already allows custom reactions, of course, if you so wish them.  And it sounds like some more interesting possibilities arise in DF2010/v3/whatever, but that's over and above the basic balance and looks like at least some technological advancements could be implemented if one wishes (if not the stuff that needs hard-coding!).


[1] Like the possibly mythical 'guided-cannonball' which there are a few sparse accounts of that seem too ernest to be complete fabrications yet obviously missing the answers the modern mind expects to have been asked about...

[Tatterdemalian]

Personally, I'd like to see more things require machine power, but also be able to use "dwarf power" as a substitute. Drawbridges, for instance. They shouldn't require power to lower (pull a lever, maybe give the bridge a good kick if it sticks), but raising them should be a more difficult process, involving either a hand crank that multiple dwarves can operate (requires a certain amount of power to begin raising the bridge, and extra dwarves beyond that threshold raises it faster), an adjacent powered gear assembly, or maybe a counterweight assembly that can be charged with power when there are no threats about, and then have its power channeled into raising the bridge immediately with the flip of a lever (but this discharges the potential energy stored, and it must be rewound with dwarf or machine power before the bridge can be raised again).