Print

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

[Carp McDwarfEater]

Without scientific studies on the matter or any thermometers, how would dwarves be able to create the perfect charcoal? I find the concept of being able to judge how much wood you'll need to burn to get the exact temperature that the kiln needs on a given day to be somewhat ridiculous. Without modern science, I think the quality of charcoal would be more or less random as it just doesn't make sense for dwarves to be capable of maintaining the ideal conditions every time. I maintain that higher wood burning skill should only translate to slightly more charcoal or faster production of ash, depending on what task is being performed.

[NW_Kohaku]

Wierd: Please spoil large images on the forum, since some people have trouble loading them.

Without scientific studies on the matter or any thermometers, how would dwarves be able to create the perfect charcoal? I find the concept of being able to judge how much wood you'll need to burn to get the exact temperature that the kiln needs on a given day to be somewhat ridiculous. Without modern science, I think the quality of charcoal would be more or less random as it just doesn't make sense for dwarves to be capable of maintaining the ideal conditions every time. I maintain that higher wood burning skill should only translate to slightly more charcoal or faster production of ash, depending on what task is being performed.

Isn't that practically the definition of what makes someone "skilled"?

Metalsmiths didn't have tools to measure exact iron or carbon contents in the steel they forged in those eras, either, which was exactly why a worker skilled enough to intuitively know how to produce such precise balances through training and intuition alone was worth their weight in gold - not everyone could do that, and it's much harder to train intuition and knowing how to balance the fuel to keep the fire at just the right temperature than it is to train someone to read a thermometer. 

[wierd]

[Image now contained in a vessel of pure spoilerite.]

[Mel_Vixen]

the mass of coal might depend on which kind of charcoal making the dorfs use. One can burn part of the load or one can keep the load in a container and heat that. The later would mean you can exclude any outside air and by this lower the losses on the load (by using lower quality fuels like say Camel-dung, woodchips and shavings). Since it produces less Carbonmonoxid i guess its a bit safer underground.

[wierd]

On this note, a magma kiln should be able to get maximum economy, because it uses no fuel at all.

[Boea]

Well consider several things: heat, fumes, and so on.. I'd dare say you could probably be able to overcook charcoal, if anything, turning up the heat of an oven doesn't necessarily give you better, or faster results. [Cue a wood burner's opinion in the next post]

[NW_Kohaku]

Yeah, I remember when we were talking about things like "magma ovens" when it came to cooking threads. 

Ovens that can go up to 1111 degrees Celsius/2032 Fahrenheit with no particular effort might just possibly burn your roasts if you aren't designing your ovens specifically to mitigate the heat conducted. 

For charcoal, though, (speaker without expertise in the field, here, so I may well be wrong,) wouldn't the objective more be to create an anoxic environment to promote the breakdown of complex hydrocarbons to base carbon without having that carbon go off to bond with oxygen and make carbon dioxide?

Speaking from the perspective of pure chemistry, you're trying to break down proteins and carbohydrates to boil off the hydrogen and oxygen as water vapor while simultaneously dropping off the potassium and phosphorous as potash and nitrogen as nitrogen gas, right?

[wierd]

Essentially yes.

Compare "charcoal kiln" with "Conveyor Furnace". (Warning, annoying music)

Essentially, you build several lengths of very large diameter magma safe tubing to serve as passive radiators, and run a powered chain driven minecart track on it. You control the heat in the furnace through spacing the magma heated elements, and allow natural convection to drive air currents inside the furnace. This allows some portions of the furnace wall to act as heat sinks, while others to act as heaters, with heat holding at a lower temperature than pure magma. A reducing environment (Free of atmospheric oxygen, so chemically bound oxygen must combine with hot carbon atoms to form carbon oxide gasses, likewise with sodium and potasium ions, who are reduced and then turned into free ions from the heat, which gas out. Putting a chemical reservoir for these ions to be attracted to, like low sodium, high silicon oxide glass insulation, would effectively remove them from the equation.) is achieved by sealing load inside a saggar, with a sealable lid, possibly with a one-way valve, and an unlockable keyhole.

