24th Galena, 514I looked outside today and it seems the goblins have vanished. I imagine the somewhat impregnable nature of the front gates combined with the fact that we can (admittedly very inefficiently) dump several metric tons of befouled seawater on their heads if they try to assault them must have rather eroded their conviction.
In other news, I have begun work on the final solution to the goblin problem - an undertaking which will undoubtedly take years, and I am unlikely in the extreme to be able to sustain leadership of this place for that long save some public relations miracle of cosmic proportions with the other denizens of this fortress. However, I shall start, and if the dwarves of this place desire a future, they shall complete its construction long after I have moved on.
Ladies and gentledwarves, I present to you: FAILCANNON PRIME.
I have used knowledge not of this world to aid in its construction. In a previous incarnation, I was permanent administrator at Laboredholy, one of dwarvenkind's most well-kept secret successes. For more than thirty years she stood before I died and passed from that world into another, and never have I been in a more successful fortress. Initially our forges were placed just above the great magma sea, but this became an arduous journey indeed, down more than a hundred flights of stairs through three separate cave levels. Part of the secret of its later successes was the magma plumbing which we used to funnel magma from the great magma sea far beneath the mountain into the forges only two flights of stairs beneath the main concourse in the highest level of the cave system. This kept the caves warm and allowed a new set of forges just below the rest of the fortress. To enable this we created a truly immense
pump stack, a marvel of interdependent engineering that allowed us to raise the magma to the level we required it. It took five years to build, and suffered several setbacks - everything from attacks from forgotten beasts to an exhausted supply of iron.
I have dredged the memories out of the fog of ages with several arcane invocations and have reproduced as much as I can of the original design. At that point in my manylife, before I had discovered the secret of the Eternal Engine, the device had to be powered off a
wind farm on the surface, which was an inelegant and inefficient method of obtaining the neccessary motive force to keep the stack running. The axle and the turbines were also vulnerable to attack - a besieging army could have wrecked the turbines or the axle and disabled the stack (although we never suffered from such an ailment, as the kingdom in which we lived was an island nation, quite secure from any goblins). It never occured to me at the time to use such a stack to create a weapon - the only attacks we suffered from were forgotten beasts and the occasional giant cave spider, which were too irregular, erratic and unpredictably placed to effectively deploy magma against.
The stack will be the equivalent height of roughly one hundred and three flights of stairs, and will in places cut through empty space in the caverns around which stone containment walls will need to be built. However, the masterstroke in the modified plans which I have drawn up is that when it is operational we shall be able to power FAILCANNON PRIME's stack off of the Eternal Engine, meaning that the device is self-contained and need not present any vulnerable parts to the world above - only the business end of its magma pump, which shall rain down fire and brimstone upon the heads of all who oppose us.
For this undertaking we shall need 110 stone or iron blocks, 110 iron pipe sections, 110 iron corkscrews, 110 iron doors. At the very least we shall need 330 units of hematite, limonite or magnetite and 110 stones of a magma-safe material. I remember from my second incarnation within this stinking pit of hell that I crafted a sanctum for myself within a deposit of magnetite, but I believe that it's currently flooded with water or otherwise inaccessible.
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Topic: Battlefailed (Succession) Legendary Clusterf**k, free for all reclaim (Read 631412 times)