Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Niyazov]

We have a grand total of 1 use for power at the moment. Pumps. It's not like we need more energy to power them, considering we already have hydro-plants that create enough energy to render fusion technology a thing of a bygone era.

Two, actually- don't forget millstones. Minecarts will give us a third in some form or other. Mechanical power applications that could be included but aren't yet are windlasses and capstans; winepresses; lumber mills, triphammers and ore crushers, and fulling mills which are used in cleaning plant fibers before clothmaking.

I'm sure that clever dwarves could also credibly apply mechanical power for spinning thread fast; cutting stone bricks from rocks (the romans did this); adamantine and asbestos strand extraction; grinding metal; opening and closing bridges and doors; driving siege engines; and more. Many of these could be be implemented by modders now if they so desire by creating high-speed powered workshops.

Real world applications of low-pressure steam that are period appropriate are for bending and shaping wood, saunas, cooking, cleaning clothing, and some textile manufacturing applications. Slightly more fabulous uses that are not outside the realm of probability for dwarves without being full-fledged steam engines include heating and crop cultivation in intensely cold climates; steam-pressure triphammers; steam whistles for sounding alarms or terrifying enemies; and of course deadly steam traps.

Does anyone know if flowing magma can turn a nether-cap waterwheel? There aren't natural magma flows in the game but you could probably rig one up at the bottom of a multi-z-level pipe and have it drain into an eerie glowing pit, which could give you power until the pipe is empty. It's not specifically steam-related, and I can't think of a practical use for this, but it would be worth trying just to see if the physics exist in-game for it.

[Jelle]

No I don't think magma flow can power a wheel, but don't take my word on it.

[Sadrice]

I'm pretty sure that waterwheels require water.  I think I remember someone modding in a fireproof wood, and it didn't work, but I remember modding being used, so this must have been pre-nethercap, so I suppose it could have been changed, though I doubt it.

The main obstacle to the development of effective steam engines was building strong enough boilers, since the metalcrafting technology of the time required them to be splices together from many smaller pieces.  Dwarves are known for their metalcrafting genius, so I could see them developing steam power a fair bit earlier than historical humans.  Magma forges would also make it much easier to evenly heat a large piece of metal, which would make it a lot easier to make a good boiler.

One potential use of power would be adamantine strand extraction, since that's currently extremely labor intensive.  It could be significantly sped up with a powered workshop, though the power requirement might be formidable.

[Moonshadow101]

As far as labor-intensiveness goes, I think one of the quiet absurdities of DF has been the ability of legendary craftsmen to instantly produce masterpieces. Scaling speed and quality with skill at the same time is a very "gamey" mechanic, and I've always expected that some part of this equation would be made more rational at some point. If crafting does end up being slower, than mechanical power is an obvious way to speed it back up.

[MarcAFK]

Water wheels sady require water.
I'm debating how best to build The boilers in my titanic.
On the one hand water wheels would look nice, and i could put pumps where the engines were which provide the flow for the water wheels, but on the other hand Boilers are basically water chambers over heat and i could build something using magma and water that would look more like a boiler, then link the water to reactors in the engine room, creating something that probably would look better and technically work as long as i put some forges or something underneath the water vessels which i could explain as being the actual firebox of the boilers.
Then again theres not much room in the boiler rooms for forges, the real double ended boilers had 3 fireboxes joined end to end to another 3 fireboxes. 5 of these per room times 6 rooms.
Each double boiler was only 5 meters widex 7 meters long, now i could barely fit 2 forges into that space and have a water channel between them, I'm just wondering if it would look right.
Edit: Ok i think i have got what i need, I'll have Forges to simulate the actual boilers with water lines going between them to simulate teh heated water/steam created by them, the water will be channelled to pumps in the engine rooms which will be lines up with the pistons in the expansion engines, from there it'll go to the electric turbine room which'll have a couple of water wheels which will be actually dricing the pumps/creating teh flow to run the water wheels.
It won't be technicallycorrect, but it'll be Creating it's own power/pumping in the right direction and i'll just handwave it as the power actually coming from teh water heated by the forges that run the pumps, rather than the waterwheels (which will actually be connected in teh right place as the turbine got the steam after the engines to extract the last of the energy out of it.
... But i really want superheated running through teh system so i can accidentally scald someone to death.
Or maybe i could make a custom workshop that requires coal and produces power?
Er better, i could just make a custom reaction that requires coal and produces nothing so i'll be able to use dorfs to keep the engines running, i could also make a reaction that makes free coal and hide the building inside the coal stores so the system can work non stop.
Edit:I must put magma somewhere inside also.
Edit can custom reactions use the metalsmiths forge?

