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[HastyLumbago]

OK, so I'm working on building a water-calendar. It's a complex set-up of different sized chambers, floodgates, pumps, windmills, and whatnot. When finished, I'm hoping to have it run  to final state once per year. I designed the whole thing on paper before I knew how most of the pieces worked, and despite having managed to get the first bit operational (a corkscrew-shaped pump tower powered by windmills) I'm not optimistic about the rest.

Basically, water seems to move predictably and very quickly, or at a crawl and intermittently. Am I right? I need a way to move water slowly in a closed system, and once the device is completed, there needs to be no dwarfish element, because I need the system not to stop working for any period of time. there there a way to slow down the flow of water, and keep the flow predictable?

Also, I know that multiple devices can be attached to one lever or pressure plate, but can a device require, for instance, that three separate pressure plates exist in a triggered state in order to function?

Finally, I'm worried about evaporation. Will water evaporate in a closed system i.e. with no access to outside air?

[Tcei]

To force water to slow down after using pumps/droping it several z-lvls use diagonal tunnles for it to move thru, this will depresurize the water and cause it to flow as fast as it would from a source on the same level. Evaporation shouldnt be too much of an issue, provided the rooms you use to fill arent so large that the water cant spread to the 4/7+ depth it needs to avoid evaporation quickly. Similarly you may consider using more pumps to help push water along in long tunnels.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Water movement is random, it just looks smooth when run at a high enough frame rate. It's probably not possible to build a large-scale enough mechanism to even out enough of the randomness. There was a thread on water clocks a while back, started by me , and it did end up with some theoretical results, though I never heard of someone implementing one based on it.

This.

[darkflagrance]

If you decide to give it a shot, be warned that water evaporates at a depth of 1/7 no matter where it is, so don't depend on any chamber being that depth for long. Otherwise, it should not evaporate.

[Derakon]

Slow flows will probably cause some minor evaporation over time, though. My suspicion is that evaporation works by a random chance to clear a 1/7 tile of water, no matter how long that 1/7 has existed; thus, if you have a flow of water slow enough that at any time it's at a 1/7 level, then there is a small chance of losing some of it.

You should be able to set up a cistern hooked up to an infinite water supply that acts as a permanent unpressurized 7/7 source, though. A bit like an aquifer.

[UberNube]

Personally I'd build a small repeater with water (smaller is better) which cycles every couple of seconds, then have the output of that going to a large dwarven computer using water-based logic gates to do binary counting and possibly some arithmetic. This would be much more reliable and would remove many of the problems with evaporation/random water flow. As an added bonus you can link it to spike traps to display the output in the corpses of your enemies!

[Kanddak]

Also, I know that multiple devices can be attached to one lever or pressure plate, but can a device require, for instance, that three separate pressure plates exist in a triggered state in order to function?

Not directly. You need to build an AND gate. Link each plate to a different door and arrange the doors in series.

I prefer the predictable timing of pressurized water. To slow things down, rely on the known 100-tick timing delay on floodgates and bridges. Then someone just needs to work out how many ticks there are in a day.

[Albedo]

The only time any underground water evaporates*, closed or not, is when it's 1/7 deep (or 8/7, or 15/7, etc). 

(* with extreme heat, you can get it to disappear as well - that's not what we're talking about.)

So, if you can create your system so water is never allowed to spread out to 1/7, it should be good indefinitely. 

There are some good articles in these threads and the wiki, key word "computing", among others. These can provide some tricks for the logic system.  How to adjust it once built, and make it keep regular time, it a diff problem.  (I'd suggest "larger is better" - waterflow is random in DF, but larger systems tend to average out the randomness.  Where you can't depend on water to flow from tile A to fill tile B with predictability, it's "more" reliable to trust it to flow from 10x10 A to 10x10 B.)

[bluea]

I'd add that vertical flow is much more reliable than horizontal anything.

Open a hatch under 7/7 water, and you'll have 7/7 water downstairs quite quickly.

Open a doorway next to 7/7 water and you'll have 3/7 water next door. Eventually. With some fluctuations. And the closing door will crush some.

Pumping is also pretty reliable - and something that can just be 'left on' even when there's nothing to pump.

