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[Rat Of Wisdom]

If I designate a garbage dump zone on a channeled-out hole over a wooden wall grate surrounded by rock, and then designate an assload of lye for dumping, will it slowly fill the square with lye? (Or isn't lye a liquid? The wiki seems to suggest it is.)

You win an internet if you can guess from this what exactly it is I'm plotting. Hint, it's 0% functional and 150% awesome.

[Sphalerite]

Only water and magma can make flows of liquid.  Dumping lye in a square will simply result in a pile of lye, not a lye bath.  You can't make rivers of blood or booze fountains either, unfortunately.

[Shrike]

You can approximate lakes/rivers of blood for a season.
A whip weapon trap torture pit, your excess animals, fortifications and a water flush system can color quite a lot of water red. But it's just red food coloring, sadly.

According to the wiki, blood shouldn't spread, but it did in #40; I think it's just been fixed so that dwarf feet won't end up spreading blood everywhere.
River of blood

So, no caustic effects from dunking things in lye. Strong acids and bases don't have any more effect than consuming things from lead or pitchblende mugs. At least, not yet.

[Rat Of Wisdom]

Mrrr. Unfortunate, that is. Supposing, however, I filled it with 7/7 water and then dumped the lye in. All the lye would then have a "water covering", mmyes? (Also, displacement doesn't seem to be implemented, so dumping wouldn't cause it to overflow, right?)

This might even be better.

[Shrike]

Then you'd have wet lye, which is still inert. Or, perhaps, a wet barrel of lye. Caustic actions are still unsupported; additionally, while soap will do something in the next release, it's just a building material right now. 

There is no such thing as displacement of water due to solid objects, the same way dorf ignorance keeps them from recognizing that placing thousands of stones into a single tile  is not only impossible, but would result in a black hole or an explosion.

Evidently, Dorf Philosopher Uristmedes only figured out the Uristmedes screw. And he ran around naked and covered in water, blood, and vomit all the time, so any discoveries made in his 4/7 bathtub went unnoticed by dorf science.

[Safe-Keeper]

You're making lutefisk?

[Shrike]

I think you've figured it out. A new method to deal with Carp!

[Rat Of Wisdom]

Hmm, I know it won't be caustic, I'd just had my hopes up for it behaving as an actual liquid =(

Evidently, Dorf Philosopher Uristmedes only figured out the Uristmedes screw. And he ran around naked and covered in water, blood, and vomit all the time, so any discoveries made in his 4/7 bathtub went unnoticed by dorf science.

I lol'd, and therefore I sig'd.

You're making lutefisk?

I was just wondering if we're ever going to be able to cook that. And then trade the meals to elves, of course. But no, it's not lutefisk. Truth be told a lye bath wouldn't really have been satisfactory for my purposes =(

[Cheddarius]

What was your plan?

[Jetman123]

What was your plan?

He was going to make an acid pool out of lye, which is a natural corrosive acid.

[Sphalerite]

Lye is alkaline, not acid.  Although a pool of lye will still do horrible things to organic material that falls in it.

[Rat Of Wisdom]

What was your plan?

I pretty much needed paper. Which by an exceedingly simple definition is cellulose treated with lye (among other things). I needed this for a Kraft paper capacitor, which Wikipedia says are used for pulsed power applications and "may fail catastrophically due to high stored energy". I couldn't really think of a more dwarfy kind of capacitor to which my dwarven railgun could be hooked up.

(I've since given up on that plan and am instead going to build a bunch of supercapacitors with water and charcoal, linked together to form a Marx generator.)

[Odd!x]

how on earth did you plan on replicating that in a fortress?!

[Rat Of Wisdom]

Well, 3x3x3 towers like so:

Code: [Select]

╔═══╗ <- stone walls
║‼≈‼║ <- charcoal bars supported by charcoal floors
║‼≈‼║ <- entire thing flooded with water as an electrolyte
║‼≈‼║
╚═══╝

seemed sufficient for capacitors.

My resistors will be nickel-silver chains, I may encrust them with gems if I turn out to have enough. (There are bonus points on offer, of course, for making the colors correspond to IRL resistors, but that's a long shot.) All wires will be copper chains, or, if current needs to pass a z-level, a constructed copper block pillar. (Considering swapping the chains out with block walls so the graphics look connected.)

The actual dynamo will be a 3x3x3 block of magnetite mechanisms surrounded by a constructed copper block wall, powered by a perpetual motion machine that spans the entire top of my outdoor farm. Switches are breaks in the string of copper chains filled (or not) by upright copper spikes.

Rails are raising steel block drawbridges, with a retracting steel block drawbridge in between to form a barrel (of which there will be one for each cardinal direction). Projectiles are iron blocks, loaded by hatch from above. Above that will sit a control room with gem windows everywhere and a lever reserved for the King (when he arrives, which I will make sure he does when it's complete).

Finding the metal was an assload and a half of work, lemme tell you. *thanks Armok and the RNG for giving me dolomite on top of slate on top of gabbro*

The only real theoretical problem (aside from the slightly minor detail that electricity hasn't been implemented yet) is that I don't know which direction to point it, as I don't know where the elves and goblins are located...

And I need a name for it, of course.

[Cheddarius]

But... electricity isn't implemented.