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[Master Catfish]

I've had a most fantastic idea for making an underwater saw-blade trap, but I want to know if it will work first.  I don't want to spend 8 hours playing DF only to become extremely disappointed.  Essentially, I want a constructed underground aqueduct which carries enemies/nobles/cats into a saw blade trap.  The kind folks on the IRC channel have informed me that you need to keep the water at less than 7/7 for a flow to carry creatures around in it.  Here are my questions: 

1. Will creatures carried by flowing water still push down pressure plates?  Is there some other way to make them get chopped up reliably?

2. How do I get flowing water to be less than 7/7?  I think I have an idea of how to do this, but any suggestions would be welcome.

[Hyndis]

It won't work. Friendlies only trigger traps if they are unconscious.

You might be best off dumping them into a pit full of spike traps. Also its very hard to control the water to that precision. Its very easy to accidentally drown everyone while trying to push them.

[Master Catfish]

That's all right, it was mainly going to be for goblins anyway.

[BigD145]

In 40d the enemies would run from a wall of water. You may be able to use that to your advantage.

[Psieye]

Variant: if you make your saw blade (weapon) traps at the bottom of a deep pit, you can rely on creatures getting unconscious after the fall (though they may die from the fall itself). Friendlies trigger traps if they fall unconscious on them (as do TrapAvoid units).

Variant2: Spike traps hit everything, even friendlies. Again, wash the victims into a pit and let the water drain out through grates/fortifications out the sides. Then activate the spike traps (repeatedly) for desired effect.

Water: Essentially you want a 'pulse' of water flow not a continuous flow. That can be very hard to achieve depending on the width and openness of your plans. You'll be building pump stacks to get pressurised water that you're hopefully recycling or draining away efficiently to make your contraption reusable. I'd consider setting up "ammo crates" of water high up (altitude for pressure) - open a crate to get a single pulse of water, reload it slowly while you still have more crates available.



Mind, that water section above was theorycrafting from me. To be sure whether it works or not, go to the DF2010 arena and experiment with the creature & water creation settings. The arena conveniently starts out with a flood of water going out.

[Master Catfish]

Just had an idea.  What if I made a closed cycle of water?  Like this:

Code: [Select]

====================
==WWWOOOOWWWWWWPP===
=WW=============PP==
==WWWWWWWWWWWWWWW===
====================
Where W is water, O is saw blades, and P are pumps.  The water flows in a counter-clockwise direction here.  Also, this way the bloody water will get going in a cycle and not be lost off the edge map, right? (gorier is better IMO)

[Hyndis]

When weapon traps kill something there is about a 20% chance that the corpse gets stuck in the weapon trap, jamming it. This means that you have to frequently maintain the traps. Spike traps don't have this problem.

[Psieye]

Hmmmmmmm, a washing machine of gore... very appropriate. You'd need to engineer the water content carefully adn if you ever want to loot from your kills down there, you'd need to be more elaborate, but in principle this could work I think. Just be sure to use spike traps over most of the area (in addition to the weapon traps in the small kill zone) so you don't have to worry about maintenance if the weapon traps get jammed. No need to be fancy about the spike traps - just have a noble or some such push and pull it forever while the washing machine has content.