Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Suggestions => Topic started by: Alastar on July 30, 2010, 07:40:15 am
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First, I can't stress enough how awesome it is to simply assign different materials real-life properties and have the game take care of everything that follows. However, this requires the entries to make sense in the first place. I thought I'd make a thread to suggest tweaks to make DF even more of a geeky delight.
I'll start off with something that doesn't exist in the real world, adamantine. I'm not challenging the sheer structural strength of the stuff. As a mythic metal, a lot is justifiable here and I'd only worry about his after the more problematic entires are taken care of.
However, do the following feel right?
1) It has roughly the density of balsa wood, aluminium is approximately 13 times as heavy.
2) The edge it can carry, given as a unitless number. Most metals including steel have 10000 (there probably should be some variation here, but I don't have specifics atm), obsidian has 20000, adamantine has 100000. Afaik, nothing in the real world carries a finer edge than obsidian (although some are similar and have other desirable properties - hardness, durability etc), so this seems very extreme as well.
3) There is no elasticity and no plastic deformation; it doesn't give at all before snapping entirely (which would, of course, take quite a bit of force). Parrying a blow with something that light and that inflexible would probably result in either cutting straight through their weapon or having yours knocked out of your hand.
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Yeah, and adamantine has a melting point so high, and convection doesn't exist in DF, so you could literally make an adamantine submarine that could sail through the outer layers of the Sun like an ocean.
All of adamantine's properties are LOL BULLSHIT numbers pulled out of thin air. Frankly, as most bodily organs (including bones) are being defaulted to density half that of water, it's not terribly surprising. In fact, as density is generally a good thing when it comes to weapons, it makes most forms of weapons made of adamantine fairly useless (while slade is allmighty in warhammer form).
Elasticity, plastic deformation, fatigue strength, those are all known problems that have been raised before... I have no idea whether Toady has said he would revist them, but considering how much trouble it is to put them in (possibly save breaking), I'm not sure we're going to see them any time soon.
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Adamantine is not a normal metal but one blessed by the gods. As such it can't be broken, it is, however, not very dense at all and is about as dense as balsa wood.
1) Adamantine is only as dense as balsa wood, but unbreakable because it is blessed by the gods.
2) The edge it can carry is the same as any other metal but it acts much finer when it comes to chopping because it is blessed by the gods.
3) why do you think that it never says: The flying arrow strikes Ursit McAdamantine in the chest but is blocked by the admantine sword.?
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Keep in mind that Obsidian has molecular-level sharpness. Adamantine has five times its sharpness.
Yeah, sure, I've seen it used supersilliously in video games before, but sub-atomic edges are just a little BS.
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Keep in mind that Obsidian has molecular-level sharpness.
They can be, but they fracture as well so you end up with some parts of you edge that are molecule thick and others that are 3 or 4. Furthermore a obsidian isn't a single element, mostly silicon dioxide if memory serves, in which cause an adamantine edge could not only be a stable single molecule thick but also have smaller molecules, doesn't need to be sub-atomic.
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1) It has roughly the density of balsa wood, aluminium is approximately 13 times as heavy.
2) The edge it can carry, given as a unitless number. Most metals including steel have 10000 (there probably should be some variation here, but I don't have specifics atm), obsidian has 20000, adamantine has 100000. Afaik, nothing in the real world carries a finer edge than obsidian (although some are similar and have other desirable properties - hardness, durability etc), so this seems very extreme as well.
3) There is no elasticity and no plastic deformation; it doesn't give at all before snapping entirely (which would, of course, take quite a bit of force). Parrying a blow with something that light and that inflexible would probably result in either cutting straight through their weapon or having yours knocked out of your hand.
In case you want to see Toady's explanation for those properties: (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=21498.msg369028#msg369028)
The high impact and shear numbers will make it resistant to all attacks and also cutting attacks specifically. In game terms, the yield=fracture means that if you manage to hit the adamantine hard enough, it won't dent but will fracture immediately. I don't think the low elasticity (which is probably actually something like yield strain, but I found inverting the moduli convenient -- I think it's strain with scale 1000 times the percent deformation at yield) will matter for items at this point, as it only is used so far in determining some skin/soft tissue like behaviors for attacks on creatures. It also makes the current notion of adamantine thread something that needs some explaining. Since I threw the numbers in haphazardly without considering that, one can now start to come up with some sort of weird hooking together sewing thingy that the dwarves do -- either that or some miracle chemistry they do that lets them get around the raw mechanics. Since the elasticity number doesn't matter for adamantine items, perhaps it could also be changed, but I currently like the starkness of it. In terms of adamantine weapons, the edge and shear properties mean it will be able to slice through steel for example quite easily, even though the low density means that it won't be effective in bludeoning weapons. Normal cutting weapons won't be able to slice through your adamantine armor, but you can still get knocked around.
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What I wonder is how do dwarf manage to shape adamantine using magma forges.
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Well, with a melting point of 15,000 degrees Farenheit, any kind of fire is a moot point, they obvoiusly can either temporarily make it a flexible fabric-like substance with magic, or it's naturally a flexible fabric that you can magically make rigid and forever after unchanging.
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Well, it could be that adamantine strands are extracted rather easily, then adamantine thread is spun into cloth just as normal thread would be, and only when it's truly forged with high heat into its final object form does it "set" into its properties as described in the raws, similar to cement drying.
There's no material in the real world that actually works like this, of course, but it provides an explanation.
Can dwarves melt adamantine objects? I've never tried.
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There effectively IS no "high heat" that dwarves could apply to adamantine.
Once again, the melting point is 15,000 degrees Farenheight.
For reference, magma in this game is 2032 degrees Farenheight.
For reference, THE SURFACE OF THE SUN IS ONLY 10,000 DEGREES FARENHEIGHT.
Even the Earth's core is "only" about 12,000 degrees Farenheight.
You'd have to go into the depths of the Sun for that kind of heat.
