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[SilentThunderStorm]

Okies... been having a thought, but don't have enough know-how myself to pull it off.

I want to create an AUTOMATED obsidian farm to train my military, and to generate obsidian goods/blocks/etc.

The way I am imagining this being set up is to have a water tower on one end, and a magma tower on the other.  The area between them is where the actual obsidianification would be done, and would be a 1 z-level pit 32x10 with three 10x10 retracting bridges centered within it.  The remaining 2 spaces would be left, one on either end of the long pit, to house pressure plates to determine depth of magma (on the water tower side) or water (on the magma tower side).  The bridges would cover a pit that is 30 long x 8 wide x n levels deep, the remaining 2 spaces (from the upper pit;  32 tiles - 30 tiles for the lower pit) would be left as two long strips of 1 tile each all the way down the side of the pit, to provide seating for the bridges.

How I would like to see this working is that a dwarf up top pulls a lever, and the machine starts up.  First,  magma is pumped out from the tower to the top of the bridges.  When the pressure plates on the water tower end determine that they are all covered in 2 z-levels of magma (to prevent evaporation), the bridges are triggered, and drop the magma into the bottom z-level of the pit.  After the 100 tick delay (which conveniently would allow for the remaining magma on the pressure plate squares to drain/evaporate), the bridges close again, and the water pumps perform the exact same routine.

Obviously, once water hits magma at the bottom of the pit, obsidian will form.... However, this is not !!SCIENCE!! enough.  This entire process needs to repeat itself automatically until all z-levels of the pit are filled with obsidian, and then STOP so it can be mined and happiness can ensue.

So far, until I can get a decent idea as to how to proceed, this is all on paper...I am having a few difficulties with this design.

1) I can see how to trigger the pressure plates once they are all covered with magma/water... simply attach each pressure plate to a gear, and attach the gears to each other sequentially.. apply power to one end, and the power will not come out the other until all of the pressure plates are simultaneously active.  This would work fine for pump control, as the pumps require power to activate...does it still work for bridges?  If not, how does one trigger a bridge with an AND gate?

2) I am looking up timing controls now to compensate for the 100 tick delay... this way, when the pressure plates empty off (due to the bridge dumping), I can time when to activate the other set of pumps, and accurately assume that the bridges have closed.  Or am I over-thinking, and there is some way of determining directly that the bridges have closed?

3) I am unsure how to switch power from one system (like magma) to the other (like water)... in other words, once the magma side has done its thing, and the 100 tick delay has expired, and the bridges have closed, how do I then trigger the water side rather than the magma?

4) How do I get the entire process to shut down when complete?  My initial thought is to have a separate pressure plate up top (probably on the side of the bridge pit, and centered between the towers).  This one (two actually, water and magma) would trigger if covered by (2/7 magma OR 2/7 water) AND bridges have been open for xx ticks.  This would require a separate timing mechanism, at least.

5) Last but not least... if I succeed at getting this entire system automated, and get a dwarf to throw the switch, then that switch will be in the same position when all is said and done... (ex. He turns it on, it is still 'ON' when process completes)... this might lead to issues with repeating the process.  Is there a way to trigger the switch to turn itself off (somehow, I strongly doubt this)?  Is there a way to have the system trigger whenever the switch is thrown, regardless of its actual position?  Would I simply have to have the dwarf thrown the switch twice in succession every time he started it ('OFF' then back to 'ON')??

I would really love to build this thing as my introduction to serious dwarf mechanics... but lost as to where to start with it.  Building this system to work with two switches (water and magma - color coded and such) seems far easier to do, but far less worthwhile.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[ohgoditburns]

I think it might be better to use a system with 2 floodgates, and a single bridge (or multiple if you want a larger area) over a pit. To avoid issues with evaporation and pressure plates, maybe use a system of timing repeaters to work the bridges and floodgates.

Code: [Select]

Water..........Magma
_____.........._____
|...|..........|...|
|~~~|..........|~~~|
|~~~|..........|~~~|
|~~~|..........|~~~|
|~~~F__bridge__F~~~|

With repeaters, you could have:

1. Open water floodgate
2. Close water floodgate
3. Open bridge
4. Close bridge
5. Open magma floodgate
6. Close magma floodgate
7. Open bridge
8. Close bridge
GOTO 1

To end the cycle, you could have a pressure plate at the top level that triggers when any liquid hits it. Use this to disengage the system. This system requires  pumps to constantly fill the water towers, or towers that are large enough to hold enough liquid for the entire operation..

[SilentThunderStorm]

That is, in effect, the basic premise.

Floodgates vs pumps is really only important to me based on the map... if I have sufficient headroom to build actual towers, then floodgates would work fine... if it is more efficient to dig sumps/reservoirs, however, then pumps are the obvious choice.

The other reason I was thinking pumps was to avoid fire men and such from popping out at random, but this could be handled by other means.

