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[Sheb]

Well, then you could just make anything letal by having a reaction that turns it into a weapon.

[xeivous]

Well, then you could just make anything letal by having a reaction that turns it into a weapon.

But there's no FUN in that.

[EveryZig]

Well, then you could just make anything letal by having a reaction that turns it into a weapon.

But there's no FUN in that.

I shall crush you with my soap sword!

[Nikov]

Something tells me flaming oil jugs will fly hither and thither as the siege arc develops, splattering burning contaminants on goblins and dwarves alike with little goblin grenadiers tossing their lethal payloads into fortification embrasures.

That something is an understanding that Toady wants this game to kick ass.

[agatharchides]

Boiling oil, pfft. Fill it with sand, roast it and upend it from a wall overlooking them and upwind .

Yes, people actually did.

[Girlinhat]

I don't seem to follow this.  You mean hot sand?  Or molten glass?

[Max White]

Hot sand. It works well, as sand was some what easyer to get your hands on then oil. Although oil was a lot stickyer.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yea, there are ceramic knifes in real life, they do very well, harder then most metals, and therefor require less sharpening. Did you also know there are ceramics that conduct far better then metal are notibly low temperatures? Ceramic is a very wide term these days, and just because dwarfs can make a few types of ceramic dosn't mean they can preoduce the type used for knives.

If I were to weaponise ceramics , I would mod in clay golems and make then tamable, with the trainable tag.

The thing about "Stoneware" is that it can be literally described as "Man-made stone" (or dwarf-made in this case).  You take the sand, silt, or clay of certain types of stone, and melt them at extreme (1000 degree Farenheit or so) temperatures until they basically hit semi-molten state, and congeal into a stone in the shape you wanted. 

The problem is often that stoneware is very difficult to make very thick - you have to make the body of the material you are working wet to work it, but that moisture needs to escape when you boil it at the extreme temperatures you hit when baking it.  This is why stoneware, and to a greater degree, porcelain, need to be fairly thin.

Making stoneware have properties functionally similar to actual stone makes perfect sense in this regard.  I could see a "ceramic bolt" being manufactured as a means of producing weapons on non-metal-bearing maps.  That, or obsidian or even flint-based arrows.  Flint can keep a sharper edge than steel, at that.  Sure, a ceramic bolt would break after one use, but that's an acceptable loss you have with bolts already, anyway.

As for non-metal armors, there are some ways to do it... I know of rattan armor, which was supposedly used in Ancient China, which was composed of a bamboo-like vine for the main bulk, then treated with oil to harden.  You could possibly layer in some ceramic plate inside of a rattan or similar flexible fabric that could act as a shock absorber, and reduce the odds of shattering prematurely, or at least, make sure the fragments stay in the armor, and keep providing some protection.  Even then, you'd probably have to discard it after every battle, but since vines and clay are a renewable resource, that wouldn't be much of a problem.

[Girlinhat]

Until armor damage is implemented, ceramic armor won't be accurate.  When it is, then you can make single-use ceramic plate shields, a simple lightweight slab of clay across your chest that shatters on impact, but stops that impact.  Sure, it needs replacing, but that's one less swipe of a dragon's claw that's hitting your dwarf!  Ceramic hammers would be interesting as well, especially if you could have secondary weapons.  Slam a stone hammer into a goblin's rhino mount, shattering the hammer and the rhino, then draw your sword to finish the goblin itself.

Silver warhammers will suffer badly once degradation is in, since your fancy silver hammer will warp and bend on every hit, while the strong steel armor it's slamming against holds its shape through the whole battle.  I'm just hoping for repair functions, so you can take broken and discarded armor, and fix it up like new, because all your stolen goblinite weapons will be in tatters from that one serrated saw trap that butchered the previous owner.

[Jake]

Not exactly ceramic, but wouldn't a brick on a stick make a pretty effective warhammer?

[NW_Kohaku]

Ceramic armor would have some use.  Used to provide a stiff backing to a flexible but tough fabric like rattan, ceramics would make excellent armor against bolts and arrows, and wouldn't necessarily shatter.  They could possibly take some blows from other piercing weapons, so long as too much impact force isn't placed on it, as well. 

A ceramic-backed armor against a hammer would shatter (but do a good job absorbing the impact in shattering).  Shattered ceramics wouldn't provide as much protection, but if you have the ceramics inside of some sort of fabric that can contain the clay and shards the ceramics would shatter into, then you would have at least some absorbative properties, although piercing weapons would go through them.

Ceramic "artificial stone" armors would, however, be literally as heavy as wearing a similar amount of stones on you.  You'd probably only be able to armor your chest, at that. 

[Girlinhat]

Not exactly ceramic, but wouldn't a brick on a stick make a pretty effective warhammer?

Take a cinder block.  Lift it up to above waist high.  Drop it.  It'll probably shatter, or at least chip badly.  Imagine that, swung from the end of a stick as hard as you can.  It'll positively shatter any bone and crush whole organs, but if it hits a shield or solid breastplate, the stone will turn to powder.  Granted, the bone within that breastplate will suffer, but only on that one strike.  So, lethal yes, but not re-usable.

[Nikov]

The absence of a historical precedent for ceramic weapons and armor makes me very doubtful of any suggestions to that effect. Ceramics are brittle and impossible to repair. I see no use for them as weapons or armor in this time period. As containers for burning oil / hot sand / boiling water / poisonous spiders they have a use. A few creative applications beyond that? Sure. But lets not presume ourselves to be more clever at killing people than ten thousand years of our ancestors.

[Babylon]

The problem with making them weapons material is that they have very little in the raws for them. The only weapon/armor data they have is density, so for everything else, it would be a similar situation to the max edge of glass. Even if all other values are set to zero, they night still make a poor quality blunt weapon. Clay hammers it is!

changing that glass problem and adding in ceramic and glass weapons would go a long way to reducing the reliance on iron IMO.

[UristMcDwarf]

The absence of a historical precedent for ceramic weapons and armor makes me very doubtful of any suggestions to that effect. Ceramics are brittle and impossible to repair. I see no use for them as weapons or armor in this time period. As containers for burning oil / hot sand / boiling water / poisonous spiders they have a use. A few creative applications beyond that? Sure. But lets not presume ourselves to be more clever at killing people than ten thousand years of our ancestors.

We are, though.