Unless you plan on replacing your magma forges with Utsuho (http://touhou.wikia.com/wiki/Utsuho) Nuclear Fusion Forges, you're not using "high heat" on adamantine. (And that's if you can even "tame (http://sadpanda.us/images/178441-IH78VJ3.jpg)" the nuclear hell crow.)
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For addy vs other weapons, I just assumed (until durability is added) that weapons were crafted in a way that they wouldn't need constant sharpening, so while you COULD create a copper sword as sharp as an addy sword it would deform the first time you struck something hard.
For melting points, thats to turn a solid into a liquid, right? i know some cultures used molds, but maybe the metal only needs to be softened? Think of the movie image of a smith pounding on a red hot blade with a hammer. That would also account for making magma-safe items in a forge made out of only fire-safe materials.
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Thanks for the quote, Footkerchief!
I still think these values are too far out-of-this-world even for an out-of-this-world metal. You can melt down adamantine objects, which indeed raises questions about dwarven furnace technology. And it would pretty much have to be molten to be shaped as it's extremely brittle - doesn't flex, doesn't deform... nothing happens until it snaps. Unless there's some alchemical trick to it that isn't simulated.
Thematically, it'd make sense if the prospect of working it with the best dwarven technology has to offer was just about plausible. As it is, it sounds like faerie magic. With regard to game mechanics... really, what could possibly go wrong when making it less extreme? If no set of realistic values will make it immune to steel... well, proper weapons grade steel is pretty impressive stuff as well, and I'm sure we'd get something markedly superior. And something that doesn't result in clown hammers for comic relief.
I think these things shouldn't be fudged, as this takes a bit of the coolness out of having everything based on actual physical properties.
Time for some research, then Research... I'll look up the values of various impressive real-life materials and cherry pick from them to see if something works out in gameplay.
@ NW_Kohaku: The day a procedurally generated nuclear-powered hell raven shows up in Dwarf Fortress and throws miniature suns at dwarves, the universe will collapse into a singularity of awesomeness.
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There effectively IS no "high heat" that dwarves could apply to adamantine.
Well, what I was going to say is that it doesn't *gain* its melting point until it's actually forged. That is, adamantine thread is semi-soft, adamantine cloth is just cloth, wafers are just pounded that way, but once you apply heat to it, it suddenly stiffens up and gains the physical properties we see in the game.
I know- that makes no IRL physical sense. (And dwarves can just melt it down again anyway, which kind of breaks that idea.)
But we're talking about a metal that melts at temperatures that would have long since turned everything else in existence to plasma.
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The problem with that is that raw adamantine is also a stone, capable of being treated like a stone, and has the same properties as "processed" adamantine.
It's property of shattering before bending (like glass, I suppose you could say) would also make it extremely difficult to work with - how do you put two pieces of adamantine together? You can't melt it into a semi-liquid state (even a semi-liquid state requires temperatures relatively near melting point), so what do you do? Hammer two pieces of adamantine together, and hope they somehow start sticking to one another?
@ NW_Kohaku: The day a procedurally generated nuclear-powered hell raven shows up in Dwarf Fortress and throws miniature suns at dwarves, the universe will collapse into a singularity of awesomeness.
Actually, even though there is a Touhou mod out there, what I'd REALLY like to see is a mod that makes the Subterranean Animism characters pop up when you Dig Too Deep. Suddenly, there is Nuclear Hell Raven, psychics with superpower-cloning abilities, a Super-Cave-Spider that can shoot webs and spread plagues, and an impossibly strong, impossibly tough giant that brushes off all attacks as mere fun and sport, and is COMING FOR YOUR BOOZE! (It NOT EVEN DROP!)
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It seems kind of silly to be talking about realistic material properties for a metal imbued with the power of the Gods, created for the sole purpose of trapping magical fire demons...
But I dunno, there could be some annealing process, hot as molten steel but far below adamant's melting point, that makes it malleable without needing to melt it. Once shaped, it would be tempered to its more familiar hard, brittle state. The only implication would be, if the sword gets hot as molten steel during combat then its material properties need to be adjusted accordingly. This must definitely be simulated, of course.
I would prefer if it could only be shaped by magical means (or some combination of magical and mundane), because it is a magical metal. But that's a long way off, if ever.
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Why don't you just consider the fact that dwarves are ALREADY using magical means to do their forging? Let's face it--- dwarves are DEFINATELY using magic when they construct stuff--- you can build a solitary STAIRS Up at the highest point on your embark, put a stairs down on top of it, and roof over the entire map. And the whole thing can be held up by that one lone stairs made of almost anything--- like soap!
Dwarves are magical creatures. They can grow any plant underground without light! (although sometimes they need to "pull down the surface" or expose it to the sky to be able to grow oak trees and wild strawberries 200 feet below the surface, under 20 or more stories of other construction). They can make any physical construction merge. They can mine out sheer tunnels that takes us YEARS with multi-billion dollar equipment in just a couple of seasns using 1 dwarf and 1 pick.
They can take a bit of rock, turn it into a "bat-device" and have it work a complex mechanical device from the other side of the map with no batteries or power source of any kind, and no physical connections.
They attract other magical creatures that are completely unknown to science, such as dragons and giant damsel flies that breath out poisonous fumes.
I truly just don't see complaining about an ultimate magical metal in their world being "unrealistic" in what it does, or in how they utilize it. It is just part of their natural magic.
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Hahaha, I am totally on-board with everything you just said XD
I specifically meant an explicit magical means for forging adamantine, just so it's more challenging/interesting and different from "normal" forging. Like maybe you need to capture a live SoF, and use it as a construction component in the dreaded Demon Forge, where you harness its magical demon fire to work with adamantine.
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Dwarf Fortress is unrealistic in parts, but one thing that sets it apart from other games is simulating many things where most others would have hard-and-fast rules that are meant to cover game mechanics and nothing else. Maybe I'm being unreasonably pedantic, but going 'Magic, don't ask' in the material section makes things less interesting: it cheapens one very very cool aspect of the game.
