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[K7avenger]

Oh, I agree with that 100%, and it IS an exploit/unintended feature no mater how you look at it. But I still defer to the point of other than possibly using it to flood the world with a liquid of your choice (which as I said, is fun the first time, but afterwards...), its not a very useful exploit. By all means, when we get dwarven Tesla coils, I think we should tackle this problem immediately, but until then...I mean, who cares if player #60224 uses an exploit to rig up a water fall in his meeting area. It effects no one but him. Its not like we pump up so much magma it runs off his map and spills over into yours. I'd instead start looking at that squad of hammerdwarves over there who have been beating on that goblin for the better part of a year and has YET to kill him. Or the marksdwarves who want to join the hammerdwarves in bashing the bloody pulp of a goblin with their crossbows instead of shooting it and putting it out of its misery.

I mean say you fix this, then what? Players will still pump up magma for whatever nefarious purpose, except they'll have to get slightly more creative with their power generation, and if this community lacks anything, it is NOT creativity.

[profit]

I think I am going to make a windmill powered pump stack but put the windmills in such a way that they should have used all of the energy for the wind and therefore should be invalid in the simulation.. Maybe I will block them with a wall or something... Just to exploit it that way. 

[Urist_McArathos]

I have to agree that this is a bug/exploit that needs to be saved for the end to be fixed, if ever.

I built a water reactor once, and in my experience they are FAR more trouble than they're worth.  The primary reason is because, at least for me, my FPS took a nasty nosedive from understand and processing all the flowing water.  Maybe I made a poorly designed one, but on a later map when I had a windmill farm, everything was running smoothly.  I decided to add a couple waterwheels to boost the power, and noticed another (albeit substantially smaller) FPS drop.  Windmills are FPS, water is not.  This alone, to me, is enough of a deterrent.

As for how to fix it, I agree that windmills need some tweaking before the dwarven water reactor is nerfed or removed.  However, if you're on a map with a perma-frozen river and no wind, well then you have no power.  That's the real world for you, and Dwarf Fortress has never been shy about leaving you completely screwed in situations where even the real world might give you a pass.

[G-Flex]

I think I am going to make a windmill powered pump stack but put the windmills in such a way that they should have used all of the energy for the wind and therefore should be invalid in the simulation.. Maybe I will block them with a wall or something... Just to exploit it that way.

Just curious what you mean by this. "Used all their energy for the wind"?

[Vattic]

I'd quite like to see this fixed but only because I relish the idea of more complex power generation.

I think I am going to make a windmill powered pump stack but put the windmills in such a way that they should have used all of the energy for the wind and therefore should be invalid in the simulation.. Maybe I will block them with a wall or something... Just to exploit it that way.

Only the space above the central tile has to be open to the air. You can have underground wind farms which from the surface are just rows of channelled out tiles.

Just curious what you mean by this. "Used all their energy for the wind"?

I imagine a huge array of windmills so vast that the wind cannot reach the inner ones having had all the energy taken from it. I'd assume this was possible but impractical. How much would an average windmill slow the wind?

[G-Flex]

You have a point. Windmill farms in real life can be pretty huge, but I guess they're spaced out enough for it not to be a problem.

[nitus]

Both windmills and waterwheels can be set in arrays with no power loss in the real world.
 
It's not like it kills the river, or the wind. There's a LOT of water/air flowing by. Spacing them is a safety/maint issue - you're not going to depower the wind somehow.

[profit]

Actually, you can "depower" the wind very easily.  windmills are highly susceptible to wind turbulence and with a very small amount of it from say a windmill in front of it, and the windmill will produce significantly less power or none at all.

Rivers power comes from drop usually, not flow.  So after the water has went over a water wheel or through a hydroelectric stations turbines, there is usually very little power left.  Undershot wheels which use flow not the drop, are horridly inefficient and are used in only the lightest of applications.   DF of course apparently uses only undershot wheels, which surprises me it can turn a millstone, much less turn 10 of them...

