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[Frogwarrior]

http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-2362-superdefenses
ok my df recording skills aren't that great, but hey.
my fort entrance is guarded by about five dozen dogs, a bear, three cougars, a leopard, and an alligator.

but that's not what I'm proud of.

I'm proud of the magma landmines.

[Excedion]

Yeah trust me those dogs wont do as well as you think against tough enemies.

I'm intrigued by the magma or should i say lava landmines. How is it you achieve this?

[Frelock]

I like it.  Pumps artificially pressurizing magma to ensure that it will spout out of the ground when triggered by the nearby plates.  Brilliant!

[blue emu]

Cool. Just dropping the Magma from above also works, but you need to use BIG hatches in order to drop it fast enough to prevent the elves invaders from out-running it. I use maximum-sized Drawbridges as drop-hatches.

[EveryZig]

I'm intrigued by the magma or should i say lava landmines. How is it you achieve this?

Magma gets pressure when moved by pumps.

I agree with Excedion that the rest of your defenses are not that impressive (weapon traps outside of the drawbridge seem like they would expose the mechanics to enemies), but the magma tube system more than makes up for it in terms of dorfness. You can drop it from above, but that just isn't as cool as it bubbling from below.

If I weren't too lazy to pumpstack, I would definitely try that out myself. Maybe I will embark on a volcano and do that.

Do your tubes have manual on/off levers as well as the plates?

[Solon64]

Goblin takes one wrong step, hears a whooshing, rushing, burning, bubbly sound from below.  Moments later, he is engulfed in a towering spray of burning hot melted rock, a flood of titanic proportions which washes over him and his comrades, melting them into various fleshy bits instantly.

At least their deaths are quick.  Except for the ones near the edge of the group.  And none of the deaths are painless, I guarantee.

+10 Dorfiness points sir

[Itnetlolor]

Reading the autopsy reports as I watch the video. 1 word.

Ow.

[Putnam]

"His head is melted."

[Frogwarrior]

Well, my main defensive system is not the cabal of dogs and such (which are currently helping shred the trolls into a fine mist, but mostly are just fodder) but my four squads of well-equipped dwarves. I just think it's hilarious that I have this pen built into the side of my entrance, so enemies that wander in suddenly get ganged by a million puppies.
The weapon traps are mostly just there for flavor and random wounding of wild animals; each of them only has a single weapon on them anyways. Never seen anything get stuck, and anyway I set everything to an alerta as soon as I get sieged.

BUT WHATEVER, you're here for the MAGMA LANDMINES. (Which, I should say, I saw the basic idea for them on this forum somewhere, but I had to figure out the details myself.)
Here's a map of my fort:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-10671-rampartroots
Pumping from below is much more practical than dropping from above, I think, because to drop it from above I would have to pump it up over EACH drop site. With this, I only have to build a single pump stack.
Also, with the triple pump stack I used, the magma comes out REALLY fast; the goblins couldn't run away fast enough. And now they're melted. Suckers. Also, the other landmine that was triggered by the trolls, the video zooms by it but the magma gushed out to a height of three Z-levels.

SCHEMATIC:
Side View:

Code: [Select]

OOOOOOOO
O /=~~~O  ~
O~=\ O~O ~~~
O /=~O~O~!g!~
O~=\ O~OOO#OO
OOOO~O~~~+~OO/= - screw pump
~ - magma
+ - door (hooked to pressure plates)
# - grate
!g! - burning goblin

NOTES:
-I have a few manual controls; I have one lever linked to all 15 doors; in case a wire gets crossed somewhere I can always pull the lever twice ensuring all 15 doors are then closed. Also, each pump stack has a lever that cuts a gearbox somewhere along its power supply train. Additionally, the Heart of !!Dwarven Science!!, the mechanism through which all of the power is channeled, is hooked to another lever so I have a full-stop kill switch on everything. It pays to have redundant safety mechanisms!
-Doors are preferable to drawbridges for the operating mechanics because they do not have the 100-tick delay - as soon as one of the four plates is triggered, the volcano begins.
-However, this means you REALLY SHOULD make DARN SURE your magma tubes are FREE OF ANY MAGMA-SAFE STONES before you pump in the magma! Otherwise the flow might push the stones onto the door spaces, preventing the door from closing. This is bad because it means you have pressurized magma spewing all over your landscape and, if you didn't put in a kill switch, you have only to wait for the awesome, awesome end. Fortunately, by repeatedly pulling the lever linked to all the doors, I was able to eventually flush the tubes out when this happened to me. (I was planning on building a drain area behind each of the problem sites, but the situation resolved itself before I finished it.)
-Magma will only flow up to the level of the highest screw pump pressurizing it, so, make sure your pump stack is tall enough. The landmine encountered by the goblins was at the height of the highest pump, so it was at the limit - the trolls triggered one 2 z-levels below, allowing for an impressive 3-z-levels tall geyser. For maximum awesome, make a huge stack way taller than you need it.
-Needless to say, there will be a lot of magma lying around on the surface, being dangerous, starting fires, etc. Make sure your dwarves don't all get killed fighting over a !!cave spider silk sock!! or two.

Lastly: The deaths are not painless. But neither are they as quick as facing my warriors. Most of them are able to escape from the torrent, only to bleed to death from their horribly mangled, melted bodies as what's left uncooked of their muscle tissue tries to drag them somewhere, anywhere, where the pain will stop.

[trees]

This is pretty awesome. I've never messed with machinery too much before, but I'm going to have to try this out. Imagining the look on the faces of those goblins as the magma shot straight up in to the air was priceless.

[Oliolli]

Wow, it has been some time but...

Frogwarrior

You deserve a *Bloated Tuber Biscuit* for this.

Congratulations.

[AWdeV]

That's awful. And awesome. Serves 'em right for being trolls and goblins, the bastards.

I can imagine several "redundant" safety mechanisms being jolly useful when working with pressurised (or any) magma. Maybe you could do a water basin/spout to stop the lava from doing too much damage? That way you can turn a siege into a horribly smelling obsidian farm.

[Number4]

Brilliant! That isn't simply good, it's Dwarven!

Can we build this also horizontally, a kind of Dwarven automatic flamethrower? Next megaproject: Dwarven Iron Curtain!

[FrisianDude]

Looks impressive. The animals would probably not last long against a goblin siege, though.

[Quantumtroll]

Today I learned that pumps pressurize magma.  A useful, if not absolutely !!critical!! bit of knowledge. Well done, and thanks!

Now to combine magma mines with an overhead water sprinkler — instant obsidian pyramids to entomb the invaders.  It'd be absolutely terrible to clean, of course, but it'd be a fun show.