As it is, it'd make more sense of thinking of adamantine as 'divine glass': It's perfectly brittle (yield = fracture, no elasticity) and amorphous (implied by the edge value, although it's too extreme even then). Metals simply don't behave that way, we may as well call it 'divine water' and justify its properties 'because the gods say so'. Can't refute divine fiat, but it may still make no sense.
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As far as working with adamantine, what about using thermite reactions? Those can get up to about 4500 degrees F in open air. Put that reaction in an oven and you could semi-realistically claim that the temperature would be high enough to soften addy (it melts at 15,000 degrees, but you don't want to melt the metal when making, say, a sword).
Plus, thermite reactions require powdered iron oxide (basically rust) and aluminum. Requiring a bar of iron and a bar of aluminum to make something from addy might be an interesting mechanic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite) for those who are interested.
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Interesting and very dwarfy tidbit... but generally, Toady voiced a desire to cut off technological process at some stage and remain firmly rooted in fantasy rather than steampunk. According to the site you linked to, thermite reactions were discovered in the late 19th century and used for welding only a few years later.
Solving the melting point issues still doesn't address the problem that adamantine is currently a glass rather than a metal in all but name.
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As far as working with adamantine, what about using thermite reactions? Those can get up to about 4500 degrees F in open air. Put that reaction in an oven and you could semi-realistically claim that the temperature would be high enough to soften addy (it melts at 15,000 degrees, but you don't want to melt the metal when making, say, a sword).
Plus, thermite reactions require powdered iron oxide (basically rust) and aluminum. Requiring a bar of iron and a bar of aluminum to make something from addy might be an interesting mechanic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite) for those who are interested.
Sorry, but not even close. First off, how are you going to build an over that would be a perfect insulator so as to trap all that heat when you are trying to hit temperatures that will melt an object that takes several times more heat to melt than any other material you could possibly make that oven out of? (And if you say "make the oven out of Adamantine, too!", how would even shape it, if this thermite oven is what it takes to even start shaping it?) That's not even touching the fact you simply can't concentrate that much heat without having much of it leak out of your oven that is almost certainly now in a state of plasma, (and potentially giving nearby fluffy wamblers or knuckle worms enough radiation to turn them into 50 foot megabeasts).
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perhaps you could make an over in such a way that it ends up floating inside magma with some kind of magnatic system (metalworking and mining are the most dwarven things out there (perhaps competing with beards) so these things might be somewhat more reasonable then for example gunpowder and engines)
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If we're talking about generating magnetic/plasma forcefields capable of preventing heat loss through radiation, we're not even talking steampunk anymore. That's more akin to Star Wars.
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Maybe the adamantine fibres can react with say carbon or something which creates a formable material and after that the carbon gets burned out so the you get raw adamntine again.
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That would have to be something fairly uncommon. If it were just carbon or simply some kind of acid, you could render adamantine armor into a squishy mess by just throwing charcoal or citrus at anyone wearing it.
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Woah woah woah, we are talking about creating more semi-realistic ways to smelt it now?
Why not just suggest the values be altered to be more plausible?
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That would have to be something fairly uncommon. If it were just carbon or simply some kind of acid, you could render adamantine armor into a squishy mess by just throwing charcoal or citrus at anyone wearing it.
Well unless its a endothermic reaction as in it reacts only as long so and so much energy is applied.
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They are dwarves, and by god, if there's a metal they can melt it.
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Woah woah woah, we are talking about creating more semi-realistic ways to smelt it now?
Why not just suggest the values be altered to be more plausible?
Umm... that was the original suggestion.
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Woah woah woah, we are talking about creating more semi-realistic ways to smelt it now?
Why not just suggest the values be altered to be more plausible?
That's what I was getting at. Of course, a fictional material can have any properties the author wants... but who of us thought of adamantine as ultra-tough glass with the density of balsa wood and a melting point above 8000°C (for comparison: iron boils at 2900°C) before looking up the values? I certainly thought of something that behaved like a metal and could be smelted and forged with good old dwarven craftsmanship.
I'm all for testing out an alternative form of adamantine; currently I'm looking for interesting materials to lift values from for an 'ultimate metal'. So far, I've got Tungsten, Titanium, some high-performance steels and am contemplating a few others. If someone with more knowledge about exotic metals could make some suggestions or, even better, point me at a site where I can get all the data in an easily accessible format, I'd be very grateful.
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Yeah, sure, I've seen it used supersilliously in video games before, but sub-atomic edges are just a little BS.
Why is that? Smaller than the atom, there is the quantum structure. Its feasable to think that an edge could be created utilising quantum mechanics know-how, although I don't think the dwarves would know how to do that ;) In fact if it is even posible, its something that we would not have the technology to do for a long time...
I'm all for testing out an alternative form of adamantine; currently I'm looking for interesting materials to lift values from for an 'ultimate metal'. So far, I've got Tungsten, Titanium, some high-performance steels and am contemplating a few others.
IIRC, Rolls-Royce have some patents on one of the strongest and most heat-resistant titanium variants, might be called Gamma Titanium Aluminide, or perhaps thats the older one. Its used for blades in the compressors of their jet engines.
The forces applied to the blades is in the extreme, however its very hard to find any diffinitive data on the material, as it is patented and a trade secret.
There is some info on wiki, but its not substantial.
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Maybe adamantine is so special because it layers in some way? It could be that in nature if already forms as quantum structure sharp edges. This could mean that it might "bend" when exposed to temperature diffrences (not melt just bend) when it's then blocked by another piece of adamantine it can't reform. though this would create armor that would as soon as it actually is damaged reshape and pasibly kill the armour user.
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Since medieval painters and stained glass window makers were using nano-technology, nothing is really "impossible" for even a fantasy version of medieval technology. Of course, they didn't understand WHY the technique they stumbled on worked, so they couldn't expand on it, unlike us, with our more advanced knowledge of materials at the nano size.
