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Author Topic: Hot Lead - Dwarven Railgun Design Idea (Weaponized, Magma-Filled Lead Minecarts)  (Read 29344 times)

Uristocrat

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Per the devlog, it appears that we have the following at our disposal:
* Minecarts that can be filled with liquid ("The carts currently fill up with liquid when they are in a liquid square")
* Minecarts that derail at high speed & do damage ("The mass/speed will matter in the same way as it does with weapons, since it'll likely just call the same function.")
* Minecarts are made of wood & metal, so lead or even silver will be !!FUN!!.  ("The heaviest fast minecarts will blast through many dwarves before they are slowed significantly.")
* Pressure plates that detect minecarts and how full they are.
* Powered rollers to accelerate carts, as well as stop zones.
* Newton's Cradle works (minecarts can transfer momentum)
* Bridges act as rails for minecarts

The two most important points is that rollers are powered (so they should be controllable with Dwarven logic).  So what we need to do is have a setup like this:

(Loading Zone)===(Magma Channel)===(Long Holding Track)==(Logic-Powered Rollers)========  => (long, thin hallway where enemies eat hot lead from derailed carts)

Presumably, we can use rollers at the back of the holding track to bump a single cart into the zone in front, Newton's Cradle style, where it goes into the mass of rollers in the accelerator zone and gets shot directly into our enemies.  If rollers can't do enough, we'll just have to build massive downward ramps to finish the job.  Once we hook this to, say, pressure plates, we can have it so that a hot, flaming lead minecart zooms down the ramp, into the goblin siege whenever they step on the pressure plate.  It may also be necessary to use raising bridges to keep carts from spilling out by mistake.

Just make sure you don't let your legendary axedwarves stand in that hallway by mistake!
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Maxmurder

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isnt lead non-magma safe?

you will probobly need to use steel...
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saltmummy626

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does it melt the instant it hits the magma? maybe if its going fast enough, and it only has to... no no, you have a point sir. it would have to be iron, steel, or nickel. I vote nickel. its a low value metal, so you can really churn out lots of shots for little cost, but then again, its not as heavy as steel. steel would be like the better more expensive shot, where as nickel would be the cheaper less effective shots.
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zombie urist

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Why not platinum. It's magma safe, super heavy, and very valuable!
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Niccolo

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Why not platinum. It's magma safe, super heavy, and very valuable!

I think the point is to avoid making bullets that are stupidly expensive.
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What's wrong with using magma? That's almost always the easiest method.
I have issues channeling it properly to do that method. I end up flooding the fortress with magma.
Check out my RtD!

Martin

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Well, if you have magma and the intention to kill gobbos en masse, iron is the material you will have nearly unlimited quantities of. Plus, if it works, you won't have anything but iron to clean up.

JoshBrickstien

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Well, if you have magma and the intention to kill gobbos en masse, iron is the material you will have nearly unlimited quantities of. Plus, if it works, you won't have anything but iron to clean up.

Unless we get glass carts, at which points all the bets are off, really.
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FearfulJesuit

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Why not platinum. It's magma safe, super heavy, and very valuable!

I think the point is to avoid making bullets that are stupidly expensive.

Are you really sure? C'mon- how many of us haven't mass-produced gold blocks just to make a gigantic megaproject with absolutely no function whatsoever?
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Niccolo

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Why not platinum. It's magma safe, super heavy, and very valuable!

I think the point is to avoid making bullets that are stupidly expensive.

Are you really sure? C'mon- how many of us haven't mass-produced gold blocks just to make a gigantic megaproject with absolutely no function whatsoever?

Me (mostly due to fortress death via mismanagement). However, megaprojects and murdering goblins are two different things.

Besides, wouldn't the platinum be better used as material to construct the ramp to fire the minecarts off of? I mean, it's not quite a Golden Gun, but it's in the right direction.
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What's wrong with using magma? That's almost always the easiest method.
I have issues channeling it properly to do that method. I end up flooding the fortress with magma.
Check out my RtD!

Trapezohedron

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THIS is why I love the mindset of us Bay12ers. Whenever something new appears, all we can think of is 'How can we weaponize this?'.
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NonconsensualSurgery

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Slade minecarts loaded with dragons flying at twice the speed of light.
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ComradeGafarov

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I would say slade for mass, or bluemetal for velocity.
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Urist Da Vinci

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Put 50 elephants in one cage, put said one cage (weighing more than a bunch of slade boulders) into a minecart, roll downhill => unstoppable momentum.

Mapleguy555

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Put 50 elephants in one cage, put said one cage (weighing more than a bunch of slade boulders) into a minecart, roll downhill => unstoppable momentum.
If you dropped that onto the ground it'd cause a cave-in.
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Aviator CJ

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It seems to me that in this arrangement, the carts should be reusable, so their value doesn't really matter - once they're built, you just need to collect and reload. You won't be wasting more and more valuable rare metals to make more and more 'bullets'
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!!Science!!: Knowledge through magma

There's safe. Then there's unsafe. And then there's the average dwarf fort, which remains unrated because the OSHA inspector flatly refused to go anywhere within a dozen miles of the place.
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