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[Fossaman]

This is the first floor of my control room. There are two more floors, both of which I expect to fill with levers. I've already used about 1600 mechanisms, and I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever be able to finish this project.

What I'm working on is an underwater fortress with precision flood control. The fortress consists of two towers occasionally linked by bridges. Each level of each tower (fifteen stories tall) will have its own floodgates to let in water, floodgates around the stairwell, screwpumps that drain the floor below, and hatches to control the screwpump intake and prevent pressure-floods. A diagram of a typical level:

Code: [Select]

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓XX▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
▓..............▓
▓..............▓
▓..............▓
▓..............▓
▓..............▓
▓.....▓XX▓.....▓
X.....XSSX.....▓
X.....XSSX.....▓
▓.....▓XX▓.....▓
▓..............▓
▓..............▓
▓..............▓
▓......HH......▓
▓......%%......▓
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓%%▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
H = Hatch, S = Stairs, the rest should be pretty obvious.

Hm. Writing this out, I notice that I don't really need to make the screwpumps have a lever hooked to their powering gear assembly. I can just use the hatches to control when a level is pumped out or not.

Anyway, I'm still going to need at least 32 more levers for hatches (15 levels total on each side, plus a master switch for each side). And I still need to work out the exterior power system for the pumps. I'm debating how I should power them, as well. I'm kind of leaning towards a drainhole on the bottom level of the map leading to fortifications off the edge, with waterwheels in the flow. I've chosen to dig out this fortress like a sculpture from a block of rock, so that should be fairly simple to do.

I suspect I'll hit 2000 mechanisms before I finish. It'll be close, anyway.

[Hamster Man]

I was recently thinking about a problem somewhat similar to that, myself. I wanted a make a switch where, flipping it once, would close 2 gates and open a third (after a short delay), and activate a pump.

What I came up with was using the animal-drop-on-a-pressure-plate trick.

Flipping the switch would drop 4 cats. 2 of the cats would land in a 1x3 room (with door and escape stairs) with a pressure plate, thus turning it on immediately. The other 2 cats would land in 1x10 rooms, with the pressure plate at the end and a door.

The idea would be the cats would immediately move towards the door they can't go through and sit there (on the pressure plate), but there would be a delay between them landing and them getting there... so 2 plates would trigger immediately, and the other two would trigger after a 5 second delay.

A second switch would open all 4 escape-doors so the cats would step off the pressure plates and thus reset the system.

Unfortunately I never got around to testing it, but maybe you can give it a try and let me know how it works. It might cut down on the number of switches, at the very least.

[Neruz]

Or you could just use raising 1 tile bridges

[Hamster Man]

I could never get pressure plates to work right with water - they always got screwed up, and triggered repeatedly or not at all. Hence why I use cats. (Plus this way I don't have to worry about a system to move the water to the triggers).

... or are you talking about something else?

[Fossaman]

Hm. It's an ingenious idea, but I wouldn't want to try it in a situation where one mis-timed switching could flood an entire tower. And if the stairwell flooded and I was unable to close it again, the tower would be a total loss until I could drain the whole fortress-bed. (Which I do plan to be able to do. But it'll be sloooow, I suspect.)

On the subject of bridges: Yes, drawbridges could indeed reduce the number of mechanisms required by half. But I'm loath to use them around the stairwells for a couple of reasons. The first is aesthetics. Open floodgates look much nicer than 2x1 bridges. The second is more practical; I don't want my dwarves to go smashy. So at most using bridges would save me...124 mechanisms. And if I'm going to be using a couple thousand of them overall, that seems a bit of a pittance. I'd rather have a uniform aesthetic than save a tiny bit of stone and effort.

[Albedo]

... I wouldn't want to try it in a situation where one mis-timed switching could flood an entire tower...

But... why not?

[Martin]

... I wouldn't want to try it in a situation where one mis-timed switching could flood an entire tower...

But... why not?

Seriously, what game is he playing? 

But I like the idea of flood control dependent on falling cats. That's pretty dwarfy. It'd be better if pressure plates were more sensitive and trigged when a kitteh body part hit it, so you could get the whole explode on impact subatomic particle detector thing going.

[Fossaman]

Well, I have no objections to my fortress flooding if it's because I or one of my dwarfs do something stupid, like pulling the wrong lever or having a dwarf standing in the way of a floodgate when it goes off. But I don't want to lose a fort merely because I did it wrong. That would be silly.

[AtomicPaperclip]

I was recently thinking about a problem somewhat similar to that, myself. I wanted a make a switch where, flipping it once, would close 2 gates and open a third (after a short delay), and activate a pump.

What I came up with was using the animal-drop-on-a-pressure-plate trick.

Flipping the switch would drop 4 cats. 2 of the cats would land in a 1x3 room (with door and escape stairs) with a pressure plate, thus turning it on immediately. The other 2 cats would land in 1x10 rooms, with the pressure plate at the end and a door.

The idea would be the cats would immediately move towards the door they can't go through and sit there (on the pressure plate), but there would be a delay between them landing and them getting there... so 2 plates would trigger immediately, and the other two would trigger after a 5 second delay.

A second switch would open all 4 escape-doors so the cats would step off the pressure plates and thus reset the system.

Unfortunately I never got around to testing it, but maybe you can give it a try and let me know how it works. It might cut down on the number of switches, at the very least.

or... you could have had the lever connected to the 2 gates and a bridge, that would release water onto a pressure plate. Your idea is more dwarven though.

[Hamster Man]

But I like the idea of flood control dependent on falling cats. That's pretty dwarfy.

Why thank you sir! That made my day.

[Fossaman]

Work progresses apace. The hatches and pumps for the main towers have been emplaced. An amusing quirk of carving the whole thing from natural rock is that the watertight drainage pumps for the top level have to be constructed in such a way as to trap the dwarf that builds them inside. Luckily the hatches in the pump-housing were already linked to a lever, so the trapped dwarf could be dropped a gentle one level to safety. This process will have to be repeated at least four more times, for the pumps on the bridges linking the towers.

Does anybody know if windmills work underwater? It strikes me as a delightful irony if they do, and I fully intend to power my fortress with underwater windmills if it's possible.

[Dorf3000]

Does anybody know if windmills work underwater? It strikes me as a delightful irony if they do, and I fully intend to power my fortress with underwater windmills if it's possible.

I'd always assumed they had to be built aboveground to work. Edit: just built one underground and it had 0 power.

[XSI]

Aboveground and underwater are not mutually exclusive,  the lowest z level of an ocean is underwater, but it still counts as aboveground.

I'm also interested to see if windmills work underwater.

[Dorf3000]

Ah, I assumed they would be inside the tower, oops 

This calls for some dwarf science!  Many dwarves will die to bring us this information....

[Neruz]

By the way, when you finish you need to savescum and then pull random levers to see what happens.