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[King_of_the_weasels]

Technically Pearlash wasn't "discovered" until the 1700 according to wikipedia.

[G-Flex]

First identified in the 1700s. Doesn't mean that it wasn't used prior to then. After all, people were breathing oxygen long before it was chemically isolated.

In fact, potassium carbonate is the primary ingredient in potash, which has been used for centuries.

[King_of_the_weasels]

Then again no one really uses pearl ash anyway.

[G-Flex]

You do if you want to make clear glass! Granted, it has no other real uses yet. Although potash is used in farming.

[Winterbrass]

"Too dangerous" is a very, very stupid argument to use.

If you're a pansy elf or a surface-dwelling human, 'too dangerous' is anything that doesn't involve sipping elven wine and occasionally picking up a quill to write with.

Real dwarves play with lava and kill entire siege parties with butt-ends of crossbows. Coiled up pieces of metal? Bah. Don't claim that it's "too dangerous" until it menaces with spikes of spikes of spikes of spikes. And even then, it's merely 'fun'.

[Jamuk]

Springs are silly as mobile power sources. They do work, however, as capacitors.  They turn a weak force applied over a long time into a short duration strong force.  Use gears to convert a waterwheel's power into compressing a spring, then latch it into place for a trap.  This would make powered traps from things like windmills possible.

The thing is, you can get the same thing from a rock held up into the air.  So why not just implement the rock held up into the air as a capacitor component and solve the problem more simply?

Take a rock that is slowly lifted off the ground under power, then put it on a ledge.  Then when a gate needs to be opened, a bridge raised, or a trap sprung, provide a slight kick to the rock sending it hurtling downward.  You could even implement it like a well, with more power supplied the farther it falls, and ledges so that multiple bursts of power can be gotten from the same charge.

It could even be used to -remove the delay- on lever activated components by charging energy from a waterwheel and having the lever not actually move the components, but release the rock.

Anyways, I'm just throwing out ideas of uses.  Most of it involves making mechanics more complicated, and not actually adding functions.  But, it would be enjoyable for me to play around with.

[King_of_the_weasels]

Attach the rock thing you just described to a chain. I'm going to leave that idea out there.

[G-Flex]

Springs are silly as mobile power sources. They do work, however, as capacitors.  They turn a weak force applied over a long time into a short duration strong force.  Use gears to convert a waterwheel's power into compressing a spring, then latch it into place for a trap.  This would make powered traps from things like windmills possible.

You could do weapon traps via windmills other ways, potentially. For instance, spinning blades that only spin when a gearbox is engaged, by someone stepping on a plate. Something like that.

[Belteshazzar]

Need I say that from the idea of working mobile spring capacitors its only a short leap to harpoon bazookas. It would be similar to a common spear trap, but carried around as a cumbersome ranged weapon, attach a line to the spear any you could real in prey, lock down megabeasts, and even use it as an impromptu grapple gun or linethrower (for scaling cliffs, anchoring structures, or throwing up a rope bridge.)

[Pickerel]

I hope my comment is not unnecessary or irrelevant, but I need to point out the following.

Crossbows:
Mechanical energy storage is feasible in the DF setting.  Case crossbows.  A crossbow can remain loaded for quite some time and discharged later.  And for those that want a repeating crossbow, I recommend a hand-cranked thing that repeatedly pulls the sting back and lets it fly while you turn the large wheel on the side.  The torque should make this easily possible.  That said, a crossbow modified to shoot a spinning disc is really no stretch of the imagination.  However there is also no major need for spinning discs, as we have crossbow bolts.

[Grendus]

I hope my comment is not unnecessary or irrelevant, but I need to point out the following.

Crossbows:
Mechanical energy storage is feasible in the DF setting.  Case crossbows.  A crossbow can remain loaded for quite some time and discharged later.  And for those that want a repeating crossbow, I recommend a hand-cranked thing that repeatedly pulls the sting back and lets it fly while you turn the large wheel on the side.  The torque should make this easily possible.  That said, a crossbow modified to shoot a spinning disc is really no stretch of the imagination.  However there is also no major need for spinning discs, as we have crossbow bolts.

I think you're missing the point of a crossbow bolt. Put a rock in a crossbow instead of a bolt, you have a weapon that delivers a nasty bruise, nothing more (maybe a broken bone at close range). If you put a lot of energy into making a blade spin, 3 things will happen:

1. The blade will lose energy fairly rapidly to wind resistance. Compared to the fairly streamlined design of an arrow or bolt, discs have a lot of surface area.

2. You won't be able to spin the blade fast enough to cut. You might end up with some minor slashing wounds, but unless you nick a surface artery (such as the neck or wrists) odds are the wound won't even be felt through the adrenalin rush. If you had a bladed disk instead of a serrated one you might have better luck, but it still would be easily stopped by even wooden or leather armor.

3. The blades will be less accurate. While the gyroscopic forces on a frisbee would make it fairly accurate, they're nothing compared to the accuracy of a straight projectile.

Ranged weapons don't really carry enough energy to slash, you have to focus the energy into a very small area to cause damage. There's no way in the 1400's for technology to create a handheld device that could launch a spinning disk fast enough to be lethal. Possibly a siege weapon could do it (though why you'd bother I don't know, a ballista would still be far more lethal), but not a hand held crossbow.


I personally feel that springs are badly out of place in the DF world. They aren't period appropriate, and they don't seem very dwarvish. Dwarvish breaks from reality tend to be into a fantasy realm, not into a level of technology several hundred years more advanced than the game's setting.

[Pilsu]

The kind of traps we have aren't exactly period accurate in themselves. Needing springs to make them out of small weapons wouldn't be bad

[G-Flex]

That's only because the kinds of traps we have either are ill-defined or don't make sense at all.

Stonefall and cage traps are fairly simple in real life. Those make sense enough, except for the gameplay issues where you can put stonefall traps out in a field or cage a colossus with wood.

Upright spike traps make sense enough. You have spikes going through slats in the ground, and some guy pushes a lever or steps on a plate and they move up or down. Nothing particularly strange there, either.

Weapon traps are the oddest because they just don't make sense in the game. They require a power source. Counterweights work, and coiled springs were around in the 1400s, but making them big enough would be a challenge. Powering them through other means would be reasonable, as well. Either way, they need either constant resetting or a constant power source, obviously.