[Darvi]

And where does Valve come into play?

[Miuramir]

The main obstacle to the development of effective steam engines was building strong enough boilers, since the metalcrafting technology of the time required them to be splices together from many smaller pieces.  Dwarves are known for their metalcrafting genius, so I could see them developing steam power a fair bit earlier than historical humans.  ...

My understanding was that the main obstacles to early effective steam engines were how cheap labor was to start with compared to fuel, the difficulty of making vessels that were accurately round for pistons, and poor options for seals, valves, and packing / glands.  The first commercially useful steam engines (Newcomen, around 1712) went through several cycles of improvement, including Smeaton improving them by a factor of three, and still Watt concluded that they wasted more than 80% of the steam.  Early "atmospheric" steam engines were quite low pressure; they are actually better described as vacuum engines, as the primary mechanical work is done by atmospheric pressure acting against a vacuum created by condensing low-pressure steam. 

When [John] Smeaton saw the first engine he reported to the Society of Engineers that 'neither the tools nor the workmen existed who could manufacture such a complex machine with sufficient precision'

Watt's improvements demanded primarily more reliably *round* cylinders.  It wasn't until Wilkinson's double-supported cannon boring machine of around 1774 that technology was capable of doing what was needed, and Boulton & Watt's engines starting around 1776 were the first to become widespread. 

Note the date issues here: DF's cutoff is ~1400, and the first usable steam engines were ~1712, 312 years later.  Putting a useful steam engine into DF is as anachronistic as giving Newcomen an iPhone to do his calculations on, or providing supersonic strike fighters with laser-guided missiles to the belligerents in the War of the Spanish Succession.  By comparison, supplying a few crates of Colt .45 automatics to one side of the American Revolution in some sort of Turtledove-like alternate history would be only 135 years off, well under half as chronologically anachronistic, and it is easy to see how astoundingly disruptive it would be. 

Note also that the Newcomen steam engine had performance that was somewhat underwhelming in DF terms.  From a 1719 engraving and description:

The Great Balanced Beam vibrates 12 times in a minute and each stroke lifts up 10 gallons of water 51 yards perpendicular.

There's some question about exactly what gallon is being referred to; if we assume the Queen Anne wine gallon of 1706 (which remains the basis of the US gallon of today), that's 120 gallons per minute (around 454 liters per minute).  A fortress mode tick is 1.2 minutes; a DF pump is capable of moving a 7/7 full square of water per tick.  If we assume a 2m side for a DF square, that's 8 m^3, or 8000 liters in 1.2 minutes, or around 6,667 liters per minute.  That means a DF pump, whether hand-cranked by a stubby alcoholic or powered by a series of gears connected to a windmill or waterwheel, has a flow rate just under 15 times that of the early steam engine.  (You could argue that the Newcomen pump was better at heights, as in DF terms it's more like a cross between a pump and a well; you'd need several DF pumps in a pump stack to get the same vertical lift as they can't pressurize their output above their own level or draw from more than one square below their level.)

The first high-pressure steam engine was arguably Trevithick's around 1799.  Even given the *enormous* economic incentive (several steam engine improvements were sold with the profit coming entirely from a cut of the reduction in fuel costs to the operator), a wide variety of brilliant inventors, dramatically improving engineering from military spin-offs, and a total population many times that of an entire DF world, it took around a hundred years of concerted development to go from the first "Miner's Friend" steam-assisted pump to the first usable high-pressure steam engine, and the distinguishing characteristic of steam engines for a century more than that was "they blow up unpredictably". 

Don't get me wrong; I *like* clockpunk, gaslight fantasy, steampunk, and the like.  But even "early" steam is both wildly inappropriate for DF, and both far harder and far less useful than people realize. 

[Leatra]

Who builds things because of it's use in DF? My megaprojects (which I never complete) don't go far than seeming cool.

And steampunk is an alternate history. It's fiction.

