Bay 12 Games Forum

I recall an interesting story about spanish cannons being made with platinum ore.

Iirc, the resulting alloy could withstand far greater bore pressures without fatigue than normal iron/steel/brass cannon.

When it was discovered that they were alloyed with some 30% platinum, they were yanked from the mesoamerican fortress they were installed in, melted, ad reprocessed to recover the platinum.

This is only a story I heard though. I habe no reliable sources.

It's a myth; it was some sort of scam from the '80s similar to the kind of scam where you get sold "damaged money" that just needs to get exposed to a special chemical to turn into real money. The idea was that the cannons were found in a spanish shipwreck and that some sort of low-energy nuclear transmutation had converted radioactive elements in the cannon into platinum or something, and that you could buy bits of this metal and separate out the platinum at home for fun and profit. It was all bunk of course. Platinum is not a radioactive decay product and I believe that it can only be formed by stellar nucleosynthesis.

As for intentionally making cannons out of platinum alloys: the mesoamericans did have some native platinum artifacts but they were tiny and they were all made using cold hammering since platinum has an extremely high melting point. 16th and 17th spanish steel making techniques couldn't have been used to create any kind of usable platinum alloy.

The mining techniques that the Spanish used in the new world for silver, gold and copper were heavily reliant on mercury extraction; mercury forms amalgams with just about every metal and can majorly increase yields from precious metal ores. Mercury will not amalgamate with platinum or mercury, so if the cannons were brass or bronze they can't have contained platinum since there wouldn't have been any in the copper used to make them. Interestingly, mercury will not amalgamate with platinum or iron.

The Spanish sucked at making cannons in general but they were especially bad at making steel cannons. I'm not aware of any substantial iron mining or any iron/steel cannon foundries in New Spain. Platinum is also 3 times denser than iron, so an iron or steel cannon that was 30% platinum would be about twice as heavy as a regular cannon of the same size-, not something that you would want to put on a ship.

I'd like to join so that I can test the properties and limits of wheelbarrows.

I've modded the raws for animals using lazy newb pack, thereby removeing the exotic tag. At least until dungeon master works correctly. But I've been doing that for like...... a rl year now, never had anything like this before. Also, they have giant cave spiders and giant olms, upon caravan-request time.

I always had this occur for me when I removed the exotic tag from the raws (this was the only change I would make). I believe that it may require a long worldgen so that historical figures can "tame the great beasts" of various caverns in worldgen. However, it's no longer necessary to muck about with the exotic tag in this version.

Contract vampirism. Steal a book from a necro tower and learn the secrets of unlife. Wade out into the ocean.

On the day that I return from the abyss with my army of zombie whales and giant squid, the world will learn the true meaning of fear.

I got away with a minimal number of barrels.

Have 3 main food stockpiles.
1. Raw plant/ingredients
2. Booze only
3.Forbid all except prepared food. Set Barrel number to zero here.

If you stay on top of the raw ingredient stockpile and cook everything into large stacks. They don't even fit in barrels anyway. Turn off cooking for crap in single stacks, such as tallow. If you end up with too much clogging up your ingredients stockpile, don't be afraid to dump that crap into the magma pit if you can't use it for anything else. I go through the stockpile screens for food and dump everything stacked 4 or less. Grow farms with fertilizer with legendary growers. Grow quarry bushes, sweet pods, cavewheat, pigtails. End up with 1,000 prepared meals that will fit on a 10x10 stockpile.

You want the brewers to use large stacks of brewable plants. cavewheat[7] will make a barrel with 35 beer.
It is very efficient on:
a. space
b. barrel usage
c. hauling jobs

I create the entire years supply on alcohol and food in a month from the ingredients grown by two 4x4 farms on fertilizer. And this still leaves me with too many ingredients in the 1st stockpile.

Two 4x4 farms will feed and booze a Fort of 120 dwarfs

Haha, this is the exact opposite of what I do; on each floor I usually I have 8 completely enclosed 11x11 stockpiles arranged in a lattice around a central 11x11 hallway with 3 enclosed 3x3 workspaces in the gaps between them and two additional fully enclosed 3x3 workspaces bordering each face of the central hall. Moving in a counterclockwise direction, I maintain separate stockpiles for booze; plants; processed plants; prepared meals; meat, cheese, and processed fish; soap, fat, tallow, unprocessed fish, and milk; refuse and animals; and empty barrels. Workspaces generally each communicate with an appropriate input and output stockpile and have movement restrictions to keep haulers from moving between stockpiles through workshops. It is probably bad for pathing though.

Has being knocked around by blunt hits been removed in DF2012? I remember that in 40d hammerdwarves wpi;d constantly sending enemies flying, resulting in instakills when the enemy collided with an obstacle. However, I am unable to replicate this in this version, even in BC-vs-kitten fights. Did this get removed because enemies kept getting stuck in midair?

Also, has anyone considered using a submerged bridgeapult? It's tough to do falls/throws/pitting on aquatic creatures since they tend to airdrown.

I am not sure about 10 z level falls being an instakill for anything; can anyone confirm this? I have always done 20 z levels as a minimum and have never seen anything survive a fall from that height. I suspect that some other mechanism than combat rules handles fall damage above a certain number of z-levels and may even specify instagib above a certain height. Creatures fall at a constant rate but in-game we can easily see that more z-levels equals more explodiness.

Quote from: KtosoX on April 04, 2012, 03:41:15 am

According to the devlog, we will be able to carve tracks in stone floors and stone ramps

Who will push those tough?
Massive deforestation?

We already have power in-game from windmills and waterwheels. Have you ever seen a ski tow? Carts could easily be pulled around using ropes or chains on a continuous loop, so power only needs to be applied at one point on the track.

The downside to this of course is that because carts are clipped to the rope, they will only move as fast as it (maybe dwarf-speed) and no faster. This means no gravity-powered hijinx, but it's the only period-appropriate method of moving carts around that I can think of that doesn't require draft animals. Systems like this are described in De Re Metallica and similar works.