Gah.. so many people posting in this thread... 7 replies... I need to stop reading books in the middle of posts.
And writing them.
Are you kidding, I barely filled a page with that. I obviously should have written something more comprehensive.
If a minecart is an option, a dwarf should probably always choose the minecart. The trickier thing is keeping track of which goods can and cannot go on the cart. If a minecart acts like a stockpile, it needs to be connected to a stockpile to dump things in, and it needs to keep track of wich stockpiles the track is connected to.
I don't think you would necessarily have a single track that winds the full hight of the fortress. You might for mining purposes, but I imagine having issolated tracks carts for different industries, running side by side.
Well, no, minecarts can't always be the option, because what if you are, say, looking to bring some food from a farm to a food stockpile, and the food stockpile is 5 tiles away, wheras the nearest mine cart is 100 tiles away, and the tracks don't even lead to anywhere within 60 tiles of the food stockpile, because you've only laid down tracks in the heavy mining segments. You have to check to see if that's the case before making your decision, of course, but there are reasons not to go there.
As for the tracks and carts for different industries, I was thinking about this when I was talking about the "rollercoaster" aspects of the minecarts in some of the other threads, and an old idea I had about conveyor belts-
I remember in the old improved mechanics thread, one of the things I thought of for trying to make more fortress equipment that actually used power was to use a conveyor belt that could be set up directly from a workshop, so that its outputs would automatically be carried away from the workshop - potentially directly into the next workshop, if it was like a clothing industry, so that cloth could be automatically moved from the farmer's workshop to the dyer's workshop to the loom to a dumping point at/near the stockpile. It would automate some of the hauling that takes up so much dwarven time, and would be a neat way to make use of waterwheels to make a more "industrial" type of dwarf without actual steampunk.
Well, for one thing, you have to do that "one-time" setup for every workshop, which you have to do for every fort you build.
But anyway, one of the things I rather liked the concept of, especially when I was talking about the "conveyor belt" idea was that you could somehow designate a literal supply line.
If you had, say, a farm which you set to grow pig tails, you could designate that to be fed to the farmer's workshop, which would probably have to be hauled. From there, however, a conveyor belt could be built that automatically sends the output of the farmer's workshop to the dyer, whose output goes to the loom, whose output is simply dumped into an clothing stockpile area. Rather than having to micromanage jobs that keep getting canceled, you could simply set them to "work as supplies come in".
Basically, if you can create a way to "mechanize" minecart motion by throwing mechanisms under the tracks, and setting up roller-coaster style "acceleration wheels" that are simply wheels that turn due to the torque applied through mechanisms in order to push along a cart that is moving slowly enough through one of the tiles that is mechanized, it will be able to push those carts along a path, or push it up hills so that when it goes down the hills, it can just carry on its own momentum forward.
If you build a full circuit of mechanized carts, however, you could recreate that conveyor belt approach.
That is, if a workshop is attended, all "finished products" from a workshop could be offloaded from a workshop into a cart as it passes by, and all "raw materials" that it will need for the queued jobs can be input into the workshop without needing to have a hauling job performed - workers just automatically offload or take in whatever they need as long as they are at the workshop as the cart goes by.
Then, you can have supply chains like sending a cart track on a loop between a farm, the farmer's workshop, the dyer, the loom, the stockpile, and maybe the trade depot. Minimize your need to actually haul things through automated movement of goods.