If the dwarves have stumbled across a secret process to utilize adamantine, then they have the technique. Could have been delivered by divine inspirate, could have been some drunk experimentation, whatever it is, it works for them. In our history, someone often stumbled across something that worked, and it would take decades or even centuries before humans had sufficent understanding of physics to understand why it works.
The reason thermite had to wait so long is aluminum was so rare and expensive, so much wasn't done with it. It wasn't until the advent of electricity that we gained the tools to make it so easily and cheaply.
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If there were really a need to "explain" how Adamantine can be shaped and manipulated by dwarves, I think it's easiest to imagine that they soak it in some other substance that somehow makes it malleable at achievable temperatures. Which is what Heph and NW_Kohaku suggested earlier.
It would have to be some sort of rare or manmade substance, IMO, and to be "safe" you could say that it only works in the presence of high heat (like you'd get from a forge). I don't think it would be too bad if the game required you to mix this substance into the forge reactions to work with adamantine - it'd be a high price for an even higher-valued reward.
It'd be funny if it was kobold extract. No, not the extract from kobold bulbs, but extract from kobold corpses. Given the kobold's tendency to steal valuable items, there'd be a bit of irony in that...
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Maybe just have it take some combination like the heat resistance of graphite, the density of aluminum, and the hardness of tungsten?
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I played around with something a little less extreme: Tungsten's melting point of 3400°C, aluminium's density, strength in line with the tougher metallic elements with the usual adjustments. Impact fracture was actually fine considering that Toady uses 3.5 times tensile strength if no good data is available; I simply toned the rest down accordingly and made it stiff but not perfectly brittle:
5M/4M/100 for impact, 1.5M/1.2M/100 for everything else. Last not least, I swapped the edge values for obsidian and adamantine (which incidentally still leaves obsidian as a very mediocre weapon material).
The new adamantine, unsurprisingly, still sits at the top of the food chain for armour, edged and pierced weapons. The results for blunt weapons are quite interesting: Practically everything else that's made out of metal will beat unarmored opponents faster. Copper and silver hammers are still more useful against things with goblin-level armour. However, they're very respectable against bronze and steel armour and the best you can make against adamantine (better than sharp adamantine or blunt silver, but outperformed by blunt platinum artifacts).
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... Guys... You're all thinking about it the wrong way round... Adamantine is intended to keep demons trapped deep under the surface, demons filled with fire and hate, anger and bile...
The more energy you throw against it the stronger it gets... The harder it is to work with, untill it can't take anymore and fails, snapping...
but... when it's cooled a gental touch can peel away strands, slowly, gently, painstakingly with the patience of a dwarven craftsperson. A task no spirit of fire could manage, the heat of its form would cause the Adamantine to tighten and harden...
No frog demon could do it... Lacking fine enough motor control, plus the heat and pressure of being deep underground keeps it stiff...
You have made the mistake the gods knew the demons would... How do we defeat the material!? How can we force it to our will? More fire! More force! Hit it harder!
but the dwarves know, the secret... Have a drink, relax, get out a tweezers and slowly tease out the knotted strands bit by bit.
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... Guys... You're all thinking about it the wrong way round... Adamantine is intended to keep demons trapped deep under the surface, demons filled with fire and hate, anger and bile...
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but the dwarves know, the secret... Have a drink, relax, get out a tweezers and slowly tease out the knotted strands bit by bit.
Makes sense. Until the new version's randomly generated tweezer demons emerge.
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Oh, I like that one.
So it's basically a non-newtonian (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2XQ97XHjVw) material (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYIWfn2Jz2g)?
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We would need some new tags in the raws for that but heck! Yes!
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Oh, I like that one.
So it's basically a non-newtonian (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2XQ97XHjVw) material (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYIWfn2Jz2g)?
Yup, basically Adamantine is like the custard of the gods...
Well custard is a non-newtonian fluid... Is there such a thing as a non-newtonian solid?
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That would be the most awesome explanation for adamant cloth ever.
So, how about this:
Natual adamantine should be flexible fibers, that harden under force into the axiomatically inflexible, invincible metal, that we see in the raws.
Heat can't really melt these fibers, but it can make them stick together into intricately patterned wafers, which can then be further bonded to make armor plates or sword blades.
The light weight could be explained by ultra fine threads, with lots of empty space.
The incredible edge is trickier, but it could be a natural consequence of the weaving and the shape of the strands. If the tip of each thread is actually ultra sharp (so demons that try to tear through it lacerate themselves, like on barbed wire), or even a mono-atom point, you could weave the blade so that the actual edge was a row of exposed tips.
I'm imagining something that looks like metal, but when examined with a jewelers glass, is actually a dense pack of threads, with ultra sharp ends that are woven to lie flat or stand upright, according to the needs of the craftsman. Unskilled smiths would just gently press and fold the wafers in proscribed ways with their hammers, to get a blade shaped object that stiffens up properly, but a masterwork would have every thread in perfect arrangement.
Sounds like we need a way to make adamantine whips. Cut a goblin right in half if you lash him with the edge.
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Should I feel guilty that now I want raw tags for non-newtonian fluids and item support for treated fabrics?
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... Guys... You're all thinking about it the wrong way round... Adamantine is intended to keep demons trapped deep under the surface, demons filled with fire and hate, anger and bile...
The more energy you throw against it the stronger it gets... The harder it is to work with, untill it can't take anymore and fails, snapping...
but... when it's cooled a gental touch can peel away strands, slowly, gently, painstakingly with the patience of a dwarven craftsperson. A task no spirit of fire could manage, the heat of its form would cause the Adamantine to tighten and harden...
No frog demon could do it... Lacking fine enough motor control, plus the heat and pressure of being deep underground keeps it stiff...
You have made the mistake the gods knew the demons would... How do we defeat the material!? How can we force it to our will? More fire! More force! Hit it harder!
but the dwarves know, the secret... Have a drink, relax, get out a tweezers and slowly tease out the knotted strands bit by bit.
