A new invention has been brought to me by Urist McArchimedes. He has claimed that by use of a single lever, he can move every item in the world. With the flick of a lever, he can send trade goods to the depot, bones to the craftsdwarves, goblins to their deaths, and leave the haulers to fish and drink ale with the philosopher.
I told him he was full of it.
He brought me back these plans for a first prototype.
.o.
. .............
. . _ . _ . _x
. _. _. _.
. _.. _.. _..
._..._..._...
The plan is from the side. Every _ is a single tile bridge, and every _ is linked to his single lever. Spaces are space, and .'s are walls, natural or otherwise.
The o is a garbage pit, and the x is the output.
From my initial experimentation, the prototype is sound. Dropping in wooden cups on the left side and repeated pulls of the lever eventually resulted in wooden cups appearing, almost by magic out the right. When the cups first started pooring out, Urist whooped and hollered, and ran down to the grand dining room to throw a most excellent party.
Alas poor Urist. The haulers union took him in the night, and several hours later, his skull was found in a tower cap mug just beyond the output of his prototype device.
Several haulers were hammered as a result, and many haulers were put to work carrying large stones back and forth purposelessly as punishment. The hammerer has informed me that such incidents will never happen again.
But all I have is this prototype plan, and I am no McArchimedes. There are a multitude of problems with this... conveyor belt of his, and I don't think I can solve all of them alone.
Now, I have surmised that the entire purpose of his design is to move items back and forth around a very large fortress without the need for dwarf interaction. It also has to be simple to build, repeatable, and placeable nearly anywhere. This means that a simple cascading set of bridges forming steps downwards is impractical, as the design could not be repeated indefinitely, since it would not be able to move objects back up and would thus hit the bottom of the mountain before crossing the fortress.
The problems I see with his design are as follows:
It appears that the amount of time it takes for the cups to reach the end of the design is approximately proportional to 2 to the power of the number of levels with bridges * the total number of times an ascending set of bridges is repeated. (A statistician philosopher could probably give a much better answer for how long on average it would take to move up x times with equal probably of moving up or down, I'm not certain it is exponential) However, this only works when there are bridges which cannot (or can only with low probability) fling objects back to the left. This was the purpose of the 3 tile drops. Without these drops, the cups are incredibly unlikely to make it to the end of the conveyor belt. However, if the three tile drop could be removed in some way, through timing of some other method of blocking travel in certain directions, the design could be shrunk down, maybe even to a height of 2. If that were so, the cups would truly fly through the conveyor.
Cups could be flung from the bottom level to the top level, and even back out the input on truly rare occasions. I believe some kind of grate or hatch could be put in the way of the larger falls, preventing items from coming all the way back up, however, finding a place to put such a grate is quite challenging even in the current design, never mind any flatter design.
Haulers were still needed to dump items into the input of the device. Perhaps another of the Archimedes family can could come up with a way dwarves moving towards a stock pile would drop their items (or themselves, if they can escape the device, which should be possible if there are ramps under the bridges) on a particular square thus allowing true automation of the device.
I beg you, inventors of the world, do not let the only life claimed by this conveyor belt be dwarven. Our fortresses must pile the bones of our enemies directly in our craftsdwarf's shops, our fortresses must pile our crafts directly in our depots, and they must continue to do so, even if no dwarf remains alive to trade. For otherwise, how can we truly call ourselves dwarves?