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[Eric Blank]

Glass has a variable weapon power, but usually extremely weak.  I've heard, without proof but with good reasoning, that when you load the game, it finds that glass has no weapon values like shear, impact yield, etc, so it randomly assigns the value.  This comes from leftover bits of memory, and can be completely random, but is usually a negative number that rounds up to zero, giving poor weapon results in all cases.  This also means that you should be able to close and restart DF (not just save and resume) to re-roll the glass stats, but who knows really.

Either way you slice it, glass doesn't slice much at all.  The rule for maximum effect is "1 per trap" but glass isn't good.  If you follow that advice you might end up with hundreds of tiles long and still get live goblins.  So, my advice would be to pack them in tight and make a grinder of it, to cause the goblins to keep re-pathing through the same traps again and again.  Marksdwarves with bone bolts can be stationed behind a pit+fortification to shoot down goblins who survive the grinder for too long.

The glass material definitions bug was fixed. I am late.

[Dienes]

In .25 glass makes good serrated blade traps against lightly armored enemies. I have a fort with a long hall with about 60ish traps, 6 blades per trap, and it dices nicely. Even copper armor will drastically reduce the damage glass does, but most enemies aren't fully armored so you will slice up the exposed parts. Plus you end up with so may attacks that a few will get lucky. While an individual unit will have a hard time making it through 10 traps alive the traps tend to get jammed so if you have multiple big sieges at once they could basically make a bridge of corpses.  Also dwarves might try to fix jammed traps while there are still invaders around and get themselves killed.

For siege mounts I think the trap will always target the mount before the rider. Unless you have mods mounts are usually pretty susceptible to blades. Once the mount dies the rider will be targeted by any remaining traps.

[ohgoditburns]

The mounts dying is actually pretty useful. My last fortress fell to rather large siege of about 6 squads - 5 were mounted, and the 6th was ogres. Jabberers. Ugh.

[Oaktree]

I've been using a set of grinder traps with a lot of glass serrated discs* to defend a fort for about eight years.  The "bridge of corpses" was occurring when full goblin squads went into it - and leaders tended to survive it as well due to dodging and armor.   So a few cage traps backed it up.  As goblinite came in and dwarf caravans brought goodies I beefed them up a bit.  And there were also a set of spike traps out front with a combination of a few bronze and a few glass spikes to keep the trolls away from the hatches.

They handled wildlife very well, but took a while to eventually get lucky and take down the goblins.

* - I had sand for glass and galena for silver.  So I outfitted most of the traps with a combination of glass serrated discs and silver war hammers (the lower quality ones).  Each grinder row also had a trap weapon like a giant axe blade and eventually a steel serrated disc.  Plus copper goblin weapons cycled into additional traps.  At this point I've seen four squads of goblins and troll get obliterated without any making it through to the cage traps.  Takes longer to clean up than it does to kill them.  I think another reason the traps improved is that I upgraded the quality of the mechanism to exceptional or masterpiece when I rebuilt them.

[Urist Da Vinci]

I'm surprised it doesn't do more damage. The EDGE for glass according to magmawiki is 15000. Steel is 10000, and obsidian is 20000.

According to wiki, glass has [SHEAR_YIELD:33000] [SHEAR_FRACTURE:33000]. This means that it can't penetrate copper armor, but it can cut through non-bone organic material.

Wood < Glass < Copper

[Pukako]

I used them a lot in my last desert volcano fortress.

Dangerously slicey against unarmoured gobbos, and their mounts.  Trouble in, mount is hit first, which can land uninjured goblin riders in strange places.  Like the chicken coop...

[Grifen88]

I can say you shouldn't underestimate the power of glass traps.

I had a full six row of traps with (mostly) masterwork mechanisms and masterwork serrated glass discs. Got lucky with High Master Glassmaker and Mechanic. 

In my eight years, none of the sieges/ambushers managed to make it past the last row, let alone my squad of marksdwarves and cage traps.

Even a titan was sliced and diced to juicy bits, though it took my militia to finish it off for good as it lay there unable to move. It was pretty messy though, with bits and pieces regularly flying about.

[Keldor]

You know, if you did it right, the spinning glass discs could make a danger room for the goblins to give them some supplemental training on their way in.