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[byrnsey]

So this is just a shot in the dark, I'm somewhat new to the game, but why couldn't there just be a [FORCE_FLOW] tag to go along with the flow tag?  It would designate any water with an artificial flow for its source.  Currently I only know of the pumps.  Any water wheel that was above water with that tag would not contribute any power to the system. (Conservation of energy wise it should actually be a huge drain, but whatever.)

So for instance, a 2 tunnels, one atop the other.  Holes at both ends.  A pump at one end, water fall on the other.  Water wheel above the top tunnel.  Assuming its connected to the pump, if you have a dwarf man the pump to kick start it, the second he lets go, the wheel (and flow) will stop, since the flow is flagged, and the wheel is contributing zero energy to the system.

Assuming you have your pump suck from an aquifer pit and dump into a river, we could have the regular flow tag supersede the force flow, somewhat like how salinity works, so the river would still work upstream and down to create energy.

I'm sure people are going to yell about the difficulty of getting power without perpetual energy, but it is an exploit, especially considering everything Toady is doing to simulate reality as close as possible.  How about Geothermal?  I think I saw a thread somewhere about that.  Basically, you channel a pool of water one tile from a magma tube, and construct the plant in between the two?  It would simulate the actual workings closely enough for DF, make perpetual energy a real feat depending on your map, heat engines are pretty simple so it wouldn't be an anachronism, (Unless you were to play a game running a couple billion years, but I'm sure someone's on that)  and it's just more... Dwarfy.  Humans build outside.  Dwarfs delve, dammit!

Hell even just have a chimney from a magma surrounded room with water carry steam powering an underground windmill...

[Bohandas]

I think that instead of being removed, the water-wheel/pump exploit should somehow be incorporated into the magic system.

[Talanic]

Make pumps have a slight water loss.  Problem solved - there has to be new flow in the system or it stops eventually.

[10ebbor10]

Make pumps have a slight water loss.  Problem solved - there has to be new flow in the system or it stops eventually.

Water is mesured in sevenths of a tile. So the minimal loss is 1/7 per pump which is pretty much.(Considering people build pump stacks whit 20+ pumps)
Either decrasing the pump efficiency or water wheel energy production should fix this easily.

[antymattar]

Make pumps have a slight water loss.  Problem solved - there has to be new flow in the system or it stops eventually.

Logic?

[EvilMoogle]

I've always thought that fluids should have some sort of "energy" on the tile representing the flow (energy of 0 being stagnant water, brooks might be 4, major rivers 10, whatever).

The water wheel would extract this energy from the water so a perpetual motion machine would eventually have water without any energy in it and stop flowing.

Could add a quality in there as well to determine efficiency (a standard quality wheel drains 4 energy from water, produces 90/100 power.  A masterwork quality wheel might drain only 2 energy from the water).

[Tharwen]

The way to realistically fix it would be to make pumps require slightly more energy than a waterwheel can provide, but to be honest, I think it's a good thing for the gameplay to have things like this in the game. It's not exactly a simple exploit, so it's not making 'standard' energy systems redundant.

[irmo]

I've always thought that fluids should have some sort of "energy" on the tile representing the flow (energy of 0 being stagnant water, brooks might be 4, major rivers 10, whatever).

Realistically they should, but that makes the fluid physics massively more complicated.

The basic problem is that waterwheels and pumps don't do the same operation in the game. Pumps take in energy and move fluid up a level, while waterwheels output energy without really doing anything with the fluid--it just has to be flowing, horizontally, in any direction.

It's kind of drastic, but I think waterwheels should have a drain (treat it like a grate) through which fluid has to fall to turn the wheel. The wheel then outputs power according to how much water per minute flows through the drain. This takes a lot more engineering to make your hydro-power system work (you need a dam, or maybe a shaft into the cavern) which I think would be a Good Thing.

