Bay 12 Games Forum

So I can assign the room to them? All I want is for them to enter the room so I can lock it. I have not yet gained a hatred against nobles, but I've read enough that I want to do what I think is best for my fortress.

Well, if all you want is to get them into a room, build them a lever, set its (P)rofile so that only that noble can use it, and then order it pulled repeatedly. (Because pulling levers is just about the only thing nobles are good for.)

If fortress well-being is your standard, though, you might want to contain them indefinitely instead of offing them as they come (channel a hole in the ceiling of their room, put a food stockpile on the tile below it and a dump zone directly over it, then designate occasional food and booze dumps).

For one thing, you always get replacement nobles, and you very well might get a noble that's worse, but regardless you have to go through the whole business of locking them in there again. For another, without a Captain of the Guard there are no hammerings (nor cagings/chainings/beatings), so if you haven't appointed one you can simply ignore the pretentious bastards. (This may be considered a bug, and therefore liable to get a fixin' soon.) Or if you have a Captain, you can designate your Hammerer's hammer for dumping (apparently this makes them unhappy though?), and whenever someone gets lined up for a hammering, draft them and set their armor level to plate (assuming of course that you've got a steel plate suit kicking about). Unless I'm very much mistaken (and excluding egregious circumstances) this should ensure your dwarves survive the enforcing of "justice".

You could make a torture chamber and build a bed in it, and assign that to the noble.  That's always hilarious.  Deny them booze, have nothing but a stagnant and/or contaminated water source, feed them nothing but raw plump helmet, and throw rotten goblin chunks and dead rats on the noble's head from time to time.

I prefer to build them a really, really nice room, with engravings, high-quality furniture, the the whole nine yards, but lock them in there and have dwarves periodically dump (well-prepared, natch) food and booze in there for them.

The catch?

The entire thing's built under the shadow of a drawbridge, and the lever's out in the middle of the fort. See how many nobles make unreasonable demands after the first hammering.

I'd do that, but I don't think dwarves have words for "fair" or "logical".

Which is also why I'm not especially concerned with making it particularly realistic. It's not at the level of the nuclear reactor mockup (with the graphite and the beryl windows and the pitchblende and the SCRAM hatches and shit like that, I forget who exactly posted it but it was pretty damn cool) but it looks cool and it sounds cool and it's got a high OMG IT SPINS factor, and it's a damn railgun come on.

Well, 3x3x3 towers like so:

╔═══╗ <- stone walls
║‼≈‼║ <- charcoal bars supported by charcoal floors
║‼≈‼║ <- entire thing flooded with water as an electrolyte
║‼≈‼║
╚═══╝

seemed sufficient for capacitors.

My resistors will be nickel-silver chains, I may encrust them with gems if I turn out to have enough. (There are bonus points on offer, of course, for making the colors correspond to IRL resistors, but that's a long shot.) All wires will be copper chains, or, if current needs to pass a z-level, a constructed copper block pillar. (Considering swapping the chains out with block walls so the graphics look connected.)

The actual dynamo will be a 3x3x3 block of magnetite mechanisms surrounded by a constructed copper block wall, powered by a perpetual motion machine that spans the entire top of my outdoor farm. Switches are breaks in the string of copper chains filled (or not) by upright copper spikes.

Rails are raising steel block drawbridges, with a retracting steel block drawbridge in between to form a barrel (of which there will be one for each cardinal direction). Projectiles are iron blocks, loaded by hatch from above. Above that will sit a control room with gem windows everywhere and a lever reserved for the King (when he arrives, which I will make sure he does when it's complete).

Finding the metal was an assload and a half of work, lemme tell you. *thanks Armok and the RNG for giving me dolomite on top of slate on top of gabbro*

The only real theoretical problem (aside from the slightly minor detail that electricity hasn't been implemented yet) is that I don't know which direction to point it, as I don't know where the elves and goblins are located...

And I need a name for it, of course.

What was your plan?

I pretty much needed paper. Which by an exceedingly simple definition is cellulose treated with lye (among other things). I needed this for a Kraft paper capacitor, which Wikipedia says are used for pulsed power applications and "may fail catastrophically due to high stored energy". I couldn't really think of a more dwarfy kind of capacitor to which my dwarven railgun could be hooked up.

(I've since given up on that plan and am instead going to build a bunch of supercapacitors with water and charcoal, linked together to form a Marx generator.)

Yes, undoubtedly, but that wouldn't be very dwarfy, would it? Oh holy balls you ninja'd me. Dwarven minds think alike.

Also, my champions (and the ones I'll start training once I finally get around to smithing them some armor) will be all the "effective" I need, but considering they're vastly outnumbered they need to neutralize enemy mobility. Landmines would do that reasonably efficiently, as one tile collapsing knocks out everything within a decent radius, right? (If necessary, I could increase the yield by expanding the 1x1 atop the support, perhaps to a 3x3.)

It'd be a lot less work for my masons and architects, and they'll be sufficiently far from base that they won't harm anything. And they should function as the early-warning system I wanted, as the game should pause and center the view on cave-ins, even artificial ones.