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[Kanddak]

I'm pushing the boundaries of trap design and logic systems once again.

I'll just show rather than tell:

Movie: http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1808
Map: http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7408-toolconfuse
Trap design: http://i576.photobucket.com/albums/ss208/kanddak/magmatrap.png

And quote from the description I wrote for the movie instead of rewriting it:

This design has the following desirable properties:
- Instantly seals and fills after slightly more than a floodgate toggle delay, minimizing escape opportunities and doing away with lengthy waits for magma to flow.
- Instantly drains clean when finished, allowing immediate retrieval of valuable armor or admittance of another group to trap.
- Conserves magma, never permitting it to evaporate.
- Does not require use of magma-safe mechanisms.
- Equipped with an automated trigger/safety logic system, allowing the trap to be actuated without having to pull several levers (opportunities for the lever puller to fall asleep, or for the player to pull levers in the wrong order and cause a magma flood).

Its only requirements are magma-safe pumps and grates/floor bars (have sand or iron/nickel), a substantial amount of mechanical power (and therefore wood), and enough water volume to operate the logic system.

This proof-of-concept is a 10x1 tile hallway, but two copies of the trap could be placed face-to-face to make a 2-wide hallway, and it can be extended to any length desired.

Using this design with reversed logic would serve as a good freezing/thawing control for an ice trap.

I would be very pleased to witness a production version of this trap in someone's fort devouring a siege.

Postscript: Setting the lever to pull on repeat cannot cause any odd conditions or magma accidents, only get the trap stuck closed because the trigger door is destroying water before it can get to plates to advance the trap state. However, resetting the trigger lever and then immediately pulling it again before the trigger drawbridge has lowered will place the trap into an automatic infinite repeating state... which I'm going to consider a feature.

[Nexii Malthus]

Very Nice, but.. not perfect

1. Building Destroyers?
2. Caravans? Wider entrance?

[Firnagzen]

The logic system is awesome.

The trap itself... Sorry, but not so much, as nexii said. Wider is better... But I don't see much trouble in expanding it, really.

[Kanddak]

2-wide would be easy to do.
3-wide is pretty challenging. I thought a lot about a way to keep all of these properties, but the best 3-wide magma traps I can imagine would either have evaporation problems (1/7 magma piles blocking the trap and then being wasted), or involve bridges (with magma-safe mechanisms) and the likelihood of dropping valuable equipment into the magma.
Building destroyers are a hassle for everything.
I did think about both of those issues but I can't think of ways to address them without sacrificing something else important. I'll argue that this trap is perfect for disposing of invaders; my #2 vote would be bridges over a deep hole, which is easy to build, doesn't involve FPS-reducing fluids projects, but still won't work for wagons or building destroyers, and doesn't get rid of all the narrow clothes.
It would certainly be desirable to have an efficient way of burning caravans and only keeping the metal, but the inability to build grates supported only by grates makes it challenging.

[Nexii Malthus]

Hmm

Well, what about something like this maybe for the hallway..

Hallway

Code: [Select]

Level Z0              Z1             Z2

 ║~~~~~~~~║      ║.║║+##+║║.║     %%....%%
 ║~~~~~~~~║      ║.║║+##+║║.║     %%....%%
 ║~~~~~~~~║      ║.║║+##+║║.║     %%....%%
 ║~~~~~~~~║      ║.║║+##+║║.║     %%....%%

Basically a layer of pumps just ontop of the edges of the hallway to suck out the magma on the edges.

Now, to dispense magma, what we could try is to either drop it, OR we could make it come up from underneath.
Option B seems pretty wicked and state of the art, but may likely burn narrow clothes, so Option A for attempting to keep clothes intact?


Also, for Option A, we don't necessarily need to drop a full layer of 7/7 Magma. What we could do is calculate the exact amount needed and release it into a large reservoir retractable bridge, so that the magma is a even layer of 1/7 (by opening floodgates to prepare a fresh batch) or 2/7 (if you want don't want to use timing)

[Vattic]

Fantastic logic system as others have said. I've not tried to make anything automatic yet save some repeaters. I might try and incorporate a similar design into the next ice trap I make.

[Dorf3000]

I'm pushing the boundaries of trap design and logic systems once again.

