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[Dynastia]

How would people feel about having to link levers to objects with an axle/gear train, the same way windmill/watermill power trains are built? Instead of a lever in the deepest darkest bowels of your fort being able to magically trigger the main drawbridge, you'd have to either build the lever much closer to the gate, or plan housing for a massive gear assembly reaching all the way from your bridge to your control room.

[Zesty]

I think it would be mighty inconvenient considering we've all been on this particular system for awhile.

I tend to rationalize that there's a network of hydraulic cables throughout my fortress.

[sockless]

Well using axles would be a bit of a pain.

I imagine that if levers were to be done over a long distance, it would use ropes. I don't imagine that it would use tie-rods over such a long distance, that's more a short distance (<5 m) thing.

Also, are axles passable?

I would like to see the deep inner works in my fortress, like piping and linkages for levers like you say, because right now it's a bit odd how you can link a lever to a very remote floodgate, which can be opened and closed in a jiffy by someone turning a lever. The lever would have to have a huge mechanical advantage, as you can somehow move a granite floodgate. A winding wheel would be a lot more realistic, so that's what I imagine that levers really are.

[Zesty]

Also, are axles passable?

Yes.

[Lord Vetinari]

I support as long as there are no distance limits (like the current axles that consumes part of the power that they carry). It would be annoying otherwise.

[Dynastia]

Yes, ropes seem a much better idea than axles/cogs. If it cost, say, 1 rope for every 5 or 10 tiles (with the only limit being on how much rope you're willing to use), plus you had to path your way to the trigger (perhaps with the option of rebuilding a wall over it afterwards and still have it function, to simulate the rope running through a very small hole), plus you had to build and install a pulley for every change in direction...

Well, I think it would take a lot of the exploityness out of building a great big Front-Gate-Mechanism-Of-Death (in my current fort I've got a single lever rigged to no less than 18 retracting bridges and four floodgates.... all for one entrance. It seems a little... too easy to build up such massive defences) You could still have massive lever-run mechanisms, but it'd cost a little more effort to set them up, and your control room would have a whole bunch of dwarfy cables and pulleys running through the bowels of it.

[Urist McCheeseMaker]

Here's my thought on this:
Levers should require a proper kind of linkage. But.. you should be able to pair them up, having up to 5 or so max in a single tile, if they don't carry mechanical power. If they do, they simply require gears and stuff like mechanisms use now. That's because mechanical power could also be delivered closer by, and the lever could simply be connected to something that simply puts that one little gear between the power source and the huge freaking drawbridge. So to speak.

It should be possible for a lever to be disconnected by broken linkage, like having a troll in your systems. This will lead to Fun. It will cause amusing failures and grand constructions. And to those who would object, I say: U mad?


Anyway, traps should require mechanisms or lever-action to be reloaded, if you can't let your dwarves get close enough to do it manually. Same idea. It'll make the gamebreakers (like weapon traps) and most epic things (giant dams?) a little harder to build, and thus, all the more epic.