This is a history of the fortress Mountain-Banners. As he has with several other groups of dwarves, our exalted King has commissioned us to bridge formerly impassable canyons, erecting spans that will forever stand as monuments to Dwarven bravery, inspiration, and unremitting toil. Assuming we survive; I'll lay you 3 to 2 we don't.
We've trained intensively all our lives in preparation for great works. Two of us are miner-warriors, skilled at delving and marksdwarfship. Two of us are masons; one also an architect, the other also a mechanic. Two handle food; one is also a brewer/cook, the other a gatherer. The seventh is our leader and part-time carpenter/woodchopper. Many of us have additional skills. Erith the Herbalist is remarkably proficient at any sort of blacksmithing and has a unusual gift for making anvils and statues. Urdim the Mason deeply understands how to work chalk, a valuable rock which we expect to find in abundance at our new home. Etur the Brewer expresses a strange fondness for pig tail fabric and has therefore focused on weaving, with clothesmaking as a secondary skill.
We are as lavishly equipped as we are highly skilled. Two copper picks, an anvil, 14 units of drink, several dozen units of assorted meat and turtles, seeds for all the underground crops, two dogs, some leather, copper, tin, coal, bauxite, and logs - emptied out the shop, we did. We even went so far as to raid a coal dump and haul away 88 units, as we understand there's no magma where we're going. If we bite it despite all this support, we're going to get some mighty sarcastic comments in Fortress Valhalla.
Our king points to a map and says "go here".
And go there we therefore do, dodging goblins, black bears, and vicious schools of carp to reach the very headwaters of a distant mountain river ....
...and there at last gaze upon our new home-to-be. The canyon we find ourselves is, in a word, siblime. Short of many resources other fortresses boast, mind you, but undeniably magnificent. It will take many years to span this gorge!
We basically have two choices for building our bridge. The first and more reasonable option is to place it about 9 or 10 z-levels above the valley floor, connecting two forested plateaux about 50 distance apart. The second possibility is a bit more high-flying: Span the gorge at least 14 z-levels above the valley floor, connecting two chalk precipices with a great vaulting arch more than 170 units long.
So elevated a span would, under normal circumstances, be rather impracticable. By great good fortune, however, there's a forested plateau right underneath the center of the upper gorge; a natural tower right beside it already rises much of the way to the very center of the future bridge. We can use the plateau as a base of operations, extend the tower further upwards, and build the bridge outwards to the cliffs.
Happily, we dwarves have told gravity to sit down and shut up for the duration of operations.
[ April 06, 2008: Message edited by: Fedor ]
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Topic: canyon engineering challenge (Read 38415 times)