Evaporation was, I was thinking, kinda handled by having the system trigger the bridges to dump when coated by 2 z-levels... wouldn't that stop evaporation?  Also... how would I know how long it would take to cover the bridges with water/magma to time them properly?  That seems like a very long build/try-out/tear-down/rebuild/repeat cycle if I was doing that by trial and error... especially with the difference in the spread rate of water vs magma...

You mentioned 'issues with pressure plates'... was I missing something?  Would timers actually be better?  Or is that simply for a faster cycle time between open and close?

[ohgoditburns]

Code: [Select]

_____.........._____
|..%%__bridge__%%..|
|~~~|..........|~~~|
Water..........Magma

Yeah, that will work too. The advantage of using a tower (with pumps) is that the liquids are pressurized. That means as soon as you open the floodgate, the bridge will get covered nearly instantaneously. This will increase how fast you can build the obsidian.

The problem I mentioned is that if you are using a pressure plate in the system to do the timing, after the magma step, it'll still have 1 unit of magma on it. Then on the water step the water will cast that into obsidian above the pressure plate.

Using an n-step repeater you can attach each of the steps in magma production to a different pressure plate in the repeater. You'll have to do some !!science!! to determine the appropriate length of the repeater and the timing for each step. The easy ones should be the bridges... the harder ones will be determining when to stop the pumps.

[Reelyanoob]

I'm not sure exactly how well this would work but :-

Code: [Select]

##########
MMMMMMMP#
##########
#PFWWWWWW
##########
MMMMMMMP#
##########
#PFWWWWWW
##########


Alternate rows of the above design, the magma is pumped from the west, water from the east. When the magma hits the pressure plate on the right at 7/7, a retracting bridge under the magma opens, dumping it down the pit. The magma pressure plate is also linked to the floodgate F in the water channel. When this floodgate opens, the water hits it's own pressure plate (might need to be set to something like 5/7 or 6/7), and opens a bridge under the water, dropping it down the hole after the magma has has a moment to settle.

Actually the above probably won't work because the water can't spread out properly you might want 2 layers of bridges at the top, so you can fill both water and magma at the same time.

Although I would definitely used the idea of a floodgate in the water level which is linked to the magma bridge dropping, on the other side of this floodgate would be the pressure plate for dropping the water. Only thing now is to ensure that the magma bridge doesn't close before the water has dropped, so there might be some clever timing, or linking the water drop pressure plate to BOTH bridges (the magma should have already dropped before that though)

Having two stories of bridge, filling at the same time, at the top will reduce the need for a complex timer system.

[SilentThunderStorm]

I was assuming that since a pressure plate has a 100 tick delay before releasing, that any magma/water built up on it would have either drained away or evaporated before the bridges closed...

This does end up running a slow setup, though... after all a 5 z-level deep pit would then take (5 * (100 * 2)) = 1000 ticks to fully fill.

to be honest, I am not really familiar enough with the timing mechanisms... will have to experiment with them and get better with them before ANY fully automated system might work properly.

@Reelyanoob:

That was the essence of my original plan... with the exception that rather than having to have multiple levels of water and magma, you simply have one that alternates between the two and dumps the resulting fluid onto the last layer at the bottom of the pit.

The other thing to remember, though, is that you don't need 7/7 of anything.

If 1/7 of water hits 1/7 of magma, you will end up with 7/7 obsidian. Welcome to dwarven physics.

I was working at timing it such that the far end of the bridges hit 2/7 simply to ensure that there were no 'blank spots' (areas not covered), and to ensure that there was enough to avoid evaporation problems.

[Reelyanoob]

You might want to look at the recent swimming pool thread where I worked out equations for exact amounts of liquid to dump to fill areas to a specific height.

Also, with the small times we're talking, there will be (almost) zero evaporation. 2/7 is just to be safe.

Say the pit is 7 x 7 for simplicity, you need 2x7 cells 100% full of water or magma (that's where my 7/7 comes in). It's a lot easier to fill a tube to 7/7 level, and detect when it's full.

These can both measured exactly, then dumped onto the bridge level to spread out, then the bridge opens to drop the whole lot below. The measuring tubes would resemble my comb-shaped tubes in the diagram i posted. That also will reduce the time needed for the water or magma to spread out once on the bridge level, making the whole device faster and reducing evporation.

It may actually be better to dump the water first. Because then you will only get pockets of water down below due to errors, not pockets of magma.

[SilentThunderStorm]

Ah, there is that.. it would be nice to dump both of them at once... but I forsee a few problems.

What happens if they collide in midair, for example?  If such a thing is possible, they would turn to obsidian on the way down, and cause collapse spam, and possibly destroying some of the obsidian you had already created... this would also lead to uneven layers.

An additional issue would be that even a single tick delay in the operation of the bridges would cause the lower one to form an entire layer of obsidian on it... which would then be dropped causing much obsidian destruction, and coughing fits for anyone in the area.