...
Its only requirements are magma-safe pumps and grates/floor bars (have sand or iron/nickel), a substantial amount of mechanical power (and therefore wood), and enough water volume to operate the logic system.

I won't comment on the logic system (too stupid myself to ever get one to work without water flooding/broken operation) but the magma safe pumps aren't really necessary, you can use just one 7/7 tile of magma per set of pumps and it will still work fine.

For building destroyers I would suggest a slightly modified design that makes them travel on the very lowest level, with no grates at all.  The magma would have to be stored between the top and bottom pump when not in use, and pumped up and onto the invaders' heads when triggered. The lower pumps would be used to reset the trap/open the pathway.

[BlazingDav]

Logic can be such a pain sometimes, I am still trying to get my head round creature triggered ones, thought I set up a correct range from the minimum to the maximum, but I was wrong when an orc siege came knocking and they didnt trigger (have 5 of them hooked up to a hatchcover for my system, it just drops a couple of sealing bridges), but then I had a similar accident with water triggered ones not realising the range specified is the levels that don't trigger XP hopefully it will work this time being min-min

Also if you want to make something Building destroyer proof, remember fortifications, you probably end up losing some magma, but its worth it to burn those building destroyer brutes

[MrFake]

You can make it 3-wide and caravan safe, but you sacrifice at least one level of autonomy.  Create two mirror copies of this design, separated by a one-tile wide raising bridge on top of a wall.  As undesirables pass through, keep the bridge raised, creating two death chambers.  When a caravan arrives on the map, lower the bridge to provide access for the wagons.  Now it's perfect.

That requires you to manually adjust the trap depending on the situation, but really, you'll be doing that anyway.  When a diplomat comes by, you may not want them going through your automagmafier, and that necessitates some kind of input from the user (or some nifty pressure plate logic, but that's a whole other level on its own).

And yeah, there's not much you can do about building destroyers besides shunting them to their own trap.

Also, what about burning bodies?  Does the full 7/7 magma in the hallway help vaporize all remains, ensuring there are no burning corpses left behind?  Because that's a nice thing to have.

[The Architect]

Magma utterly destroys corpses and all remains, as it does anything else burnable that is not in a magma-proof container.

I enjoyed seeing the machine in action. If you want to use a drop trap, it's not hard to get rid of the clothes. Just build an atom-smasher at the bottom, keep the items you don't want to save forbidden, and activate it to clear the mess when you have retrieved what you want.

The only perfect defense is of course repeating spike traps, but you need to be able to alter the shortest path to protect allies. Would you mind taking a look at my new thread for mechanical discussion? It's currently about a labyrinth design: http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=44799.0

Contributions and suggestions would be welcome.

[Innominate]

If you put the pumps on the level above the corridor then building destroyers can't do anything. You can also have pumps to drain afterwards.

[Kanddak]

The only perfect defense is of course repeating spike traps, but you need to be able to alter the shortest path to protect allies. Would you mind taking a look at my new thread for mechanical discussion? It's currently about a labyrinth design: http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=44799.0

I built a beautiful repeating spike system once, where either an invader on a pressure plate or a manual lever pull would start the spikes repeating until reset.
It killed things pretty nicely, but the quantity of mechanical linkages required was utterly abhorrent and I will never build such a trap again.

[The Architect]

Such is the price for the only perfect system.

[Kami]

I expanded the trap to a 3 tiles wide passage and it is working:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1878-proofofconcept3tileswideperfectmagmatrap

[Kanddak]

I think I see what you did there! A little tricky to get a sense of from a movie.
It looks like besides the upper-level pump you use to remove fluids from the floor tile required to support grates, you also put the pumps behind a wall and use pressure to go around it, so that the pumps aren't accessible to building destroyers.

I was actually experimenting with a similar way to take this up to 3 tiles wide the other day, but it was unsatisfactory. I was leaving a whole middle row of floors with two floors of pumps, the upper floor of which would dump the magma back in through the same hole in the ceiling it was pumped out of. Because of magma's pressureless behavior, though, some 1/6 magma tended to get slopped onto the pump intakes and get left on the floors; be sure your version of the trap accounts for this. It's possible that a bit of magma adjacent to the floor could find itself without an empty space to fall into directly beneath it, and where water would just pressure-pathfind into any other empty space on that level, the magma will spill over and leave 1/7 on the floor.

I like seeing my design improved on, keep it up.