Very, very cool. I like it.
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yhea this is somewhat plaussible. It must however remain at least somewhat strong in order to be used in weapons so the weapons don't bent when no force is applied. This does however make you wonder why they need fuel/magma in order to procces adamantine.
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You answered that yourself, I think. Weapons-grade adamantium is almost certainly an alloy, although one with sufficiently small amounts of metal that it's not modeled as such.
Adamantium rock would be the same, just with rock. So either way, they need the heat.
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I like the justification myself, but it requires a LOT of wankery. Dwarves supposedly smelt it and melt it down, unless they just claim that to keep everyone else in the dark. If it's not completely amorphous - which we know it isn't - I'm not sure we can give it a (much!) finer edge than obsidian without taking advantage of physics while it's in the shower. 'Doesn't flex or deform before it snaps' also makes the concept of it having fibres that can be worked very problematic, and clothes made out of such a material would be rather impractical.
But justification aside... toying around with material entries more extreme than the standard metals but less so than adamantine have extremely interesting effects.
For example, my downgraded adamantine (codenamed 'clownite'; same impact strength, density of aluminium, a few properties of tungsten, very sharp but still believable edge) has some very interesting properties. It makes good blunt weapons against naked flesh or against itself because it's hard and tough, but against softer armour a denser material is better. Makes perfect sense - against hard armour some of the force will be absorbed if the weapon is soft, if the armour is equally soft this will happen anyway and a bigger impact from a heavier weapon will matter more. I don't know if the possibility of armour being pushed into tissue is simulated yet.
Buffed-up obsidian (material values cribbed from various igneous stones rather than the marble it uses by default, increased edge because when steel is 10k and 100k goes as the maximum imaginable, I believe obsidian should rank higher) is very very deadly against unarmored opponents but not tough enough to defeat even low-quality armour.
In short, the combat/material system is sheer brilliance, and I'd prefer fictional materials that show it off.
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The non-newtonian adamantine idea would explain how adamantine clothing is good armor. When hit with something like a weapon, it hardens.
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could Adamantine be similar to carbon nanotubes?
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Not entirely. The properties of adamantine match up with diamondoid in general, but not plain nanotubes. You could possibly make something similar with a nanofactory, though the high melting point is right out.
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The idea of adamantine being moldable at high temperatures is not quite impossible, if we assume adamantine to naturally be in a very hard phase with a high melting point. However, heating the ademantine to it's annealing temperature and keeping it there for an extended period of time (say, several hours) will slowly cause it to revert into a softer phase, which can be cold-worked. This phase tends to form fibers due to it's high anisotropy, hence the wafers. The annealing temperature is not high, but even at temperatures close to the melting point of the normal phase it takes several hours before the strands lose their hardness and become workable. At that point they can easily be woven into wafers or clothes using prongs. The final step is the cooling stage. Cooling fast will cause it to change into a very hard and durable form, which is most usefull for breast plates and weapons. Cooling it slowly (again over the course of several ours) will result in a more flexible strand, ideal for clothes.
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Not entirely. The properties of adamantine match up with diamondoid in general, but not plain nanotubes. You could possibly make something similar with a nanofactory, though the high melting point is right out.
Unless its some kind of thermic supercoductor (like4He at very low temperatures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluidity)) with a high thermal diffusivity or its specific heat is rediculus high or even both at once.
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No-ones linked the alchemists workshop as a necessity to forging adamantine? Alchemist workshops need more love.
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Weren't alchemist workshops completely removed in .31?
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Yes in .31 alchemy workshops no longer exist. But this is still a suggestion tread so we could suggest it to be put back in.
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Or just mod them back in, now that we can make custom workshops
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A few things.
First, who says that adamantine has to be a molecular material? It could easily be some sort of exotic matter. Neutronium comes to mind, though of course it's not stable at STP. The strands could easily be (bundles of?) strings of subatomic particles, which would allow for almost arbitrarily sharp edges.
I do really like the non-newtonian model. It even meshes with current production trees: Strand extraction, which provides us with the base (flexible, malleable) thread, requires no fuel and happens at a craftsdorf's workshop. It can then be woven into fabric. The low-temperature, low-pressure environment of a loom allows it to retain its flexibility. Forging it into wafers begins the re-hardening process that forging it into armor finishes. Ideally, if this paradigm were officially accepted, "melting" adamantine armor would involve strand extraction rather than a smelter, starting the process over again. The hardening process in this case would be more of a tight interweaving of the strands - they never "melt" per se, but high energy states encourage them to tangle together, forming an inflexible "shell".
Also, I LOVE the idea of a dwarf having to be drunk to be relaxed enough to work the material. 8)
Adamantine whips could be something very like a monofilament whip. This would be extremely powerful, but equally dangerous to any bystanders.
EDIT: Also, seconding the idea of more unnatural materials to show off the system. "The Gods made Heavy Metal, and they saw that it was good..."
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OK, at this point, we're pretty much just talking about adamantine as if it was made from the stuff lightsabers are made of in Star Wars - the blade grows or weakens to a flicker (like when Obi Wan was fighting Vader) or solidifies for completely arbitrary reasons.
I guess now it's actually a cold plasma material that dwarves control through accidental telepathy simply by being Armok's Chosen People, and which they make into weapons only because of thoughts for "MORE DAKKA" or some such noise, and would be able to turn into gattling guns and spaceships by mistake if only they knew what those were.
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... strand extraction. Ummm did somebody actually think of the fact that dwarves melt the material in which the adamantine is embeded and not the adamantine itself?
edit: grammar - i am tired excuse
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on that note, steel wool burns. strands of adamantine might increase the surface area enough to melt it down.
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Burning and melting are completly diffrend things. Burning is all about oxhygen-heat-fuel while melting is all about tempreture.
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Burning adamantine! That should be the most energetic reaction possible, even able to reduce the aluminum from bauxite, and giving you adamantine oxide, which would be an impossibly good heat insulator.
