v0.34 Talk:Sally port

Kind of a poor choice of name. What makes something a sally port is that you can use it to escape your fortress-- to counterattack a besieging force. The described project doesn't do that. Should it be renamed? Maybe it should just be part of trap design? Maybe, instead, trap design should be a category with a bazillion subpages? --Vasiln (talk) 22:41, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Yes, sally ports were used to counterattack during a siege. Why a special sally port, instead of a normal door? Because sally ports were designed as heavily fortified entrances that would not compromise the security of the fortress when open. The design in the article indeed works that way--you can open the inner bridge, march in your military, then close the inner bridge and open the outer bridge--though the raid will either be victorious or suicidal since dwarves don't understand tactical retreat. But, beyond that, in current usage a sally port is an entranceway with multiple, independently (and, often, remotely) controlled doors. In my opinion, that fits the design in the article quite well; however, if you have an alternate name in mind we certainly can consider a name change. Trap design is already overlong, and generally doesn't go into the level of detail that this article does. A merge would mean scrapping much of the content.--Loci (talk) 20:15, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Is it your intention that this page be used to demonstrate the various techniques to design "heavily fortified entrances" that will "not compromise the security of the fortress when open"? If so, sally port is an appropriate title, but of course the page is far from complete, listing only a single example, and statements like "A sally port is a type of large and extremely effective trap" should be edited out. If, on the other hand, you want this to be a page about a single kind of trap, then "sally port" is not a great choice of name. Re: placing it in categories and such, I have nothing against creating pages for specific trap designs, but feel that if this trap deserves its own page, then so do many others, for the sake of parallelism at least.

(Side discussions: Trap design is long because there are a lot of traps on there, but I think the categories make for easy browsing, and I like that people have felt so free to edit in their own traps. If you notice, there are frequently links to user pages and forum threads for when an idea needs more detail than can be provided in an overview page like trap design. I am not familiar with this modern usage of "sally port" and I recommend you check out the talk page of the wikipedia article you reference, or just ask google for a definition, to see how little consensus there is on this definition. As for what I'd name this-- I guess if I felt that the principle of bridge-based containment needed to be made explicit, I'd put a section in trap design about "containment" and discuss why bridges are better than doors, and what you can do after you get something into containment. Devices with two bridges, designed to make protected entrances, are typically referred to, on forums and on this wiki, as airlocks.)

Anyhow, it's not a vitally important issue to me; would love to hear your thoughts on the best way to handle individual trap designs on the wiki. --Vasiln (talk) 05:47, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Might just be going from literal meanings as a non-native speaker, but "sally port" to me does suggest a door specifically made to allow sorties by those inside a fortified place, not to capture intruders. The way it's used here may fit with established usage today in the US, but that still would render it non-universal, and possibly misleading. For a better name, i don't know - wouldn't "airlock trap" be descriptive enough? I think it's basically the bridge-based airlock used as an intruder trap.