Basically, when the load enters on the conveyor, It is stacked up inside a sealable airtight box that can survive the firing temperatures. Inside this box the alkaline earth absorbing material (Spun silicon oxide glass, made without flux) is set up as a series of walls arranged to come into contact with circulating gasses inside the saggar. The wood is stacked inside the saggar, and the lid is put on. The lid and saggar are designed to be held on via a simple twist-key type arrangement. The lid has a one-way checkvalve on it, to allow hot gasses to escape, but not to allow gasses back into the saggar. The conveyor conveys the saggars slowly down the track, where they get heated by IR exposure to the tube walls in the sections that are submerged in magma.  Repeated flash heating, coupled with continuous movement of the conveyor, and the refractory nature of the saggars, produces a thermally controlled furnace environment suitable to controlled charcoal making.

Chemically:

Cellulose contains enough hydrogen and oxygen to almost completely destroy the load, even under reducing conditions.
C6H1206*(length of chain, since cellulose is just a complex repetition of simple sugar in a long chain.)
In addition to that, you have sodium and potassium ions, nitrate complex ions, and other things you need to remove, like chlorine.

You heat the material to just under the kindling point, so that the bound oxygen and hydrogen from the cellulose gasses off, leaving carbon behind. Because most of the energy liberated by this inefficient burn is immediately consumed by the formation of hydrogen and oxygen covalent bonds, and is not sufficiently hot to break those down again, (Eg, NOT on fire!), then those gasses escape from the load under pressure, and out through the checkvalve. At these low temps, we can use mild steel to make the valves and latches on the saggars. (they WILL degrade over time, but this should be an expected feature of the product lifecycle, and saggars should be inspected before reuse.)

Once the gassing has stopped, the checkvalve snaps shut, and the saggar continues down the track through the more intensely heated section.

There is now insufficient oxygen or hydrogen present inside the saggar to combust the carbon left inside. This stage matures the charcoal, destroys any thermally stable complex organic substances, and is what makes "activated charcoal" "activated". High ambient temps above the kindling point are reached inside the saggar, which garantees there is no longer any organic residues other than raw carbon matrices left behind. If this results in gas buildup, the checkvalve lets it out. This high temperature reducing environment is what liberates the sodium and potassium ions from the initial oxidation that occurs during the char formation stage. (In the previous stage, oxygen and hydrogen are boiled off, along with chlorine, and any thermally decomposable polyatomic ions, like nitrate. This leaves sodium and potassium oxides behind, which we now deal with.) The very high temps inside the saggar are now sufficient to break down the sodium and potassium oxides into carbon monoxide (reaction with load) and free sodium and potassium ions.  These ions undergo an equilibrium reaction with the silicon oxide glass insulation netting installed inside the saggar, as well as with the saggar's walls. This removes them from the charcoal.

The saggar on the track is then slowly moved down a cooldown section, where cooling is controlled by rate of progression down the section of track, to prevent thermal shock in the saggars. (which would shatter them, exposing their still active contents to the atmosphere, and ruining it.)

By the time the saggars reach the far end of the system, they have cooled sufficiently to be left in ambient temp air, but are still too hot to handle by unprotected workers.  The conveyor moves the saggars onto cooling racks, where they are allowed to slow cool in the controlled environment for at least 3 days.

They are then opened, saggars are unloaded, saggars are checked/repaired, (and in some cases, destroyed/recycled as raw material), and then returned to the input side of the continuous process furnace to be reloaded, and re-run.

Less "Modern" versions would involve simply dipping the wood in refractory clay impregnated bags, and then breaking the bags up when they reach the far end, and using the force of inserting new ware at the opening to drive ware down the line-- or even just using a dwarf powered chain drive to move the conveyor, where the dwarf itself controls the rate of progression down the line.

In the traditional process, clay shard, clay powder, and dirt are used in place of the saggar, and are the sodium/potassium ion mitigator, and atmosphere type regulator.

