Hi Veeky Forums, question about metal qualities.
I'm making a game, and I want the material of your weapon to matter. Right now I have Copper and raw Iron being the shittest materials, and Bronze and Steel being valuable and rare.
Settingwise, I wanted to have one of them be an ancient weapon, no longer commonly produced because of a shortage of the necessary material. I wanted to make that steel since it's better, but I'm not sure how to justify that.
Any ideas?
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Is it a no magic setting? Because magical fake metal would be a really easy option.
Alternatively, you could make the weapon made out of a chunk of native metal, metal found in its pure metallic form in nature, and then make it a rare metal that the current society doesnt have the proper methods to refine yet. Like titanium or something.
>but I'm not sure how to justify that
Steel was only available in very limited numbers in this world and were mostly reserved as the swords of very important people, eventually steel almost completely ran out and the vast majority of steel swords you're gonna find are ancient but well preserved heroes/lords weapons.
How do you run out of steel if you have iron?
Well, when I ran a bronze age setting, the way I justified it is that ancient peoples had patron deities that, among other things, could produce heat high enough to produce high quality steel, knew enough about the world to make stainless steel, and had enough magical knowledge to lay on some preservation spells on the weapons. Now that those patron deities are gone, regular mortals don't have the techology or the knowledge to produce steel the regular way.
First off, bronze is both heavier than Iron, and it loses shape more easily than smithed iron. I'd switch that or make a worldbuilt reason to make Bronze better than Iron (beyond looks). As for ancient weapons, I'd go with meteoric iron or quicksilver plated steel
Also, steel varies widely in its properties based on its composition and manufacturing process. You could have this weapon be made of something akin to Damascus Steel, an ancient steel that was well known for being of superior quality at the time.
Right, forgot about iron bit.
Well then you kinda fucked yourself, if iron exists in great quantities, and people know how to turn it into steel, you can't really have a world where steel weapons are exceptionally rare.
pretty much impossible.
take iron bloomery, consolidate it from a smelt into an ingot through several forging passes.
then convert, of "fine" it into blister steel. That's formed by roasting the wrought bar iron in contact with carbon (usually bone dust and similar) in a cementing furnace. Its so called from the resulting blistered appearance.
To improve the quality further, it is subjected to two subsequent processes, which convert it into shear steel. that's done by taking multiple bars of blister steel, binding them together, and then forge-welding, folding, and rewelding.
higher quality for blades can be made by repeating that process, making what's called Double Shear steel.
Lastly, ingots of blister steel can be placed into a crucible with broken glass, and a small piece of charcoal, sealed up and then heated to white-hot. the steel melts, and impurities are fluxed into the glass, and carbon is transferred from the charcoal (which also burns, briefly, consuming the oxygen in the crucible.). the result is "cast" or crucible steel (note "cast steel" in this case is not in fact, cast in the sense of casting in a mould. that process is much later and different.), which is then forged out into blades.
more advanced crucible steels are made with particular alloys, resulting in cementite banding inside the steel, which becomes "Damascus", or "wootz" or "pulad" or "bulat".
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but the idea that steel would be lost while they can make iron is utterly absurd. Even a simple tatara furnace for smelting can produce high-carbon steel native straight from the raw ore. Lower carbon wrought iron is more common, but any good smelter can at least get some steel along with the iron.
Bronze remained dominant for a long time after people discovered how to work iron because it is a lot easier to work with and early iron doesn't provide a lot of benefits over bronze.
The main advantage of iron is that it's a lot easier to get the raw materials for it, thus it doesn't require an extensive trading network to make iron. Thus, when trade networks collapsed during the end of the Bronze Age, bronze became prohibitively expensive and iron finally got its chance to shine during the dark age that followed.
Isn't damascus steel always worse than just pure steel?
Just have some mystical value added to some master craftsmen and have exceptional blades be blessed by gods or something.
wrought iron is just slightly softer than cold worked bronze, and doesn't require the logistic hassle that bronze has.
It wouldn't be easy to justify but it would be possible.
