Print

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

[NW_Kohaku]

Sorry for necro.

I got some ideas with mechanic.
First of all, isn't it odd that single crunlde stepped on plate can force stone bridge 10x10 tiles to raise? Same for other mechanizabe objects.

So, first of my suggestions is - every mechanical stuff requires power to operate.

[1] If finely balanced, a moderate amount of power might be needed equally in either direction, of course.  Perhaps the given Architect's skill could be applied to how well balanced (or favoured toward the required state, such that it responds effortlessly/immediately to the being sent in that direction) such constructions are.  That's a completely new suggestion (from me at least), so you might want to ignore that for the time-being.

I get the impression that the mechanics of a bridge are such that some sort of counterbalancing weight is ready to pull the bridge up, and only a single brake stuck in a gear, or a tether on a rope is keeping that from happening, and that pressure plate's small motion releases the rope or brake, letting the weight-based mechanics work.

Of course, the fact that you never have to set these things up, or apply power, or anything else, and they are perfectly resettable on their own all imply some sort of dwarfy magic taking place.

It would be cool if bridges worked sort of like an elevator where you needed to set up counterbalances, though. 

Supposedly, some real-life drawbridges are counterbalanced so well that a 30-horsepower engine lifts a bridge that weighs several tons.  You can basically just lock it in place once it is in the air, and the counterbalancing means that some steel pegs sliding into their slots can keep the bridge in place in the raised position without using power at all.

[Bdthemag]

Heres the one trap I want and i'll be happy, bear traps. Think about it...

[Khym Chanur]

A Magic Arc cross-over idea: magic power transfer.  Attach one magic gizmo to the water-wheel or wind-mill, set up a second magic gizmo hundreds of tiles/z-levels away, and the power transfers between them across the distance.  No power loss, no need to use up hundreds of logs, no routing difficulties.

And another magic idea: power-to-heat conversion, so you can have furnaces/forges/kilns that work off of mechanical power in addition to coal and magma.

[Silverionmox]

While much of Low Tech Magazine is useful as inspiration for mechanics that use neither electricity nor combustion, I'd like to draw attention to these two articles, with illustrative schematics and plenty of sourced links.

Human powered cranes (includes treadmills, capstans, winches, pulleys)

The most powerful hand crane in history multiplied the force of its operator 632 times

A large treadwheel gives a mechanical advantage of 14 to 1

The most powerful harbour cranes had two treadwheels, each walked by 3 to 4 men

Windmills of industrial quality

Around 1600, many new industrial applications of windmills appeared: saw mills, paper mills, mustard mills, tobacco mills, ...

Besides food production, two other major applications of windmill technology were the production of paper (using ropes and sails from ships as a raw material) and the sawing of wood.

Windmills were also crushing chalk (to make cement), grinding mortar, draining mines, ventilating mineshafts (and even a prison), polishing glass and making gunpowder.

Textiles were another industry in which wind power came to the rescue: windmills were crushing seeds from flax (to make linen), preparing hemp fibres (to produce ropes and sailcloth), fulling cloth (to create soft wool), making paint and tanning and dying animal skins.

[RAM]

Perhaps power sources should be less reliable. I am sure that we are all aware of the potential for dwarf-powered pump to be sporadic in nature, although it would be nice to think that a rested and available dwarf would replace a tired-but-still-working dwarf so that a hand-powered device would function near-continuously, water-wheels are almost completely reliable. While, to the best of my knowledge, streams drying up or shifting course during fortress mode are not currently implemented, if they were to have their power output vary according to season it should be a fairly simple simulation...
 Having water-wheel output be beased upon water depth could prepare them for the difference between high-flow and low-flow streams.

P.S.
 Bauxite water-wheels!

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, the big problem with water wheels in the game right now is the massive disparity between the amount of power a water wheel generates, and the power cost of lifting water.

A single water wheel generates ten times the power it takes to lift water back up the waterfall to power the "Perpetual Motion Device", and you can hook an infinite number of water wheels to a closed loop powered by a single pump.  On top of that, this is an Archimedes Screw we are talking about, and while quite robust, that's not exactly the most energy-efficient pump in history.

Building a dam to power a large number of waterwheels to power your industry makes sense as far as it goes, but the cost of pumping that water back up should always exceed the amount of power that a water wheel can generate from the energy that the water gets from gravity.

[Bohandas]

I think an even bigger problem with water wheels is that there's not enough to do with them.

[Starver]

I think an even bigger problem with water wheels is that there's not enough to do with them.

I can make a hat... or a brooch... or a pterodactyl...

[Bohandas]

I think an even bigger problem with water wheels is that there's not enough to do with them.

I can make a hat... or a brooch... or a pterodactyl...

That's from "Airplane", right?

[Starver]

I think an even bigger problem with water wheels is that there's not enough to do with them.

I can make a hat... or a brooch... or a pterodactyl...

That's from "Airplane", right?

It is, and my name's not Wright.

(Bit of a strain there, given you didn't provide the obvious feedline but... Wright... Airplane...  It actually works.  If you'll forgive me for dissecting the frog[1] in this note.)

[1] Not an Airplane reference, but paraphrased from another source.

[sonerohi]

Slicks of things. I'd like to roll out a bunch of marbles, or BB's, or something, and see any unit walking through the area slip on their arse.

[DrKillPatient]

Adding a use for saltpeter, one could make gunpowder and ignite it with some sort of trap, starting a small fire on (or maybe a few tiles around) the trap. Would be useful in conjunction with careful moss/grass growing to start brush fires for outdoor goblin-cooking.

[RAM]

Chemistry is a bit of a touchy issue so you probably won't see much in the way of gunpowder in the default game. But starting fires makes a certain amount of sense...

[JohnieRWilkins]

Resurrecting thread with awesome picture/article:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/pl_prototype_ironhand/

Only slightly past the tech cutoff. Götz is such a badass.

[isd]

Ventilation, extraction of waste gasses.  Eventually, furnaces will make smoke and people have suggested deep mines should have a ventilation requirement.

Yes, I think it would make mining a lot more interesting (but a little slower a the same time)