[NW_Kohaku]

This again sounds like the sort of thing SirHoneyBadger tends to do - if you're going to construct more advanced saggars that need replacing of their steel valves, then you're talking about that sort of "advanced workshop" concept.

That is, in order to make your high-grade charcoal for steel, you need a furnace, and to make that you first need steel, and to make that steel, you first need charcoal...

(There's a hole in my bucket...)

If you're going to make some sort of macro-furnace that literally has a minecart rolling through it, and involves building whole rooms with controlled anoxic environments, then I think you're going too far for anything but extremely detailed mod territory.

I think that the current game abstracts far too much, but at the same time, there's a reason to keep some things from having the player need to manually calibrate every individual tool or dictate the specific size of the wrench the mechanic will use on a bolt. 

I generally like to follow the same "managerial player" model I tried to set up for the Farming thread - that the player dictates a goal to their dwarves, and the budget for what they can use, and the dwarves are then expected to figure out how to get the finished product out. 

That is, if we're going to have crude furnaces and then advanced furnaces and super-efficient magma furnaces that give a bonus to charcoal quality and yield, then the "upgrade" portions of it shouldn't need overmuch player babysitting to construct, and there shouldn't be hundreds of different tool types in the vanilla game to confuse the new players. Abstracting how a machine is actually built by having generic construction kits (like fire-safe blocks for a basic furnace, and fire-safe blocks plus green glass blocks/discs plus some sort of advanced furnace tool kit made of steel that might be interchangeable with parts for other types of advanced furnaces) so that players don't need to manually order the manufacture of hundreds of individual tools to make all the various workshops is around the limits of what is reasonable, IMHO.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Yeah, I remember when we were talking about things like "magma ovens" when it came to cooking threads. 
Ovens that can go up to 1111 degrees Celsius/2032 Fahrenheit with no particular effort might just possibly burn your roasts if you aren't designing your ovens specifically to mitigate the heat conducted. 

It would cook fast, though!
"Dwarven-style roast! Enjoy!"
"It's burnt..."
"Only on the outside! The inside is still raw!"
"..."

Sorry about that.

I agree that the player shouldn't be required to micromanage every little thing. Details are great, but most of it should be in a place where the player doesn't need to mess with it.

[wierd]

I was simply trying to be "informative", not suggestive. *shrug*

Making the workshop have a large area, and having it require stuff like a minecart as a building material is more what I had in mind. EG, the workshop requires 3 large pipe sections, a mine cart, a ceramic saggar, magma safe mechanisms and raw green glass. 

More persnickety would be to have it require multiple tiles of exposed magma.

[SirHoneyBadger]

This again sounds like the sort of thing SirHoneyBadger tends to do

...Considering I've yet to even post in this thread, does this mean I've finally achieved Legendary status?

[NW_Kohaku]

...Considering I've yet to even post in this thread, does this mean I've finally achieved Legendary status?

Unless you've been seeing your name pop up in a lot of other threads/forums, then I'm pretty sure it's just me who's been name dropping you.  (So I guess you're legendary to meee~ <3)

And it's not that I don't think your mods aren't valuable demonstrations of a specific take on the way that DF can be played... in fact, I think they're very valuable demonstrations, it's just that there are positive aspects of your mod that should be included in the game, and negative aspects (mostly ones that aren't directly your fault, but that of the game's interface,) that need to have the game changed to address.

I like the notion of a boulder not being a single, indivisible unit from which floodgates and earrings are equally produced with exactly one boulder and no other objects, where spears have wooden handles, for example.  I want to see that ability to have what you call micro-detailing, but I want to do it through a method where it doesn't involve player micromanagement.

I was simply trying to be "informative", not suggestive. *shrug*

Making the workshop have a large area, and having it require stuff like a minecart as a building material is more what I had in mind. EG, the workshop requires 3 large pipe sections, a mine cart, a ceramic saggar, magma safe mechanisms and raw green glass. 

More persnickety would be to have it require multiple tiles of exposed magma.