The proper order should be copper -> bronze -> iron -> steel. Worked iron, regardless of grade, would outperform bronze in just about any situation possible. Copper weapons will need to be small and simple; think basic spear points and axe heads the size of your palm. Copper doesn't hold an edge well at all, and you'd only really get one good strike before you bent any cutting surfaces. After that it would need to either be beaten back into shape or re-cast. Bronze fairs better, but not by a lot. Bronze will usually go through a soft target and come out the other side okay, but any blow against a solid surface will deform the edge. Even an unlucky hit against a major bone could significantly dull the edge. A bronze weapon can last through a few fights, but it will need to be recast eventually. After a major battle any bronze edge is guaranteed to be blunted.
Iron weapons have their own disadvantages. They are far more brittle (as opposed to ductile) than the two previous weapon materials, but the advantage they hold is that their overall strength is higher and more importantly they can be sharpened. Bronze and copper are primarily beaten or directly molded into an edge and then polished, but iron can be honed. A honed edge can slice through things bronze can only dream of, and an iron point can pierce armor without deforming and becoming useless. Of course if you push an iron weapon too far it shatters. The more impurities the easier this is to due. Unlike a damaged/destroyed bronze or copper weapon, a broken iron blade cannot be simply re-cast. It becomes nothing more than sharp scrap.
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Steel has all the advantages of iron with much more flexibility in the material. It will still snap before it outright bends in most cases, but it takes much more force to get there. It also holds an edge much better. As far as making steel rare-to-the-point-of-legendary, my favorite way is to say that steel hasn't actually been discovered yet. Rarely an iron asteroid falls from the heavens, leaving behind a deposit of extremely high quality star-forged steel. This adds a great mistique to steel that makes it an almost magical commodity.
Well i guess it depends on your definition of "pure steel", because steel isn't really ever pure. Modern steels are definitely better than Damascus steel, but i believe that it was quite exceptional for its time.
Have copper swords ever actually been a thing? I notice they're a common trope in fantasy but I don't think I've seen any records of actual historical swords.
Not OP, but since we're having a metal thread..
How do you like to represent the differences of various metals within your system of choice? More damage, better balance (hit chance), or maybe a chance to break or bend when struck with a stronger material?
I suppose that's true. I guess you have to be really good smelter in ancient day to get a good steel cast.
My system of choice (GURPS) has rules for it that I find adequate, so I don't bother changing them.
Is this correct? I've read in a number of places that bronze is better than iron (with the most visceral example being Caesar's account of the Gallic barbarians having to stop mid combat to beat their swords back into shape). Was that just because their weapons were really shit? What would make iron lower quality?
Would you be able to make steel if there was no coal available? Most fantasy settings never had a Carboniferous period, so what if coal just never formed in great enough quantities for it to be widely used in smithing?
Assuming typical magic rules, you could just have metals be forged using magical fires rather than coal burning. Just not sure if the result would be good enough to be useful.
smelting doesnt get you a casting.
smelted iron is a "bloom" - pretty much a grey metallic sponge, full of slaggy shit. that's hammered while hot, to force out the slag (when you see blacksmithing where sparks are shooting out under the hammer, that's not iron, its molten slag being squeezed out like toothpaste from a tube.).
hammering it together is called consolidating the bloom. once that's done that is "fined" (the origin for the word refinery) to convert iron to steel.
a skilled smelter can control the process enough to get more carbon in the bloom, making steely iron, or even steel, but usually, its far easier (and less prone to failure) to make a low carbon bloom and then add more carbon in the fining process.
Swords? Not really. Knives, spears, and axes from the Copper Age, made from copper, have been found, though.
According to Dwarf Fortress:
copper
>Would you be able to make steel if there was no coal available?
coal is really horrible for smithing, and smelting in particular. it contains sulphur and worse, phosphorus which both combine in the steel as its being created, and contaminate it.
Phosphorus results in what's called "short" iron - which is crumbly, and falls apart under the hammer, even when heated to white-hot heat - useless for blades.
