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[BradB]

Someone mentioned earlier that waterwheels can be used to speed up liquids... Can they?!

[SolarShado]

'fraid not. That was, i believe, a sarcastic remark.

It is a cool idea though.

[BradB]

Bugger.... so much for my high pressure river water squirter...

[JohnieRWilkins]

Just a note on weights,  Metal water wheels because of their increased Tensile strength could in fact weigh significantly less than a wooden one.

You're forgetting to factor in plasticity and elasticity. Metal will warp a lot faster than wood, especially when heated. So just use adamantine or something.

[profit]

Just a note on weights,  Metal water wheels because of their increased Tensile strength could in fact weigh significantly less than a wooden one.

You're forgetting to factor in plasticity and elasticity. Metal will warp a lot faster than wood, especially when heated. So just use adamantine or something.

May be true, but I had a copper waterwheel with steel spokes once and the bugger was extremely lightweight and did not warp.  Also was really really cool to watch... But I digress.

[Footkerchief]

Just a note on weights,  Metal water wheels because of their increased Tensile strength could in fact weigh significantly less than a wooden one.

You're forgetting to factor in plasticity and elasticity. Metal will warp a lot faster than wood, especially when heated. So just use adamantine or something.

Dear lord, are you kidding me?  Maybe if you tried to build them out of sheet lead or gallium or something.

Seriously people: http://images.google.com/images?q=metal%20waterwheel&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi

Metal waterwheels are totally feasible.  This should be blindingly obvious if you've ever touched a piece of steel.

[JohnieRWilkins]

You missed the point. You can make a metal waterwheel easily, but I doubt it'd be lighter than a piece of wood.

[Footkerchief]

Steel has a significantly higher specific modulus and specific strength than oak, so yes, it probably would.  Also, you think metal warps easily?  The strength of wood drops like a stone when it gets wet.  Not that any of this matters, because DF doesn't factor wood densities into power consumption anyway.  Metal waterwheels and axles in particular make just as much sense as the current implementations of their wooden counterparts.

[alfie275]

Surely magma would be able to move wheels better because it is heavier and has more force in flows because the weight of the magma at the top of an incline is using gravity to push the other magma whilst water is lighter so it has less downwards momentum? Its like saying that if wheel A has speed 2 and torque 1 and B has speed 1 and torque 2 then A is better because its faster, but they can both be geared to produce either effect.

[profit]

Surely magma would be able to move wheels better because it is heavier and has more force in flows because the weight of the magma at the top of an incline is using gravity to push the other magma whilst water is lighter so it has less downwards momentum? Its like saying that if wheel A has speed 2 and torque 1 and B has speed 1 and torque 2 then A is better because its faster, but they can both be geared to produce either effect.

Magma would have a tendency of sticking to the wheel and reducing its efficiency by filling in the cups, probably to the point of having a wheel so unbalanced and the cups so filled it could not overcome the weight of hardened magma and turn. (Magma would not distribute evenly so one side could have a massive block of it on it and the otherside could have cracked and fallen off making the rock bock sit at the bottem and require way too much energy to lift it over the top to get it to spin)

[Kazindir]

Why should a metal water wheel use the same volume of material as a wooden one, though? (this is essentially the same as the armor suggestion that I haven't had time to work out the details of)

It doesn't - X metal bars are not the same volume as X logs, even if (ignoring bins for a moment) you need the same sized stockpile to store each. This is down to very ancient and strict Dwarven Warehousing Regulations, and can also be seen in the way you need the same amount of stockpile space to store a golden earring as you do a granite block - or how you need five times the space to store iron bars compared to space required for storage of plate armour made from those 5 bars.

(You just need to accept that tiles and storage areas aren't a set area IC, they're just a tile because it's a tile based game. )

[ogion]

Allright, a  bit of physics 101...

p=mv
p= the force
m= mass
v= speed (velocity)

m₁u₁+m₂u₂=m₁v₁+m₂v₂
where u(n) is the speed before, and v(n) is the speed after. Usually, one of the m's are neutralized in the equation, leaving ony one mass and two different velocities.

Pardon me if I'm not making quite sence, but English isn't my native tounge.

Now, if you also take into account Bernoulli's equation, that u²/2g you quickly realizes that the mass and velocity of the fluid during a given time period have a linear correlation to the force. Regardless of the fluid, the same ammount of force which to apply to the object (waterwheel) during a specific time period is dependent on the density and velocity factors.

To tie this into the discussion:

A wooden waterwheel have a lot more material, buy lower average density compared to a metal waterwheel, but in the end the weight difference is almost negligeble.

True, that you can make all kinds of sleek and streamlined constructions with metal comapred to wood because of the matterial strength, I feel that the issue of having wooden whaterwheels combined with magma is a bit redundant...

I don't think I'm making sense here at all....

[numerobis]

In the absence of friction, the weight and mass of the wheel and axle should make no difference at all in the steady state.  It would take longer to get the more massive setup up to speed, but that's not currently modeled in DF (nor should it be, probably).

Taking friction into account, maybe we have a new use for tallow: oil the mechanisms.

[ogion]

That could work. Actually, I kinda lost the train of my thoughts during that previous rant... 

[Duke 2.0]

Surely magma would be able to move wheels better because it is heavier and has more force in flows because the weight of the magma at the top of an incline is using gravity to push the other magma whilst water is lighter so it has less downwards momentum? Its like saying that if wheel A has speed 2 and torque 1 and B has speed 1 and torque 2 then A is better because its faster, but they can both be geared to produce either effect.

Magma would have a tendency of sticking to the wheel and reducing its efficiency by filling in the cups, probably to the point of having a wheel so unbalanced and the cups so filled it could not overcome the weight of hardened magma and turn. (Magma would not distribute evenly so one side could have a massive block of it on it and the otherside could have cracked and fallen off making the rock bock sit at the bottem and require way too much energy to lift it over the top to get it to spin)

Unless it is an undershot waterwheel, which seems to be the case looking at how we use them.
 Although considering the dwarves, overshot wheels seems possible.