Had a good one this morning. I was starting to lag pretty badly, and part of it I chocked up to all the useless crap I'd been accumulating. I'd captured, disarmed and disposed of several hundred goblins, so I had plenty of goblinite for iron, silver warhammers, etc... but also several thousand pieces of rotted clothing all over my fort, because my dwarves just loved picking it up, wearing it for a week, dropping it and grabbing another, rinse repeat, etc. Also had about 50x50 worth of refuse piles because my strategy of "release 120 war dogs on an ambush full of sword and marksgoblins" resulted in very few dead goblins and almost a thousand dog pieces flying everywhere. So I decided to get rid of it all in true dwarf fashion with an atom smasher.
All went well, built a little 4x4 bridge and linked it up to a lever a few squares to the north of it. Put all my refuse and rotten clothes onto it, everybody's happy. Took special care to make sure nobody would try to haul something onto the pile at the last second, all precautions taken. Then I noticed that I hadn't raised the bridge beforehand. Didn't think it would be a problem. Oh, how wrong I was.
Pulled the lever and my entire courtyard was blanketed by a shotgun blast of socks, bones, goblin corpses, and other objects. I just looked at the screen stunned, mouth literally agape, for about 10 seconds before I burst out laughing so hard it hurt. The dwarf who'd pulled the lever (An expert fish dissector, oh no) more or less ceased to exist. There was a massive smear of blood and gore that stretched out in a cone about 8 tiles long and 10 wide. I checked the report and he'd been hit with about a dozen different things, breaking bones, even severing a few limbs before having his brain bashed in by a XXLarge Llama Wool SockXX. Other than him, casualties were light. One legendary miner got his arm fractured over a dozen tiles away, but that healed up fine. The rest of the casualties were about 6 war lions I'd just trained either killed or maimed. One got decapitated by a flying birchen war axe from 10 tiles away, which amused me. Blood for the Blood God.
After that it was just a matter of re-dumping it all back onto the pile and this time DROPPING the bridge onto it. Every once in a while I'll find a sock or bolt or something that I missed, sometimes multiple z-levels away, such as on top of a tower. I've since built a partial wall around the atom smasher to prevent further incidents... and have begun designing ways to militarize it to splatter massive amounts of gobbos. I noticed that bolts and arrows behaved as if they'd been fired, including some breaking on impact, so this could be a useful way to get rid of the crappy arrows gobbos drop now that my military's using all silver/steel bolts. Results to follow ;p