[Jake]

Note the date issues here: DF's cutoff is ~1400, and the first usable steam engines were ~1712, 312 years later.  Putting a useful steam engine into DF is as anachronistic as giving Newcomen an iPhone to do his calculations on, or providing supersonic strike fighters with laser-guided missiles to the belligerents in the War of the Spanish Succession.  By comparison, supplying a few crates of Colt .45 automatics to one side of the American Revolution in some sort of Turtledove-like alternate history would be only 135 years off, well under half as chronologically anachronistic, and it is easy to see how astoundingly disruptive it would be. 

[...]

Don't get me wrong; I *like* clockpunk, gaslight fantasy, steampunk, and the like.  But even "early" steam is both wildly inappropriate for DF, and both far harder and far less useful than people realize.

You know, this is worth a thread over in the modding sub-forum, because I'm actually with you on this to an extent; just dropping a few steam-powered workshops into DF without changing anything else about the civs or the weapons and tools wouldn't be terribly interesting or historically accurate. If we're going to lobby Toady to add features to the base game engine so that we can mod in stuff we like but which doesn't fit his vision for the default game, let's not just use it to kill goblins and/or spam Vendor Trash. Let's actually create something innovative, complex, historically accurate and really fucking awesome. Let's take our best shot at creating a true-to-life portrait of an industrial civilisation, with the positions of hereditary wealth and privilege pushed aside by the nouveau-rich merchants and bankers, and the master-craftsmen of old fighting a rearguard action against mass production and automation. Let's give every player who downloads the Steam Power mod a whole new set of challenges, a whole new set of extra play styles and a dozen new ways to have Fun!

Ahem. Erm... Sorry about that, everyone. Got a little carried away there.

[Itnetlolor]

(Shameless plug/mini-de-rail)

I can always use more ships in my aerial navy. I only got my 1 ship.

According to the scale of The BloodFist/Armok's Gauntlet, I only have 1 Cruiser, or maybe destroyer, I suppose, in my fleet. Actually, I would call it a destroyer; I can build far bigger than that. BloodAxe/Armok's Blade (next project when Minecarts get implemented) would be a cruiser by comparison (the tech upgrade will have better hauling and minecarts that will help colossally with development, plus my added experience in playing allows me to build much more efficiently, safer, and quickly; so Bloodfist is demoted to Destroyer), and if I get around to it, BloodSoul/Armok's Will would be a battleship.

[Leatra]

Let's actually create something innovative, complex, historically accurate and really fucking awesome. Let's take our best shot at creating a true-to-life portrait of an industrial civilisation, with the positions of hereditary wealth and privilege pushed aside by the nouveau-rich merchants and bankers, and the master-craftsmen of old fighting a rearguard action against mass production and automation. Let's give every player who downloads the Steam Power mod a whole new set of challenges, a whole new set of extra play styles and a dozen new ways to have Fun!

HELL YEAH!

[Triskelli]

Don't get me wrong; I *like* clockpunk, gaslight fantasy, steampunk, and the like.  But even "early" steam is both wildly inappropriate for DF, and both far harder and far less useful than people realize.

I have to agree with the points you're making about anachronism, but this is a fantasy setting already with tenuous ties to reality.  The development of technologies doesn't have to coincide with that of the real world, and the hurdles of steam power in the real world need not apply.  Magma is already a perpetual energy source, and Dwarves have greater metalworking and forging abilities; so it's not so far fetched to say they would be able to craft more reliable, form-fitting, and standardized components than our human-history equivalents.

But even then, we don't need to jump straight to high-pressure steam or locomotives.  For example, a major use of steam power in modern cities is for internal heating.  If body temperature and creatures freezing in cold environments is reintroduced, a system of steam pipes would power radiators during the winter and end the (hypothetical) need for fireplaces.

Say we do include industrialization though.  I think this would be a great extension of the dwarven economy in its previous state.  Instead of focusing on steam-powered machines though, the emphasis should be on creating generic/customizable objects that uses tons of unskilled labor.  All those leftover haulers, fish cleaners and soap makers should be able to walk down to a factory, do a repeated task for a modest wage alongside a dozen other peasants, and produce an unimproved piece of material.

Because that was the problem with the economy, wasn't it?  In a fortress with a hundred dwarves, only about 15 were used in the creation of objects and another 10 were exempt from the economy.  The remaining 75 couldn't afford the rent on their *masterwork* bedrooms.  By providing a new variety of workshop (That really isn't a workshop:  It'll keep churning out the same item nonstop) a dwarf can hop in, make money, and provide cheap items that are actually affordable for the plebs.