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@ Heph: Adamantine doesn't flex or deform before it snaps, so extraction isn't the only problem. If we assume that this only applies at room temperature and can be changed with moderate heat, or that we'd need some arcane process to make it flexible, it still leaves us with a problem regarding adamantine threads. Clothes would be perfectly rigid, sutures would tear through the stitched flesh at the slightest provocation.
Assuming that adamantine keeps some sort of natural structure also raises questions about the edge value - with 10k for other metal and 20k for obsidian, 100k already seems ridiculous; more so if the material is known not to be amorphous.
Something else that is very odd: Most substances are denser as a solid than as a liquid, water is a huge exception. Adamantine is 13 times as dense in its liquid state.
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Some nice attempts were made to justify some individual properties of adamantine, but they don't work all at once. The whole thing only makes sense if we postulate secret processes to make its properties whatever it needs to be for any given application, which is as good an explanatiion as 'faerie magic!'.
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Some nice attempts were made to justify some individual properties of adamantine, but they don't work all at once. The whole thing only makes sense if we postulate secret processes to make its properties whatever it needs to be for any given application, which is as good an explanatiion as 'faerie magic!'.
It's just the same law of physics that causes liquids to flow in blocks of sevenths, which allows water to freeze and thaw to create matter, and allows any mountain, no matter how big to be supported on a single column of sand. :)
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Those quirks don't directly touch the materials system though, and are no reason to go 'Nothing makes sense anyway! Let's have hydrogen hammers hit hardest!'.
Fixing engine limitations would involve a lot of work, testing and possibly unacceptable amounts of processing power. Fixing nonsensical table entries doesn't.
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Fixing engine limitations would involve a lot of work, testing and possibly unacceptable amounts of processing power. Fixing nonsensical table entries doesn't.
That assumes the table entry is nonsensical. But it isn't really. Take the edge stat you mentioned the difference between metal, at 10k, and obsidian, at 20k, is 10k, the different between obsidian and adamantine, at 100k, is 80k. So either obsidian has twice the edge metal does (assume 0 means nothing) and adamantine has 5 times the edge of that, or the difference between obsidian and adamantine is eight times greater than that between metal and obsidian.
Neither is outside the realm of possibility assuming max edge indicates the sharpness and when you consider DF has the same value for all it's metals this seems unlikely.
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Something else that is very odd: Most substances are denser as a solid than as a liquid, water is a huge exception. Adamantine is 13 times as dense in its liquid state.
Oh, if nobody minds me taking my cynic hat off for a while, I'd like to take a crack at this one...
The reason that objects have the density they do depends upon their atomic weight (which multiply the density, obviously), how energized (hot) the atoms or molecules are (with the random motion tending to make objects less dense), and their magnetic properties (which can attract or repel other atoms, making them more or less dense).
Water notably becomes less dense upon freezing because its process of crystalization requires all of the water molecules to align in a way that water's inherent magnetism from having two (positive) hydrogen atoms on the end of a (negative) oxygen atom requires those atoms to crystalize further away from one another because with the random (heat) motion on a molecular level, even at freezing temperatures, is enough to vibrate between having aligned and unaligned magnetic fields. If you actually keep making ice colder, it will eventually get denser than room temperature water.
So then, adamantine, if you compare, has, at a liquid state, a density comparable to some lighter-than-iron elements like Scandium in its liquid state. (Of course, said liquid state is at "middle of the sun" temperatures, which would be driving the whole thing to be even less dense, so we might compare this to denser metals, and just say that it's the heat doing it.)
So what we are dealing with is a heavier metal than its density really implies, that instead has a VERY powerful magnetic property repulsing the rest of the adamantine on a molecular/atomic level. I don't know if this is the sort of property a metal can even display (metals can generally bond with one another in crystaline form just fine), so it might need to be a molecule of some sort. An extremely powerful magnetic repulsion can account for its low density, even if it is made of relatively dense materials. Its glass-like shattering may even be accounted for in this way by saying that, like Pig Iron, when you make a crystaline structure TOO rigid, it tends to shatter before it bends. It may be best to think of it as an extremely complex molecule whose combined magnetic fields ensure that the entire structure has powerful recoil against any kind of attempt to flex it out of its set shape, making an apparently impossibly rigid structure.
Of course, that raises the question of how to account for it's occasional cloth-like properties, which imply a total lack of that rigid crystaline structure, even at room temperature, even when whatever put it into that state is no longer being applied (so you can't simply say "magnets", since you'd have to wear said magnets all the time, and that probably wouldn't even work, anyway). The only thing I can offer up to explain that is that you would simply have to go the "acid" route and chemically change the molecule into a completely different molecule completely, one without all the properties that adamantine normally displays, but which dwarves still call adamantine because they don't really know better. This might be the "non-Newtonian solid" form of Adamantine. By being freer-flowing, though, it should also be denser than normal adamantine.
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Of course, that raises the question of how to account for it's occasional cloth-like properties,
Do we know it has cloth-like properties? I see nothing in the raws other than it can be used as clothing, although I could easily have missed it, my knowledge of 2010 raws is no where near as good as 40d.
It could well be that the clothing produced is very stiff and dwarves just put up with it because it's adamantine. Think of the thread as wires of the metal-like adamantine, weaved together to make whatever you want. Not very comfortable I admit, but means it can keep a somewhat rigid structure.
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We aren't talking 'this is slightly uncomfortable' kind of stiff. We're talking 'the hem of my shirt just cut me in half' kind of stiff.
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We aren't talking 'this is slightly uncomfortable' kind of stiff. We're talking 'the hem of my shirt just cut me in half' kind of stiff.
The things people do for fashion....
As long as it was rounded and not a sharp edge it shouldn't cut though. Well unless it was hit with something like a hammer and the force had to go somewhere (the same reason it's dumb to wear steel toecaps on a building site..)
