A while back, someone posted a thread asking what to do with a captured werebeast. I suggested using using the werebeast to trigger a mechanism, such as a calendar, every month. I don't know if the guy asking the question did anything with the idea, but I decided I liked it. As it turned out, the project led to questions about what a dwarven calendar should be, and it necessitated a bit of astronomical research, which I hope to add to the wiki soon (I'd appreciate independent confirmation if anyone is willing). Before I get to the dwarven astronomy, though, let me tell you a bit (much of which you probably already know) about real-life astronomy.
As you're no doubt aware, nearly every real-world culture, past and present, keeps track of the year in terms of the cycles of the moon. As far as I am aware, the most commonly used cycle is the synodic month, the period of the moon's phases. This is also the one that's relevant to werebeasts, so it's the one I'll focus on.
In real life, we have:
- about 365 1/4 days in a year
- about 29 1/2 days in a synodic month
- 12.36 synodic months in a year
Much to the chagrin of ancient astronomers, there is no easy way to fit a syndodic month (or a month based on any other lunar cycle) into a year. The ancients sure as hell tried. Take, for example, the 19-year, 235-month
Metonic cycle, which is the basis of the Babylonian, Chinese, and Hebrew calendars. Some calendars, like the Hebrew calendar, feature 29-30 day months, in keeping with the natural synodic month, and add leap months every few years to keep in sync with the solar year. Others, like the Gregorian Calendar, add days to each month, abandoning the idea of syncing the calendar month with a lunar cycle. Why do I bring all this up? To contrast it with the dwarven approach to the calendar.
In a Dwarf Fortress universe, we have:
- exactly 336 days in a year
- 25.85 days in a synodic month
- exactly 13 synodic months in a year
That's right. The dwarves have a year with
exactly 13 synodic months, the kind of lunar cycle ancient man would have killed for, the kind of cycle that would have been cited as proof of a benevolent god for thousands of years, and the dwarves took that and came up with a calendar with... 12 months. I suppose I should have expected nothing less. However, I'm not a dwarf, so I decided to make a logical calendar, one with 13 months. I named the 13th month Slade.
For reference, here are the dates (they're the same every year) of the full moons in the "official" dwarven calendar:
25th granite
23rd slate
21st felsite
19th hematite
17th malachite
15th galena
13th limestone
10th sandstone
8th timber
6th moonstone
4th opal
2nd obsidian
28th obsidian
I'd like to add this to the wiki, pending independent confirmation.
The displayThe display consists of 315 green glass bridges, or 9 5x7 characters. There are 92 characters in the names of the 13 months. With an estimated average of 13 pixels per character, and two mechanisms required per pixel, that's 2392 mechanisms. Add 630 mechanisms for the reset mechanism and a few hundred to account for all the pressure plates, hatches, and mistakes I made, and we're up to around 3,200 mechanisms used in the project. And let me say, the mechanical linking interface SUCKS. It took me about 30 seconds to create every bridge linking job thanks to all the scrolling I had to do, and I had to do all the work blind, since there's no easy way to see what is linked to what. It was only sheer stubbornness that kept me from abandoning the project, to be honest.
The font I used is
Minecraftia, mainly because it was the first 5x7 pixel font I found. I altered the i's and l's to try to make them look better in a fixed-width setting.
The mechanismThe mechanism is not nearly as complex as it looks. It's actually 13 copies of the same monthly mechanism daisy-chained together, and all the loops and stops are just there to delay the minecart a bit. To see how it works, let's look at the parts in detail:
Cerol, the werelizard
Level Z, detail
Level Z-1, detail
Cerol, the werelizard: This guy (not a member of the fort, incidentally) is sitting on a pressure plate linked to thirteen hatches, each of which will support the blue minecart for one of the thirteen months. When he turns into a werelizard, he gains [TRAPAVOID], deactivating the plate and causing nothing of importance to happen. When he turns back, however, he retriggers the plate, opening the hatches and sending the minecart into motion.
Green arrow: When the mechanism is activated, the minecart drops through the hatch it is sitting on, runs over the pressure plate on Z-1, then takes an impulse ramp back to level Z. This pressure plate closes a hatch located in the
red box. The minecart follows the loops, waiting for that hatch to close, then it hits the...
Blue box: This is another impulse ramp which ensures the minecart hits the upcoming pressure plate at high speed. Hitting the plate at high speed ensures that it either an on signal (if the bridge is off) OR an off signal (if the bridge is on), but never both. The plate is linked to the bridges spelling out the name of the month, in this case Obsidian.
Red box: The hatch in this square (which will be closed by the time the minecart gets here) is the starting point for next month. The werebeast will trigger its opening and send the cart down a functionally identical track.
If you've followed my description carefully, you've probably noticed something is missing. If the cart prints the name of the current month, then next month it prints the name of the next month, and so on. But what happened to the text that was already there? Originally, I had planned for the minecart to trigger a fairly complex reset loop, but then I realized that there was a a solution which required no extra machinery: add another minecart. If you look at the large screenshot of level Z, you'll see two minecarts, one blue and one brown. The brown cart follows the blue one, always one month behind. That means that whatever bridges the blue cart turned off (and thus made visible), the brown cart will turn them on ("erasing" them) next month.
Needless to say, this calendar is totally useless, but the werebeast-triggering mechanism could be applied in useful ways. For example, perhaps you could pasture livestock around a bridge which is tied into the werebeast system. You could set it to retract automatically every few months, dropping several of the animals down a deep shaft, exploding them for maximum yield. It should make for an efficient and fully automatic meat and leather industry. I'd love to hear some of your ideas for what to do with the system.
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Topic: Astronomy and the Dwarven lunar calendar (with giant text display!) (Read 48146 times)