[DeathOfRats]

I love this topic (water engineering in DF) I've tried building a timing mechanism (see Sir Pseudonymous' link) myself, but the design didn't quite work out, and I decided to move back to a more primitive but labor intensive system. I'm still on a preliminary mega-project, tho (you know your projects are really mega when you need another mega-project just to set the stage. Me, I need at least three for this one )

I'm going to have to disagree with you, bluea. Vertical (unpressurized) flow is only reliable in one thing: direction. You know it's going to go from up to down, but the speed is variable. I've seen anything from 3 ticks to drop 1 z-level to more than 10. If you want predictable flow, either you do some funky stuff to get rid of flow altogether for any time sensitive part of the mechanism(i.e., water flowing on its own is unpredictable. A pump is predictable) or, as Kanddak said, use high-pressure water.

Also, and due to a strange artifact of programming, timing for a bridge/floodgate is tied to whether you've built it before or after the pressure plate that activates it (innit fun?).

[Albedo]

And the closing door will crush some.

Do doors destroy water? Meh, even if they don't, drawbridges do, and it would be tough to create this without some of those - that's where your water loss will come in, most likely.

Have to figure out some way to maintain the level. Because otherwise it would just be tooooo easy. 

[darkflagrance]

In theory, if there is a risk of water being lost, you can also rig another mechanism to refill chambers from an infinite water source triggered by a pressure plate.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Closing doors destroy water, closing floodgates destroy water, closing and opening bridges destroy water (on the tiles the bridge occupies after its state changes).

There are allegedly 1200 ticks in a day, 28 days in a month, three months in a season, and four seasons in a year.

The last page of the thread I linked has a small, reliable repeater design that only requires an infinite water source and a 5/7 block of water for every cycle. I seem to remember it firing every 301 ticks, but I can't recall if I took Peewee's finding's into account in constructing the test model... Hmm... HellMOO is down, so I might fire up dorf fort again and try it out.

[HastyLumbago]

Sorry I abandoned this for so long. I want to thank you all for your input, and address some things that were said directly.

Personally I'd build a small repeater with water (smaller is better) which cycles every couple of seconds, then have the output of that going to a large dwarven computer using water-based logic gates to do binary counting and possibly some arithmetic. This would be much more reliable and would remove many of the problems with evaporation/random water flow. As an added bonus you can link it to spike traps to display the output in the corpses of your enemies!

This is pretty much what I'm doing. The spike traps I've replaced with  crystal glass floor tiles in a level above, which display either muddy or water tiles, depending on the state of the corresponding cell. Prior to my reading of the responses, when I believed water worked in a predictable way, I had planned to use pools of varying sizes to time out various intervals, which would empty into other sized pools, and so on...

Closing doors destroy water, closing floodgates destroy water, closing and opening bridges destroy water (on the tiles the bridge occupies after its state changes).

There are allegedly 1200 ticks in a day, 28 days in a month, three months in a season, and four seasons in a year.

Hmm, useful information, even if it doesn't give me much hope for this. You say allegedly. Where does that info come from? Also is there a way to get the game to... wait, I can one-step the game while it's paused, can't I? doesn't that make it use one tick? Also, to save me the extra quote, thank you for the link, truely, even if I accomplish this,my dwarfs will be standing on the shoulders of giants...

metaphorically, of course. Dwarves don't use mounts, do they? Oh god, I need to mod this in.

In theory, if there is a risk of water being lost, you can also rig another mechanism to refill chambers from an infinite water source triggered by a pressure plate.

Yes, and using hydro-static water pressure to acivate that system could work, if I understand Dwarf Water correctly.

...I'd suggest "larger is dwarfier"...

Fix'd. But seriously, a larger system seems to make this worse, I think, especially when one of the things I need is for chambers to empty of water reliably.

Not directly. You need to build an AND gate. Link each plate to a different door and arrange the doors in series.

I prefer the predictable timing of pressurized water. To slow things down, rely on the known 100-tick timing delay on floodgates and bridges.

I figured on using the AND gate, I just felt it would be more elegant to have the multiple requirements. as for the timing delay, I was given to understand that quality of craftsmanship had something to do with this. Does the same delay apply to triggers attached to say, a gear box? Is there a chart?

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Hmm, useful information, even if it doesn't give me much hope for this. You say allegedly. Where does that info come from? Also is there a way to get the game to... wait, I can one-step the game while it's paused, can't I? doesn't that make it use one tick? Also, to save me the extra quote, thank you for the link, truely, even if I accomplish this,my dwarfs will be standing on the shoulders of giants...

metaphorically, of course. Dwarves don't use mounts, do they? Oh god, I need to mod this in.

I say allegedly because I do not know for sure, though I have no reason to disbelieve it. Someone at some point said the wiki says that, and no one proclaimed otherwise, so that's what I've gone with. I don't know where on the wiki, and a few cursory searches for such things as "calendar", "time", "day", "frame", "cycle", and "tick" turn up nothing relevant...