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well I read through a couple of pages of this and there's one thing that everybody has overlooked (I only read through a couple of pages, forgive me if someone else has said this), the adamantine that is mined would very likely be impure (as with any ore), the impurities in the metal could lead it to be more workable, then when a certain heat threshold is passed(whilst forging) the bonds holding the adamantine and impurities together break and combust/combine with other molecules, whilst the adamantine molecules join back together in a very strong form, which makes it practically unworkable when cooled again.
I agree some of the properties are a bit too high, but considering how hard it is to obtain I think that they are justified.
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I don't know if this has been brought up, but perhaps the metal we call adamantine is actually an alloy. It may be dug out of the ground as an alloy, melted and worked at the much lower heat values of the alloy and then worked with that fantastic Dwarven skill so that when the other metal is extracted, it leaves the adamantine in whatever shape the dwarf had worked it into. When the dwarves want to melt it down, they get some of the metal that adamantine bonds with, heat both metals until they start bonding and from there the adamantine can be turned into whatever shape, or just left as bars like other metal.
It retains the strength and weight of adamantine, while getting over the heating problem.
To extract it from the ground in the first place, miners find seams in the adamantine, where the easily cut other metal hasn't bonded with the adamantine, allowing them to extract and use the chunk of adamantine.
- = other metal
* = adamantine alloy
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^------^
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-------cut here
DAMMIT! While I typed someone ninja'd me!
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OK, at this point, we're pretty much just talking about adamantine as if it was made from the stuff lightsabers are made of in Star Wars - the blade grows or weakens to a flicker (like when Obi Wan was fighting Vader) or solidifies for completely arbitrary reasons.
I guess now it's actually a cold plasma material that dwarves control through accidental telepathy simply by being Armok's Chosen People, and which they make into weapons only because of thoughts for "MORE DAKKA" or some such noise, and would be able to turn into gattling guns and spaceships by mistake if only they knew what those were.
I'm... sorry? I felt like my suggestion, while physically impossible under SI, was at least internally consistent. :( I was not trying to anger you. If it helps, think of it this way: Steel wool is bendy. Heat and hammer it (what I meant by "high energy state") and the strands weld together, making it less bendy. That's what I was getting at with the wafer-making tomfoolery.
Adamantine doesn't flex or deform before it snaps, so extraction isn't the only problem.
This, however, is a problem. My suggestion requires a modelling (or rather, in-raw acknowledgement) of the quanta of adamantine (strands) creating large-scale effects that the individual strands lack (hardness, inflexibility), which isn't the current model. Of course, I would submit that 1) the current in-game representation of adamantine makes no actual sense, and as such trying to explain it as-is in physical terms is a fool's errand, so we may as well seek explanations for how it could work given various assumptions, and 2) that using the material that the columns supporting the world and separating it from Hell are made of to suture wounds is too stupid even for a creature that will remove the bridge suspending the floor it is standing on over a 50 z-level pit.
Some nice attempts were made to justify some individual properties of adamantine, but they don't work all at once. The whole thing only makes sense if we postulate secret processes to make its properties whatever it needs to be for any given application, which is as good an explanatiion as 'faerie magic!'.
Of course they don't. Each suggested model is supposed to stand on its own; they aren't supposed to mesh with every other suggestion in the thread.
Unless I've misread you, and you're saying that no individual suggestion models all the properties of adamantine, in which case I agree with you. I made no attempt to explain adamantine sutures in my suggestion, because (as I mentioned above) I hate them and think they're stupid.
*science!*
Very interesting, and extremely likely if adamantine is a molecule. Of course, if there is an element found only in adamantine molecules (likely), then we might wonder at its properties as well. However, in the interest of not contemplating my navel, I'm not going to.
robolee and Rowanas seem to have (accidentally?) suggested very similar things. The main problem with this, as with the other workable suggestions in the thread, is that the raws don't currently acknowledge any such thing. Not that I consider that a count against the suggestions; I'm just saying that none of these suggestions can explain the properties of adamantine AND its raw-stated properties (as the two are inherently inconsistent), as I mentioned earlier.
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Soooo what kind of Molecule? Can anayone think of something (or calculate) a Molecule that has (most) properties of Adamantine? Bonuspoint of the reaction includes FOOF.
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As long as it was rounded and not a sharp edge it shouldn't cut though. Well unless it was hit with something like a hammer and the force had to go somewhere (the same reason it's dumb to wear steel toecaps on a building site..)
Actually, Mythbusters disproved that one - the amount of force it takes to actually deform the steel toes of steel toe boots to cut through your toes is an amount of force that would essentially have liquified your entire foot without the protection.
Also, the properties of adamantine are not like, say, gold, which you can make a thread out of. Gold is very malleable. Adamantine will shatter before it ever bends. It's like making a dress out of glass or hardened plastic.
well I read through a couple of pages of this and there's one thing that everybody has overlooked (I only read through a couple of pages, forgive me if someone else has said this), the adamantine that is mined would very likely be impure (as with any ore), the impurities in the metal could lead it to be more workable, then when a certain heat threshold is passed(whilst forging) the bonds holding the adamantine and impurities together break and combust/combine with other molecules, whilst the adamantine molecules join back together in a very strong form, which makes it practically unworkable when cooled again.
I agree some of the properties are a bit too high, but considering how hard it is to obtain I think that they are justified.
The problem with that idea is that even the raw adamantine "ore" has the same imperviousness to all terrestrial temperatures as the final metal.
Soooo what kind of Molecule? Can anayone think of something (or calculate) a Molecule that has (most) properties of Adamantine? Bonuspoint of the reaction includes FOOF.
Well, it'd have to include some kind of really, really bizzare magnetic interaction if it were to have a low density like this. Water has its magnetic properties because the hydrogen binds in that "Micky Mouse" formation you see, one side becomes positive, while the other becomes negative, since Oxygen balances off its negative electrical charge with the two positive hydrogen charges... You'd need to have a crystaline formation that would put rows of repeating negative and positive charges... to be able to really secure them in place, maybe the crystaline structure formed by the interacting molecules look like interlocking puzzle pieces, with cavities and knobs that fill them, so that the complex magnetic fields refuse to allow the molecules to move in any particular direction, provided you have at least one such interlocking part in every direction.