The downside is that absent a way to raise or lower the entry/exit points of a river or drain water off the edge of the map, there might be sites where it's not possible where water power isn't available. That's somewhat realistic (on those sites you just have to use wind power, dwarf power or (eventually) animals on treadmills) but might be frustrating. So when the Army Arc stuff gets to the point that we're sending patrols/scouting parties/caravans to do stuff off-map, maybe one option would be to create a mining crew, designate a section of map edge, and say "change the elevation of this edge". Those miners go off the map for a few months* and the edge of the map goes up or down as requested.


* Because they're not just moving earth along the edge, but reshaping the terrain beyond that. The exact time would depend on how much edge you're moving, the number and skill of miners in the party, and the type of stone.

[Talanic]

Make pumps have a slight water loss.  Problem solved - there has to be new flow in the system or it stops eventually.

Logic?

Evaporation.  Although, I was putting it in the wrong place - make water wheels have a slight water loss.  1/7 water lost per month, perhaps.

[eataTREE]

Man, why you gotta hate?

Removing the water turbine exploit means no power other than windmills on maps with no surface river (since there are no more underground ones). And windmills, as we all know, do not produce enough power to power anything remotely useful or Dwarfy.

It's not like it's a 'ping, have instant free power!' exploit. They require four different machine components plus the masonry/carpentry of building the turbine vessel. On maps that do have a river or stream it is far easier to slap down a few water wheels than build a reactor.

I build the reactor vessel out of pitchblende blocks if I can find it, but I usually can't so I use the rarest and most unusual blocks I can find. Trading caravans usually have a few strange stone blocks.

Of all the bugs in the game... I would fix this one last.

[Bohandas]

Man, why you gotta hate?

Removing the water turbine exploit means no power other than windmills on maps with no surface river (since there are no more underground ones). And windmills, as we all know, do not produce enough power to power anything remotely useful or Dwarfy.

It's not like it's a 'ping, have instant free power!' exploit. They require four different machine components plus the masonry/carpentry of building the turbine vessel. On maps that do have a river or stream it is far easier to slap down a few water wheels than build a reactor.

I build the reactor vessel out of pitchblende blocks if I can find it, but I usually can't so I use the rarest and most unusual blocks I can find. Trading caravans usually have a few strange stone blocks.

Of all the bugs in the game... I would fix this one last.

Entirely agreed!

[G-Flex]

There's really no decent way to fix the exploit, because there's no concept of how much momentum or energy a given flow actually has. If that were changed, then it might be possible.

[greenskye]

I don't think "exploits" like this should be fixed until the other related problems have been addressed (such as little/no power on maps without rivers). I consider the dwarven reactor more of a placeholder until Toady can really take a good look at mechanics and power in general.

Not to mention, since DF is a single player game exploits should be low priority compared to new features or real bugs. Someone else using dwarven reactors doesn't impact your game play.

I do however support a more realistic approach to physics in general

[nitus]

Reducing the power given by waterwheels is no good, as it would make them useless.
 
Increasing the power required to operate a pump is also no good, as only one dwarf can operate a pump and an increase would make it impossible to operate manually.
 
Perhaps the fact that pumps and waterwheels are part of the same machine in a reactor would provide a means, but then what happens when you link it to a pump stack or other mechanism?
 
I tend to think of the water reactor as more like a charming in-universe dwarfism than a bug. And like eataTREE said, it's not like it takes no effort or knowhow to successfully build one and get it operational.

[Pilsu]

For a dwarf to be able to set forth a tidal wave with a screw pump is the source of the problem. If the pump worked slowly, moving one unit of water every 100 ticks or so, it would not only be more realistic but the lack of continuous flow to the downstream waterwheels, having been replaced with low volume, low frequency surges, would result in the waterwheels being unable to power the process further, necessitating an external powersource. Moving any given surge of water through the pump should require the full 100 ticks of uninterrupted power before anything happens. If the first tick of power moved the first load of water through and the volume suppressing relied on a cooldown instead, it'd simply result in stop-n-go designs, solving nothing.