Well, I know you weren't exactly suggesting a full-fledged physical rendition of a workshop per se (not that, at some level, actually having moving parts within a workshop that could be seen operating wouldn't be a masterstroke for DF, and there have been people wanting to replace workshops with zones in the past...) but that it was going in that direction, so I wanted to go ahead and head that off.

Anyway, part of the point is that there's good reason to want to fudge exactly what goes into the construction of a workshop for at least the purposes of vanilla DF.  That is, use more generic types of items when they will do rather than using specific types of devices.

If a saggar is just a specific type of ceramic container, then making the component required to make the advanced form of kiln be a ceramic box or jug would be sufficient, for example.  A minecart would probably also be a little too large, and maybe just a magma-safe bin (or even just asking for a second ceramic box - of course, there's the fact that you inexplicably can't make a ceramic box without modding right now...) would be sufficient, with the assumption that the mechanism is there for motive force. 

I also believe that a total of 8 materials - or more, depending on how many mechanisms you want - including large pipes that are somewhat complex products to produce magma-safe (you're basically talking metal or glass, which players may not have) may be overkill unless this design does something godly.

Part of the point is that, as I argued (with people other than SirHoneyBadger) in other threads, you can't start adding dozens of new component parts to every type of workshop, or you start having players need to track and manually order the production of hundreds of types of new items whose only purpose is making workshops whose only purpose is making more items. 

Part of the problem DF has now is in its "Sandbox Paralysis" - an overflow of potential options players can choose, but no information on how to actually make a choice.  New players often starve because they're so busy worrying about forges that they never stop to notice that they didn't build a farm yet. 

This is why (aside from "locking out" several workshop choices under default settings until some more basic concerns are met, with an init setting to put them all back in at the start,) I try to push for an interface where, instead of players manually having to fuss over every individual thing a dwarf does, you are just ordering a finished product and "budgeting" a dwarf what they can use, and letting the dwarves go through the process of doing the ordering of the component pieces along the path to manufacturing the finished product. 

This is why I'd point to having a model where the dwarves might improve the workshop design on their own, provided that you give them the authorization to do so - I.E. if they are authorized to order their own glass products, they don't demand the raw green glass up front, they can just put in the order for one to be built, and install it into the workshop when they have time. 

EDIT: This is one of those older threads on that topic of workshops, by the way.

[SirHoneyBadger]

...Considering I've yet to even post in this thread, does this mean I've finally achieved Legendary status?

Unless you've been seeing your name pop up in a lot of other threads/forums, then I'm pretty sure it's just me who's been name dropping you.  (So I guess you're legendary to meee~ <3)

(That's all the fame I require. <3)

Excellent point about More Choices = More Confusion = Steeper Learning Curve.

I'd like to address that in my mods, the intention is to start Fortresses out at technologically primitive levels, and then use reality, where possible, as a guide to learning about how to play the game (I like the educational component inherant in that use. I enjoy learning, and hopefully so will my players.), as well a source for drawing high levels of detail from.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but the easy version of the modded game will start at Year 1, and you'll want to start with 0 points. You'll need to figure out how to make fire before you can use that fire to make other things. This won't leave you alone and defenseless in a hostile world, however, because "wandering monsters" will be designed to get tougher over time, and the hostility of your neighbors will sharply fluctuate, depending much less on how much your Fortress is producing, and much more on how much you're importing and exporting.

Less value will always equal less trouble, though.

Trade will be very useful for obtaining needed resources and goods, but if you use it as a crutch, you'll need to invest strongly in defensive measures to protect that trade. Weapons and mercenaries will be available, but they will themselves be quite pricey, and buying/hiring them will only raise your long-term risk.

Although charcoal may be one of the very first items you make, I admit I do like the idea of refining it. I have already planned on different gradients of coal--many of my ancestors were coalminers, lumberjacks, and worked on the railroads--so this is a logical parallel "path", for Fortresses without good access to any type of coal, and from what I'm understanding, finding the very best quality coal might be vital for advanced metalworking.

To make skill a factor, the simplest solution may just be to require several "burnings" to create a superior batch. High skill will ensure shortened individual burning sessions, and will result in more quickly producing a higher quality product.