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[JohnieRWilkins]

You might be able to make attackers very uncomfortable with reflected light, but you aren't going to be able to actually damage them. At the worst you could blind them temporarily, but given the instinctive reaction to looking at bright light, I doubt it'd have much effect.

A modern tactic is to employ very powerful lights in a perimeter around a base. The idea is to make it so that attackers can't target the defenders. Think Gandalf in the LOTR movie during Helms Deep. That is a pretty darn awesome way to use mirrors for dwarves.

[praguepride]

You say it's not that complicated to build, but then again, computers aren't hard to build, as long as you have the proper parts.

1) You'd need exceptionally pure glass. Any glass of that quality was used for decoration only. That's like having a mechanic come up and say "I would like to experiment with that incredibly priceless huge ruby you have on the top of your royal scepter)

2) Knowledge of light: This could potentially be back in the day when they didn't know how heat travelled. Heck, they could still have an Earth (Armok?) centric view of the universe and the sun is just a big nightlight to them.

Mirrors were made of polished bronze ro silver, not exactly the kind of thing a king just hands to some peasants to "play around with"

[G-Flex]

Not to mention the kind of precise geometry and construction needed. Hell, even glass 100 years ago (relative to today) was warped as hell, and good luck having a dwarf construct a giant, concave metallic mirror to that kind of precision necessary. Maybe as an artifact, but even then the actual heat provided by it would probably be lower than you'd think.

[Jadael]

This Death Ray works just fine, and is totally within the Dwarves' capability: http://www.solardeathray.com/images/sdr_index.jpg Putting a bunch of mirrors together and simply adjusting each one until you see the reflection pointing at the right spot is pretty easy compared to construction a parabolic lens.

It's not going to set a goblin on fire, though, or heat steel enough for forging. Might cook a meal.

[G-Flex]

If your idea of a "death ray" is something that can slowly set a piece of tinder on fire at a specific point, given enough sunlight, but that's kind of like designing some sort of jet engine in order to cook pasta.

[Karadan]

You might be able to make attackers very uncomfortable with reflected light

Now I can't stop thinking of dwarves saying things like "Give us what we want or we will make you veeeryy uncomfortable."

[inaluct]

Did you guys ever seen that movie about the Molepeople? There were these albino molepeople (cave adapted dwarves) who used something like this to sacrifice whoever blasphemed the cult of Ishtar, or something like that.

[Urist McDetective]

like designing some sort of jet engine in order to cook pasta.

If DF had jet engines or their component pieces, I would be attempting to do just that.

[praguepride]

Do dwarves eat pasta? They only eat stews and roasts in my game

[Silverionmox]

Do dwarves eat pasta? They only eat stews and roasts in my game

They do get salad, puree, soup, sausages and marinade in mine .

[Porpoisepower]

I'm finding the concept of craters really interesting for world gen purposes...

a roundish depression, (2-3 z-levels deep, maybe rising a 1-2 z-levels from the surrounding area.)

and if you mine the area out, you can find some iron or maybe something more *special*?

[Rysith]

It's not going to set a goblin on fire, though, or heat steel enough for forging. Might cook a meal.

It's all about scale. A two by three sheet of plywood can cook a meal. A 20 by 30 foot array lights a goblin on fire. A 50 foot square array forges steel. These are dwarves, creating a giant solar death array seems like the sort of thing that they would do. I'd personally use silver for the mirror material, but bronze might work as well.

To change the focal point, you'd just need a bunch of mechanisms that would change the angle of the sub-mirrors in a coordinated way, and turn the crank until it was focused correctly. Well withing dwarven engineering.

I also like the idea of craters in world gen.

[praguepride]

These are dwarves, creating a giant solar death array seems like the sort of thing that they would do.

You mean the same dwarves that quickly develop cave adaptation and then throw up and complain loudly whenever they see sunlight? I really don't thik manipulating the much hated sunlight is something dwarves eagerly do...unless they swallowed poison or another toxic material and need their stomach "pumped"

[alfie275]

I meant craters during play, hence the term power goal. Lol imagine in adventure mode the combat logs: The !!adamantine comet!! strikes the earth.
It explodes in a shower of dirt.
An SoF emerges from the comet.
The SoF pwns you.

Maby make it so that comets have the temperature 1 degree below thier melting poit, if it's not pure the 1 degree below its average melting point, meaning it would start off like a bit of adamtine surounded by stone and iron then the stone would melt over time, outer tiles (yes I'm thinking multi tile comets!) first, so you get a super fast bit of admantine trailed by a shower of molten iron and stone , big time Fun!

[SirHoneyBadger]

I don't know that this would be something dwarfs would necessarily do, but as long as it was just an "oven" type source of fairly low-level heat (say less than 500 degrees F), that can't really easily be turned into a weapon (beyond maybe temporarily blinding someone with the mirrors), and that only works during the day, then I really don't see this as being a bad idea, for say a desert-dwelling Civ.

Would work great for my minotaur civ, I think.