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[Thatdude]

This agrees with my own experiments.  Creatures and objects fall at 1 Z-level per 6 tick.  Water falls at an unpredictable, pseudorandom rate.  Cave-ins fall instantaneously.

I'm glad someone else found the same results as me. A third test for me showed that water really falls how it pleases taking only 68 steps to fall 5 z-levels (as opposed to the 104 and 96 previously). This is going to make it hard...

Also, a single 7/7 of still water makes little to no difference on falling from a 6 z-level drop (it was how I set it up ok?).

Finally @Vicid, I think the point of the 'hammer' idea was just to get a dwarven 'submarine' to 'explore' volcanoes and the bottoms of oceans. If I remember correctly, the dwarf doesn't go down with it, instead it drops and leaves the top of the 'handle' poking out so you can dig down through it and make a home in the 'head' before sealing it off somehow. It didn't turn out to be the ODST type thing I (at the very least) am going for.

[Reelyanoob]

My proposition involves no cave-ins, for the record.  It's completely reusable for the purpose of orbital drops.  As for magma sea explorers, that's a bit trickier.  Water acts strange in a cave-in, and almost always appears atop whatever caved in.  This is primarily because cave-ins are instant, while water and creatures take time to fall.  There's also the issue of displacement in the magma-piston style.  And then, ultimately, SMR is all-consuming, and any cave-in that hits it will vanish into the SMR.

Yeah, the only luck I've had is to pump the magma sea away, then floor over the SMR. which sort of defeats the purpose of the drop chamber idea. You can also channel into SMR cells which have not been exposed/visible. This is an exploitable bug to punch through SMR :- Channel into the SMR, this will leave a gap with a ramp, but cannot be used like a normal ramp. Then, put a floor on the original level you channeled (it will be perfectly safe, but say "Magma Flow"). After flooring, you can drop a cave-in through the SMR cell. I got different results depending on whether I put a support below the cave-in (resting on the 'floor' i built) or hung the cave-in from above.

I forget which is which (support below or support above), but one way plugged the gap (it ate a multi-z-level cave in column and turned it into a single 1x1x1 cube in the original SMR location of normal stone - i think this was the "dangling" cave-in). The other way the column broke right through the SMR and landed all the way on the ground of HFS.

[OcelotTango]

Now I'm not actually sure if this actually works, but working on the theory that if you drop a cube of cast obsidian with 7/7 water and a dwarf inside, the entire assembly will make it to the drop site intact, albeit drowning. That said, I'm not actually sure this is true, but I do recall a similar approach failing in the magma drop thread due to the fact that if it's enclosed the dwarf has no chance of not drowning. I'm wondering if this approach could be further expounded upon for dwarf pods.

Also, dwarves falling into liquid look at the fall before they come in contact with the liquid. ex: a dwarf falls 10 z levels before hitting a body of water, the dwarf will die. A dwarf falls 1 z level before falling 10 in water, he lives. That's why falling down the entire volcano doesn't kill you, the fall before the liquid is minimized.

[Girlinhat]

I believe this is why the dwarf in these theories is submerged above-ground, and then dropped.  They count as "already in water" and thus fall 0 levels before hitting the ground, relatively speaking.

[Eddren]

I think what we really need to do is average the amount of time the water speed clocks in for about ten tries, take that, convert it to Z-levels, and then take however fast the Dwarf falls, compare the two, and place the water lower then the dwarf accordingly. Pretty much, he falls into the water and should stay with it just long enough to pass through the magma/survive the cave-in.

[Girlinhat]

No, really we need to find water's slowest falling speed, and account for that with some 1-2 levels of extra water for security.  Because it's random, there needs to be an amount of padding.  An "average" solution will only give average results, with plenty of dwarven deaths who fell 50 levels without their liquid parachute.  Which is fun too, but not utterly productive.

[MarcAFK]

I seem to recall seeing in another thread that a dwarf that goes to sleep underwater cancels his drowning, maybe something could be done with syndromes to make a water contaminant that puts the drop dwarf to sleep temporarily so he survives the drop, then when the chamber hits and the water releases is awakens?

[lanceleoghauni]

I still don't see why you're not just using cages. wouldn't that be easier?

[Girlinhat]

How in the world would a cage solve anything?

[Eddren]

Easier? Yes.
Until they, oh, I dunno, REACH THEIR DESTINATION.

[Vicid]

Would a cage linked to a lever open if the floor it was linked to collapsed? Because linking them to a lever after they fall is really defeats the goal here.

[Eddren]

That would be the problem, yes.
You'd need to put in a delay for it to work. Either that, or two separate Levers, carefully timed.

[Thatdude]

The problem I see with cages is, yes they will land completely safely with no harm done sine objects don't take any fall damage ever. It's just how would you get the dwarf out at the bottom? Linking everything up at the top then dropping a cave-in is likely to deconstruct the cage so I don't think that'd work and having a dwarf to put everything together at the bottom would be incredibly slow and defeat the point of this whole exercise and dwarves aren't smart enough to let themselves out.
So no on the cages...

[OcelotTango]

Yeah, you can't drop cages, the mechanisms deconstruct, and you're left with an inert cage at the bottom.

[Musashi]

With cages, the trick would be to find something that destructs the container after landing. Fire or magma would do that.
Of course, it would also roast the dwarf inside, which is, for once, unquestionably unproductive and unwanted here.