#Dwarf fortress stone fall speed license

Granted, they're using proper machinery, and going through relatively soft rock, but that only brings it down to 'ridiculously fast' rather than 'ludicrously.' To give credit where it's due, waste rock disposal and the shoring up of the tunnel are given consideration. One episode of Cat's Eye involved the girls, who are not expert miners by any means, drifting a tunnel a good fifty metres long in just a few hours.See also Dig Attack when this is used offensively. Expect a Wormsign to show up near the surface.Ĭompare Dishing Out Dirt. Rock-shapers, earthbenders, Superman and similar characters do not generally fall under this trope. Note that this trope only applies to characters digging far faster than their abilities and equipment should allow. Having the creature eat their way through the earth doesn't help either, since the digestive system will only hold as much material as will fit inside it. And then there's the fact that the soil and/or stone that the tunnel displaces has to go somewhere. We have no idea how many rabbits die in natural cave-ins, and will likely never know. True, rabbits, insects and other burrowing creatures make these nice, neat little tunnels, but those are much smaller creatures than humans and they have evolved to dig quickly and safely. Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress here, as a tunnel ceiling that looks stable may collapse at any old time, hence why real tunnels built by humans typically have extensive support structures to hold the ceiling up, if not replace it with an artificial one outright.

See, dirt's natural state is not to form a stable roof above.

#Dwarf fortress stone fall speed license

When you get down to thinking about it, there is a lot of Artistic License – Physics involved when this happens in fiction.

By way of reference, the fastest boring machine in history can only manage 4.5 metres per hour, with an experienced crew to run it, and to run all of the support systems, like removing waste rock and lining the tunnel behind the machine, which are very often ignored in fictional tunnelling. At rates that are flatly not possible, often in the range of several metres per second, without use of explosives or specialized boring machines. When tunnels need to be dug in fiction (particularly by the Tunnel King), they're usually dug very quickly.