[nitus]

That's nitpicking. Wind farms in regions with steady strong winds pack turbines as close together as can safely be managed -- mere feet apart, in a line perpendicular to the wind. In less optimal locations they do have to be much farther apart to avoid "shadowing" but they're still in no sense exhausting the wind supply.
 
DF-style undershot wheels can be lined up as far as there's enough flow to produce enough torque.

[irmo]

Both windmills and waterwheels can be set in arrays with no power loss in the real world.

Then why hasn't anyone built a real dwarven water reactor?

[K7avenger]

Friction. Mostly. And if it wasn't for that, then it would be because at best it would be energy neutral. Laws of thermodynamics and what not.

[profit]

DF-style undershot wheels can be lined up as far as there's enough flow to produce enough torque.

After one they would have used most of the flow's energy, unless they were badly designed.   And the statement about having little power remains accurate unless they have a hellacious surface area or a very fast river.

Even in most undershot wheel applications except very light duty they used a slope that would be the equivalent of a drop in dwarf fortress in order to get some speed on the water and create force on the wheel.

http://greenthefuture.com/graphics/hydroelectric_diy_wheel.jpg

Falling water is where the power is at, and taking the power from water that is above where the water is flowing to is usually exponentially more efficient and powerful than just using a flow.

[profit]

That's nitpicking. Wind farms in regions with steady strong winds pack turbines as close together as can safely be managed -- mere feet apart, in a line perpendicular to the wind. In less optimal locations they do have to be much farther apart to avoid "shadowing" but they're still in no sense exhausting the wind supply.

Modern wind turbines.   Older style ones do not do nearly as well.   

Even with modern ones, you will most of the time see they tend to put the turbines in a single row perpendicular to the prevailing winds.   

Windmill farms, do exist but only where the high winds make the losses from the ones in front acceptable.

[nitus]

Yeah, I guess you're right. Even in the best environment they need to be a good 10-15 meters apart to entirely eliminate interference under all wind conditions. And that's modern high-tech ones. The kind of creaking wooden monstrosity the dwarves build would be lucky to power a millstone in the real world.

BTW in real world applications, by the end there they had waterwheels designed to operate in a variety of modes. Overshot, backshot, undershot, breastshot. Some "plants" could manage several modes, usually operating at different speeds per mode. The industrial revolution in the USA used breastshot wheels, but the more significant historical uses (like the romans) used dwarf-style undershot wheels.


Back to the water reactor, though, I'm with the idea that a simple fix would be to just have pumps pump less water per step - like say 1 zlevel of water. That would stall the typical reactor design, and it wouldn't require a complex overhaul of fluid dynamics in DF. I've used the odd hand pump in real life and it didn't risk flooding the region in five turns: DF pumps are crazily powered.
 
And why *should the dwarves be able to easily power something like a pump stack, anyway? Aside from that we have gotten used to it. It's not like they're that high tech. If needs be you can always get half your population down there operating pumps.

Then why hasn't anyone built a real dwarven water reactor?

Irmo, running a line of undershot wheels down one bank of 2000 km of river isn't perpetual motion. Each waterwheel takes a negligible amount of power out and the river keeps on flowing. We can do this in the real world, although we never have as there's no point in having 2000 km of waterwheels doing nothing. And no it wouldn't back up the river.
 
We can't build a water reactor. Even if the design was 100% efficient and frictionless and never lost water it would at best only power itself, and even that would take crackerjack finesse to set in motion. And of course no real design can be 100% efficient. Dwarven tech would have a hard time doing 5%.

[G-Flex]

Back to the water reactor, though, I'm with the idea that a simple fix would be to just have pumps pump less water per step - like say 1 zlevel of water. That would stall the typical reactor design, and it wouldn't require a complex overhaul of fluid dynamics in DF. I've used the odd hand pump in real life and it didn't risk flooding the region in five turns: DF pumps are crazily powered.

Eh, to be fair, it still wouldn't prevent trivial perpetual motion. You would still be able to very easily power an arbitrarily-large set-up of waterwheels with some pumps.