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[irdsm]

2 tunnels makes it easier to haul large numbers of objects at once. I instinctively said that because I made a 1 wide hallway and then removed my glass stockpile and made a new one under the tower to speed up construction. This led to every single one of my haulers carrying glass blocks (around 150 glass blocks total) through a 1 tile wide hallway. What a mess. I have since decided that A) All hallways need to be 2 tiles wide just incase and B) If you plan to  make a lot of constructions out of glass and plan to move the glass around then designate separate stockpiles for glass blocks so that they move bins of glass blocks instead of moving 1 glass block at a time.

As for the doors, it needs to be pointlessly dwarfy. That's how I did it, and that's how it should be done. To condone the use of less levers and mechanisms....why, you wouldn't be an elf sympathizer, would you?

[Albedo]

I guess I'm dubious as to what would take longer - carving out the wider hallway, or the occasional delay from haulers running into each other - but I guess your design is essentially a self-sustaining habitat, so it would take more input than anything I'd use.

[Derakon]

Keep in mind that a legendary miner can clear a block of stone in about the amount of time it takes one hauler to stand up from lying prone. Lying down seriously impacts dwarves' speeds.

[lordcooper]

I think I'll compromise and have a 5 z high tower, but firing from level 3.

The self sustaining tower idea is pretty cool, but not really what I'm after here, although I may well use the airlock idea for a storeroom so that supplies can be brought while keeping my marksdwarves locked in.

So at the moment my underground layer will look something like this (not to scale):

Code: [Select]

MMMMMMMMMMoMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMoMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMoMMMMMMMMMM
XXXXXXXXXXoXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXoXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXdXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXSSSSSXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXSSSSSXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXSSSSSXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXSSSSSXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXSSSSSXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXDXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXwXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXUoLULoUXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXoXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXoXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXUXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
M = Main fortress
X = Rock
o = Mined out path
D = Door controlled by lever 1
d = Door controlled by lever 2
S = Stockpile
U = Upward stairs
L = Lever
w = well

Stockpile contains food, booze, wood, metal and ammo, taken from their respective piles in Main Fortress.

Z lvl 1 contains (in each tower) Dining Room and booze and food stockpiles (taken from airlock stockpile) (3 wide dry moat around the complex of towers and two drawbridges on either side of frontal tower leading to main entrance)

(Not to scale and ignoring L shaped entrance and traps etc after this))

Code: [Select]

XXXXeeeXXXX
mmmXXXXXmmm
mmmDmTmDmmm
mTmDmmmDmTm
mmmDmTmDmmm
mmmDmmmDmmm
X = Ground
m = Moat
D = Drawbridge
T = Tower
e = Entrance to main fortress

Z lvl 2 contains barracks, archery practice room (with arrow recovery channel) and ammo stockpile (Taken from airlock stockpile)

Z lvl 3 has fortifications from which to fire and an ammo stockpile (taken from the one downstairs)

Z lvl 4 has 2 bedrooms for the civilians (gotta be able to make arrows in times of need)

Z lvl 5 has a wood/metal stockpile and the workshops required to make arrows from them

Hows that sounding for everyone?

And a new question.  If for a later project I decided to make the moat floodable / drainable, can dwarves aim through waterfalls?  It would be AWESOME to have waterfalls coming down the outside of these towers.

Ooh, and would this in any way be possible with magme?  That would be the ultimate in dwarfy!

[Albedo]

And a new question...  can dwarves aim through waterfalls? 

That's a pretty obscure question! I'd be mildly surprised if anyone had the answer - you may have to experiment and let us know!

[sev]

(regarding archery targets between towers)

Building floors between towers would cut off view to the ground and kinda defeat the point of this, I'm thinking.

If you really want the towers to share a target, you just need the practice range to be *above* the fortifications they shoot enemies from.

[Albedo]

You could put floor grates in strategic spots, perhaps with small sections of fortifications around them.  This would allow shooting down below the "bridges".

The alternative would be not to build the bridges in a straight line, but zig-zagged, so any spot below the bridge has another spot that it's vulnerable to.

[lordcooper]

Nah, I'll keep it tower specific, easier to reclaim arrows that way.

I've never really used magma in any advanced way before (or at all really) so I'm gonna need to ask how to approach making a magma fall and what materials are safe to use.

[Shoku]

Uh oh.

-

Well for pumps you can use any material but depending on the map wooden pumps may burn up pretty quickly (above ground?)
If you control it entirely by turning the pumps on/off then you don't need anything made out of bauxite/HFS or modded materials. If you control it with floodgates of bridges or anything that the magma will be on the same tile with in it's open or closed state then it's gotta be high melting temperature materials. For mechanisms you're mostly limited to Bauxite so if you can't get that you're pretty much gonna have to settle for controlling it at the pumps.

As for anything that can be made with metal steel is magma safe and by the time you set something like this up I suspect you'd have a stack or wrong-size armor to melt down anyway.

As for constructed floors and walls- well go ahead and make them out of wood if you feel like it. Or coal, or gasoline, or gunpowder...

[lordcooper]

lol, why Uh oh?

[Albedo]

Because any mistake tends to be a HUGE mistake.

Read the wiki on magma, and pumps, and anything related. Search the forums and read about the mistakes that others have made (again, and again, and again...)

And remember... losing is fun!

[Albedo]

You know, a simple solution/compromise to the question of "how tall?" is to make the tower have multiple stories of firing platforms.  Easy enough - since anything like RL structural considerations are irrelevant, you can just push out from a central staircase, either walls or floors, and put fortifications out where you need.

Once you have several levels, you can station your archers where you want - you decide you don't like one level, you stop using it.  You can even flood one side with several squads on several levels, which would allow the tower to be narrower and still provide the same firepower.

 Now that is dwarfy!

[Shoku]

Actually uh oh because you blew up at the last guy who asked a magma question. I know this isn't the same but it was supposed to be humorous.

Anyway, I think the topic of how to avoid fluid spilling over is going to act very differently with magma- it's actually got to flow out of the way faster than you can pump it.

Having it fall through the ground and another two stories down into a holding tank that the pumps are originally drawing from seems like it should be safe but I'd still be careful to do it somewhere where it wouldn't spell the doom of the fort if testing it went awry- unless maybe if I hadn't had enough FUN for a few days.

Edit: Two stories more fall so that you can have the pump above two layers of magma sucking up stuff from the top but even if it gets all the magma there will still be 7/7 magma everywhere so there won't be any evaporation and you won't have to worry about filling it back up eventually.