It doesn't entirely eliminate the difficulty of timing, either... you would still need a way to check when the pit is full... and doing it like that, I don't know how you would do this.

With my original idea, the fluid that you would attempt to drop wouldn't actually drop, because the pit under it was full of solid obsidian... so it would stay up top, and trigger a pressure plate to stop the system, and return the bridges to the closed position (which should also destroy the remaining excess fluid, in case it happens to be magma).

As for your idea on the swimming pool, I had seen that.

I had not actually considered doing it by room measurement, but that could work quite well in this case.  I will have to start working out some math on that.

@everyone:

Still leaves my original questions then about switching the system from one side to the other automatically, and what happens when the switch is still in the 'ON' position after the process has completed.

[forsaken1111]

one major problem I see... you mention using pressure plates to detect when there is sufficient magma on top for obsidianification. Wouldn't these plates be destroyed when the magma in that tile turned into obsidian? (unless I misunderstood your intent..)

[Reelyanoob]

That's why the floodgate was in my first diagram (the one in the water tube, triggered by the magma dropping), it creates a link / and a delay between the magma dump and the water dump. They are NOT dumped at the same time.

But it will need to be modified for the bridge-level design.

This is another reason I think 2 separate bridges will be needed.

What happens to the 1/7 water or magma left on the pressure plate? once you fill witht he opposite liquid obsidian will block up the pressure plate.

Ahh ninja'd!!

[SilentThunderStorm]

On consideration... it may be far easier and faster to incorporate many of these ideas together...

Towers do make much more sense than cisterns.. filling the bridge surface much more quickly than a pump would.

The swimming pool idea seems to be a very intelligent approach to this... by calculating the square area needed per level, I can simply build a tower to match... and fill on the 'off' cycle.

I could create a timing system to cycle this n number of times, n being equal to the number of z-levels deep that the receiving pit is.

This could actually work.

Been thinking about the level problem, and realized that it could be just as easily solved by using a pressure plate to initiate the reaction... then there is no problem with it being left in the 'on' position.

Now I really need a better understanding of timing mechanisms.

@Reelyanoob:

As for the 1/7 left on the pressure plate?  It would roll off or evaporate... thats what happen with 1/7 fluids.

Of course, the 100 tick timer would not start until the pressure plate itself was clear; leaving plenty of time for any remaining to dissapate from anywhere else residual might have found itself.

[Reelyanoob]

1/7 might evaporate, but never rolls. only 2/7 or above rolls to cells with lower water.

Also evaporation is random, so you can't count on it happening in any set time-frame

[SilentThunderStorm]

I did not realize that evaporation was random... I had assumed, like the rest of the fluid dynamics, that it followed fairly straightforward mechanics... that could be a buzzkill.

@forsaken:

In short, that really shouldn't be a problem... the obsidian would not be produced on top of the pressure plate (everything working the way it should), rather, when it detected 2/7 magma, the bridge that it was next to would open, dropping said magma into a pit.

After the 100 tick reset-timer had clocked down, then the bridge would close, and water would pump out.  After the water hit 2/7, it, too, would drop into pit, and create obsidian in the pit beneath.

Reelyanoob's point, however, if he is correct (and I have no real reason to doubt him other than the inconvenience of his answer), would be somewhat problematic.

In effect, at worst, there would be 1/7 magma left on the pressure plate up top... anything over 1/7 having rolled off into the pit.  My assumption was that within that 100 tick time frame, that 1/7 magma should have evaporated, allowing water to be dumped there without incident.

He has stated that evaporation is random... in effect there is xx% chance that there would still be that same 1/7 magma left on the pressure plate.... were that to happen, that WOULD turn to obsidian, and may destroy the plate (although, given that it would be magma safe, it might simply disconnect it, allowing the plate itself to be  recovered after re-mining).

In such a case, it would depend on the rate of evaporation... the higher the rate, the less often this would happen.  It may be that, given a fast enough evaporation rate, and a large enough delay (like 100 ticks) that this would happen rarely enough to be  reasonable, especially if there were redundancies built in (extra pressure plates in case of this happening to one)...

If the rate of evaporation is too low, however, the entire idea may be infeasable.

[Girlinhat]

Evaporation is low, relatively.  It's very much like rain, really, in fact I think it uses the exact same mechanism (grass does too).  It picks a random tile on the map, and if that has 1/7 then it removes it.  If you have a 50x50 area of 1/7 then it's rather quick to see spots start to evaporate, but over time it becomes less frequent, because the random hits are hitting the already dry areas.  The final points of fluid can take weeks to disappear.

[SilentThunderStorm]

Well, then.. that kills the pressure plates entirely...

OKies, so we're down to measuring out the water and magma, and timing to control the reaction rather than pressure plates... no biggie there.

Again, though... will have to work out how to time this entire thing all the way through the sequence, then.  Have much reading and research to do on timing circuits, then.