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[Arrkhal]

Steam engines were described a mere 400 years after Alexander the Great's rule.  No one thought they would amount to anything, but that's because they weren't dwarves.  Well, except one guy thought that steam engines could be used to forecast the weather, and he was actually probably correct, since air pressure changes the boiling point of water.

And it sounds like gunpowder is going in, in a future release, though it will be off by default in the init.

[G-Flex]

Steam engines were described a mere 400 years after Alexander the Great's rule.

Explain? And no, the aeolipile doesn't count.

[Ramirez]

My personal mods I make place the cutoff point being where heat and carbon alone cannot extract the metals from their ores. This results in things like titanium carbide (brittle and mostly useless ceramic, although can be used to make cermets) appearing, although immediately useful elemental metals don't really appear. Also adding the platinum group metals works, as they are found naturally in platinum deposits.

[sunshaker]

Cinnabar is the ore of mercury that is present in DF, but mercury doesn't seem very useful in DF unless you plan on practicing dentistry.   

By Arrkhal I guess you could also make certain rocks be ores of mercury, though it's not yet possible to do reactions which require a container like a vial, as mercury should.  Don't know what uses mercury amalgams would have in DF.  Lots of crazy people throughout history were dumb enough to drink it, just because shiny has to = good.

Mercury Amalgams were useful in refining metals, though it is not a pleasant process. Basically mercury will form an amalgam with most other metals (iron, tantalum, tungsten and platinum being the exception). This lets you separate a metal that forms an amalgam from ore (basically it oozes out of the crushed rock), this takes WEEKS, then you separate the mercury from the metal (I think via sulfur to form Cinnabar but I'm not sure). see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patio_process (developed in 1557 for use in silver mining, but could be used with any metal that forms an amalgam, though different additives may be needed). I think, if I'm reading wiki right that you could do something similar to separate an alloy consisting of an amalgam metal and a non-amalgam metal (say a copper-iron alloy) and recover both of them afterwards (well maybe not aluminum but it has an interesting reaction to mercury). [Edit] This allows the refining of poorer ores (say 1 to 5% instead of 40 to 60%).

[Eagle0600]

You could give any smelting involving mercury [PRODUCT:2:1:SKIN_TANNED:NO_SUBTYPE:LEATHER:NO_MATGLOSS] to give a small chance of killing the worker (and anyone in the room). If anyone else has more experience with deadly leather than me, go ahead pint out where I went wrong.

[Flaede]

You could give any smelting involving mercury [PRODUCT:2:1:SKIN_TANNED:NO_SUBTYPE:LEATHER:NO_MATGLOSS] to give a small chance of killing the worker (and anyone in the room). If anyone else has more experience with deadly leather than me, go ahead pint out where I went wrong.

It needs to have a rare chance of inducing nuttiness. (or perhaps a cumulative effect, if such can be done with the current poison system)

[Eagle0600]

It can't. That up there was the best I could come up with. Feel free to tweak the chance and/or include it in a mod.

[immolo]

Steam engines were described a mere 400 years after Alexander the Great's rule.  No one thought they would amount to anything, but that's because they weren't dwarves.  Well, except one guy thought that steam engines could be used to forecast the weather, and he was actually probably correct, since air pressure changes the boiling point of water.

The basic sorta steam engine you are talking about was the one I mentioned Heron or Hero had created.

[G-Flex]

Which wasn't a steam engine any more than a paper fan is a wind turbine.

[TwilightWalker]

Which wasn't a steam engine any more than a paper fanwindmill is a wind turbine.

Fixed

In essence, it is a steam engine. As in, it uses heat and water to create mechanical energy. It's just a whole lot more inefficient and crude than a 'modern' steam engine.

[G-Flex]

That's incorrect. A better analogy might be one of those silly little pinwheel things, rather than a windmill.

The aeolipile wasn't really used to do any useful work ("work" in the scientific sense); it wasn't connected to anything and, by itself, couldn't really do much except sit there spinning.

So it's like a pinwheel: It demonstrates a basic concept that can, in fact, be used as an engine, but is not any sort of useful engine itself and doesn't imply that the knowledge existed to create one.

[Eagle0600]

Yes. The deciding factor is if it implies the knowledge required to make a functional steam engine.

Also to consider: Should common dwarves really be using something that only one obscure engineer knows about and couldn't implement properly anyway?

[G-Flex]

Yes. The deciding factor is if it implies the knowledge required to make a functional steam engine.

Right. I don't think there's much evidence that the people then understood the potential of it, nor did they likely have the manufacturing capability either.

[Eagle0600]

Agreed.

[Arrkhal]

Whether or not dwarves would have technology that ancient Greeks did is pretty far beyond the point.  There are definitely way better ways of deciding whether something should go into the game.  Are explosives dwarfy, or aren't they?  Is a steam engine dwarfy, or isn't it?

Also, even though the Greeks never thought of Hero's engine as anything but a curiosity, it still wouldn't have taken that much lateral thinking to have made it reasonably practical.  They knew of water wheels at least as early as 100 BC, and probably closer to 240 BC.  A stationary steam "spigot" blowing on a wheel could've easily set them on the path to a practical steam turbine engine.  Especially if they put two and two together with the Archimedes' screw and figured out that sealing the turbine in a housing increases efficiency enormously.

No one ever thought of that back then, but then none of them were dwarves either.  Jets of high pressure, lethally hot steam (heated by magma, of course) being harnessed to open doors and grind cave wheat doesn't seem that un-dwarfy to me.

More like a player-controlled megaproject, rather than a ready-built (M)achine component, but still reasonably dwarfy.