Print

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

[Warlord255]

I have a brook, a jungle, and sand.

Glass tower with large chunks of axle in constant operation for the purpose of looking awesome.

Worth the effort, or would the murder to my framerate be intolerable?

[Warlord255]

Huh. A slight problem. I can find no way to make my axles oscillate, or more precisely, to look like this;

Code: [Select]

-=-=-=-=-=-=-, etc.

Probably still going to do it.

[Narmio]

The problem with that is that adjacent horizontal axles will connect to each other and thus wont' run out of phase.  You could use vertical axles and get this:

Code: [Select]

o*o*o*o*o

[Warlord255]

The problem with that is that adjacent horizontal axles will connect to each other and thus wont' run out of phase.  You could use vertical axles and get this:

Code: [Select]

o*o*o*o*o

What would be the best way to do that - build every second one on a connected chain, stop them via lever gear, and hope it pauses on the off-phase so you can build the others?

Regardless, I've got a decent setup with horizontal axles ringing my fortress on multiple levels; in motion, it looks good, and it operates my four millstones (symmetry fiend) quite nicely.

[Narmio]

The problem with that is that adjacent horizontal axles will connect to each other and thus wont' run out of phase.  You could use vertical axles and get this:

Code: [Select]

o*o*o*o*o

What would be the best way to do that - build every second one on a connected chain, stop them via lever gear, and hope it pauses on the off-phase so you can build the others?

Regardless, I've got a decent setup with horizontal axles ringing my fortress on multiple levels; in motion, it looks good, and it operates my four millstones (symmetry fiend) quite nicely.

I think that's the best plan - starting one set when the other's off phase and hoping it works.

Anyway, using moving parts as an aesthetic device had not occured to me, I'm usually extremely fussy about keeping axles and gears on levels below or above whatever I'm doing as much as possible.  Sounds fun.

[Warlord255]

Since axles can be walked on, it might even be possible to (in a less cramped, non-tower fortress) pave whole hallways with oscillating horizontal axles, or even make walls predominantly out of gear assemblies.

[Jay]

They can be walked on?  Do they actually count as floor tiles or is it just passing through to the floor below?

It'd be awesome to have a tower where the only entrance is a floating axle that powers the rest of the building.

As in:

Code: [Select]

++|........+  + = Floor
++|........+  . = Empty Space
++O........+  O = Wall
+==========+  | = Wall
++O........+  = = Axle
++|........+
++|........+


[apache1990]

Having the entire fortress connected to power would be pretty awesome.  I should replace all my walls with gear assemblies in my next fortress, .

[Narmio]

It was my understanding that, like furniture, axles and gears can be walked *through*, but that they don't actually provide support.  Since, unlike furniture, they can be built where there is no floor so long as they're connected to other mechanisms.

[Warlord255]

In my experience, gears cannot be walked through. I tried stationing a dwarf directly on top of an axle, and he stood on it happily; doing the same directly on top of a gear caused him to wander off, deeming it unwalkable.

As far as support goes, it's really a matter of decoration; build a floor-structure tower first with appropriate holes as needed to transfer power up one floor, perhaps with a central axle arrangement. The only non-gear/axle tiles would be for furniture, wall columns to place doors, and if utterly necessary, a perimeter wall on each floor as normal to prevent arrow entrance. I have yet to test if gears can be shot through.

For the record, I have 2100 power coming from a set of waterwheels and it is currently proving inadequate. The power required to keep such a fortress in motion would have to be legendary; alternatively, start with a set quantity of power (20000?) and make a fortress using all of it up.

[Mechanoid]

In my experience, gears cannot be walked through.

They can be walked through if there's a floor beneath them to walk on.

[AlienChickenPie]

To get the sort of power it would take to run a mechanical fortress, your dwarves would have to dig up some pitchblende and discover nuclear fission. It would be a mess unlike any other.

[andrea]

if you have an aquifer and a brook, you can have all the power you need.
because you can build water wheels on a flowing aquifer (it stays flowing even if you stop dropping water on it)

[Time Kitten]

Only decorative thing I've done so far is to put towering vertical axles outside my fortress with green gear assemblies on top.  Tried to use them to convince the elves that there were still trees in the jungle.  Unfortunately they did not believe in spinning trees, even if they were 3 times as tall as all other trees in the world.