This is my second try at creating an underwater fortress, with the engineering technique perfected with lessons from the last attempt I will try again, this time in an arctic ocean, on the shore of a tundra.
The magmachannel I will be using to cast obsidian walls is three tiles wide this time, and will have one-tile-wide bridges as floor, so that the cas obsidian will collapse to the seafloor instead of hanging underneath the channel, as it did last time.
The fortress has been going on for a few years, and the magmachannel is well under way. Plan is to encircle the seafloor 3 z-levels down.
There are 12 comments for this map series, last post 2009-06-26
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Silverhall
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Submitted by: Mzbundifund - 2009-05-23 to 20 Early Spring
I will be most interested to see how this works out. Post updates as they come!
Submitted by: Phlamethrower - 2009-05-23 to 20 Early Spring
This may or may not help, but here's a link to my almost-successful underwater fortress.
If you're sticking with your plan of dropping a wall of obsidian into the ocean, my only real advice is to make sure that you keep it all on flat ground, otherwise getting rid of the wall afterwards is a real pain, as can be seen with what happened to Blockaderhyming.
While building Blockaderhyming I performed various experiments to determine how cave-ins work; if you look through the different maps you should hopefully find some notes about each one, which might help you a bit.
If only I'd thought to check whether constructed walls were cave-in proof :(
Good luck!
[Message edited on 2009/05/23 at 09:37 by Phlamethrower]
Submitted by: Silfurdreki - 2009-05-24 to 20 Early Spring
The plan is to use flat ground for the wall, as that was one of the mistakes I did at my old site. There, the obsidian wall didn't actually collapse as planned, because it was supported by the edges of the seabed a z-level up from where I was planning on building the fortress.
Your method of making an obsidian block on the seafloor is an interesting one, and I did look at your fortress during the planning stages, to see what techniques where available to underwater fortresses, and it seemed obsidian casting and massive amounts of screw pumps where the only ones that where useable.
So I combined the ideas. The idea is to encapsule a volume of water with obsidian walls and then pump it out, to get exposed seabed. Then build the fortress in the resulting "drydock", if you will. it will be mostly made of glass, naturally ;)
The bigest problem I have is how to get rid of the obsidian wall when everything's done in the drydock, it's possible to remove the uppermost wall by channeling, but that will leave an unsightly wall underwater. I will see what I can come up with...
Submitted by: Phlamethrower - 2009-05-24 to 20 Early Spring
As long as the wall is on flat ground, it should be possible to use the technique I attempted - dig a hole underneath the wall and then trigger a cave-in to cause the wall to fall down into the hole. If it's planned right you could make the wall sit flush with the ocean floor once it's been sunken - e.g. dig a hole in a T-shape underneath the wall, then drop two rings of obsidian. The obisidian rings will punch through the floor sections that are attaching the wall to the ocean floor, causing the wall to collapse into the hole. Although it's probably worth testing this out on dry land somewhere since I have a feeling the obisidian rings will support the wall and stop it falling. In which case you'd have to use two cave-ins instead of one - first drop a constructed floor to trigger the wall to collapse, then drop two obsidian rings to fill in the remaining holes. Unless you don't mind having a slightly uneven seabed afterwards!
Submitted by: Markavian - 2009-05-24 to 20 Early Spring
Admin: I edited your map description to use the [ map = id ] tag to hyperlink your entry. For offsite links use the [ link ] tag. Read more on the bbcode page.
Submitted by: Silfurdreki - 2009-05-29 to 23 Early Spring
Thank you for that, Markavian, I'll use the BB code next time.
As for your suggestion, Phlamethrower, I think it's a good one and I've thought a bit about it and I think it should be doable with only constructed floors. AFAIK even constructed floors punch out other floors when collapsed, and if they do, it should be possible to only leave supporting floors outside of the "drydock" wall, by undermining it from the inside, and the collapsing a constructed ring of floors.
We'll see how it works out when I get that far, or maybe earlier, I should test it somewhere first...
Submitted by: Noble Digger - 2009-05-31 to 25 Mid Spring
Methinks green glass bridges will be melted and destroyed if you allow magma to touch them while they are lowered :O
Submitted by: sneakeypete - 2009-06-01 to 25 Mid Spring
Pretty sure that they do not. The mechanisms might melt when they're pulled up if they're not magma safe, but then again they might not.
Submitted by: Silfurdreki - 2009-06-01 to 25 Mid Spring
The bridges will be deconstructed when retracted, but that won't really matter, since they're only meant to be used once, anyway.
Submitted by: Phlamethrower - 2009-06-03 to 28 Early Spring
That's a lot of bridges!
I hope you remembered to check the mechanisms all worked before you started filling the channel - it would be a pain to have to go back afterwards and try to fill in/repair any gaps in the obsidian.
Submitted by: Silfurdreki - 2009-06-03 to 28 Early Spring
I did check that they worked, but I've run into another, more serious problem.
Apparantly, bridges resist magma on top of them just fine, as long as they have no mechanisms or magma-safe mechanisms in them. This means that the central bridges deconstruct when the channel is filled. This in turn leads to bad things, as I get a few obsidian pillars, and then a wall just below the surface.
I've deviced another way of building the wall, however, but It'll take quite a while, since I'm gonna need to collapse the current channel, and then build another one.
The plan is to build a single tile channel, one z-level up in the air.
Edit: Hmmm... maybe this channel is salvagebable, after all, I just need 60 bauxite mechanisms...
Edit 2: On second thought, maybe not, since it would be hard getting an even wall with this channel... I'll still need the 60 bauxite mechanisms, though...
[Message edited on 2009/06/03 at 04:06 by Silfurdreki]
[Message edited on 2009/06/03 at 04:11 by Silfurdreki]
Submitted by: Silfurdreki - 2009-06-26 to 34 Early Spring
This fortress is now officially scrapped, due to the enourmous amount of time it would take to make such a huge obsidian mould.
Instead, I have stared another (yet again) to make my dreams of an underwater fortress come true. This map will be uploaded sometime when it has gotten started properly.