The usual suspects for this sort of thing would be Hydrogen and Carbon, but a hydrocarbon chain, of course, would never withstand the kinds of heat we are talking about. We need to be dealing in materials which are less reactive than most materials... I almost want to say "noble gas" in the molecules, and try to come up with a BS reason for how they could be bound into a molecule in the first place... I can't really think of a metal that doesn't in some way oxidize...
I do really like the non-newtonian model. It even meshes with current production trees: Strand extraction, which provides us with the base (flexible, malleable) thread, requires no fuel and happens at a craftsdorf's workshop. It can then be woven into fabric. The low-temperature, low-pressure environment of a loom allows it to retain its flexibility. Forging it into wafers begins the re-hardening process that forging it into armor finishes. Ideally, if this paradigm were officially accepted, "melting" adamantine armor would involve strand extraction rather than a smelter, starting the process over again. The hardening process in this case would be more of a tight interweaving of the strands - they never "melt" per se, but high energy states encourage them to tangle together, forming an inflexible "shell".
Hmm... going back to this...
If it's a molecule, then perhaps there are "pure" and "impure" adamantine. Most adamantine is morpheous, but, in the haste of Armok to seal the HFS, some of it was created too fast, and entered into an amorphous (what is technically called a "glass", although that doesn't necessarily mean what you think) solid state, where its magnetic properties are not fully realized, and the material is flexible.
TRUE adamantine will never change its shape once set, so as to seal in the HFS forever. However, there are strands of the imperfect, amorphous material in the raw chunks of metal. You can very carefully pluck tiny strands from the otherwise solid metal, and then must throw away the rest of the hardened shell as oversized and not terribly effective paperweights. It's properties, though fantastic and precious, can never be put to good use as it cannot be shaped by any known dwarven means... (Of course, this still doesn't explain why magic dwarven picks can cut the material to start with, but that's a mystery even when you cut through whole mountains on a single copper pick, reducing whole mountains into collections of stone that can fit on one tile.)
Using something like an acid treatment once the flexable material is set into a proper position, you can give it a chance to reset into "true" adamantine... from which, it will never again change shape, excepting unthinkable strains actually shattering a thin enough thread of the material.
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It's like making a dress out of glass
Glass is a rather bad example since glassfibers can bend very well. jUst be sure you dont go over the max bending radius.
We need to be dealing in materials which are less reactive than most materials... I almost want to say "noble gas" in the molecules, and try to come up with a BS reason for how they could be bound into a molecule in the first place... I can't really think of a metal that doesn't in some way oxidize...
Sulfur-hexaflourid and Nitrogen are chemical almost innert so i would say you would not need nobles. And i don't want purple adamantine. Actually i have a proffiecient chemics Student among my friends who knows some stuff i could ask him if he can crank something out.
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The problem with that idea is that even the raw adamantine "ore" has the same imperviousness to all terrestrial temperatures as the final metal.
This is, incidentally, the most problematic and least important (from a utility perspective) property of adamantine. Just a side note. Reducing it to e.g. thermite temperatures would be a big step toward explaining some of this stuff (and making an alternate, but still interesting, production chain at that).
I almost want to say "noble gas" in the molecules, and try to come up with a BS reason for how they could be bound into a molecule in the first place... I can't really think of a metal that doesn't in some way oxidize...
Noble gases aren't, really. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_compounds)
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Actually, Mythbusters disproved that one - the amount of force it takes to actually deform the steel toes of steel toe boots to cut through your toes is an amount of force that would essentially have liquified your entire foot without the protection.
Although mythbuster is fun they are wrong an awful lot. Still I have no reason to doubt that as I only know one person who has had this happen and it's possible nothing could have protected his foot. I've heard kevlar boots can be good but who knows.
The point about that non-sharp edge not cutting is still valid of course, as to if threads are possible to bend I'm not sure how to read the raws either way on that. Even fairly non malleable metals can be used though.
Very interesting, and extremely likely if adamantine is a molecule. Of course, if there is an element found only in adamantine molecules (likely), then we might wonder at its properties as well.
Almost certainly something made with carbon nano tubes, they seem to be the holy grail as far as structures that are applicable to everything science needs.
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I know this is a little bit late and possibly flogging a skeletal horse... but something for those with a stronger science background than myself: Doesn't adamantine's molar mass (same as that of iron) rule out possible exotic properties that were brought up to justify its edge value? If I'm talking nonsense, corrections are very welcome.
Obsidian is 13 times as dense as adamantine, with comparable molar mass (actually lower in-game). So obsidian's smallest 'elementary entities' (mostly silicon dioxide molecules) should be packed more tightly than those of adamantine (whatever their nature).
Given that a monomolecular edge is possible for obsidian blades (and something fairly close is achievable through old-fashioned knapping, if the value takes practicality into account as well as theoretical limits) I can't see a way to justify 20000 for obsidian and 100000 for adamantine.
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Anyway, harping about adamantine aside... has anyone found a good resource for overall material values yet? The system isn't being used to its fullest atm. For example, in many cases no real distinction is made between different strenghts: impact strength set to 3.5 times tensile strength (most readily available figure), most others set equal to tensile strength. I'm also curious about obsidian as a weapon material using its true properties (which I haven't found anywhere) rather than taking everything from marble.
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Just assume that a large portion of adamantine forging is done with prayers to Armok to bless the forge fire and hammer to make this possible.
Also Toady now needs to introduce a Priest of Armok noble who makes adamantine forging possible and can cure (or cause) madness and also gives happy thoughts to dwarves if you give him a magma powered temple workshop where you can assign animals for sacrifice.
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Obviously adamantium is a thermosetting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosetting_plastic) metal. The ore can be manipulated and forged, but heat it to a certain point (well below its melting point) and it becomes permanently hard.