Almost all smelting is done using charcoal, which is produced from trees in charcoal burning. That doesnt have the same impurities that coal does. Some forge-working can be done with coal, but its a poor substitute
You could use charcoal, would take longer than coal but it could be done.
Make it so that only the backwater nations have steel and non-meteoric iron in any quantity, as it was in real life for some time with the Gauls and the Hittites.
I'm not talking the same cast as you are. I'm talking about cast that you smelt in a kiln with stuff like glass and flux, not making an actual casting in mold or smelting sponge out of mineral.
So for clarity, the process is generally
Iron Ore > smelting > iron bloom > consolidating > iron ingot > fining > steel ingot
Is this correct? And its technically possible to consolidate directly into a steel ingot but is much harder due to a chance of not all the slag being removed?
that's more commonly called a crucible steel nowadays. (which was also used as a name in the 17th-19th C)
"cast steel" as a name for that process fell out of use in the late 19th and early 20th century, as steel casting became more technologically practical and more commonplace in industry.
You are right, should have used crucible steel from the get go. As long as we are talking about the same thing.
I wonder how well known technique the practice of making crucible steel was. I understand there is quite a lot of viking era tools that are quite extraordinarily pure compared to the average of the time period.
>Is this correct?
pretty much.
to be complete from start to finish, it would be :
_mining_ + _Charcoal-making_ -> "Iron Ore" -> _smelting_ -> "iron bloom" -> _consolidating_ -> "iron ingot" -> _fining_ -> "steel ingot" _forging_ -> "Steel blade"/"object"
where _underscore_ is a process, and "name" is the resulting material from that process.
>And its technically possible to consolidate directly into a steel ingot but is much harder due to a chance of not all the slag being removed?
Far harder, and much more likely to have failures - "stringers" or filaments of slag that get folded into the steel can result in delamination or breakage, and there's much more chance of inconsistency in the metal - meaning its more prone to breakage, or part of a blade would be softer than other parts, etc. the consolidating and folding processes serve to split and weld the metal again and again, and in doing so, spread out any areas of lower carbon (or areas of excessively high carbon) and even it out. sort of like kneading dough or mixing a cake, it ensures your mix is even.
A lot of these processes arent done any longer because bessmer processes create molten steel/iron, instead of the spongy mass, so there's none of the slag in it - so you just need to refine the grain structure in the metal by rolling it, which serves the same process as forging out, on a vast scale.
>I wonder how well known technique the practice of making crucible steel was
as a historian, and a bladesmith, my general beleif is that the concept was at least understood, even in medieval periods - they knew that it was a steel that was made in a crucible to refine it, as unlike the long iron bars for fined steel, it came in round "pucks". (literally like an ice hockey puck).
but the processes to do that were, it seems pretty well-guarded - it only reached england in the mid-18th C, after Huntsman spent years (and I think it was decades) perfecting the process for the equipment to hand. Even with modern gear, and the smiths I know doing it, its taken most of them at least a decade of practice to master the process, when they already knew every step in the process and what needed done, or needed adding etc.
as a petrolhead, I suppose its very similar to the fact that I can say that to make a F1 chassis, you use carbon fibre prepreg sheet, laid into a mould and then baked in an autoclave. that's the basics, but I'm sure as hell never going to make an f1 chassis that works! The same applies to the crucible steels - the smiths probably knew that same basic principle of what was behind it, but it was simply so far out of reach to do that - even getting the forges hot enough was beyond them - that they simply didnt even try beyond the occasional dabble.
Bronze is better than Iron for a couple of reasons, even if it is heavier. Primarily because Bronze is flexible.
Iron is stronger, easier, and lighter, but it is brittle as fuck. The longer you make it, the more prone to fracture or breaking it becomes. That's why most iron weapons were rather short, knives, spear heads, or mace heads. You take iron and make a three foot sword out of it, it will shatter like unto glass, and you're fucked for fixing it.
Bronze on the other hand can flex, and rather than shatter it will bend, which means you can fix it up with practically a camp fire and a rock in some cases. Plus, you can mold it suuuper easy. With iron and steel, you have to hammer them out into the weapon you want, especially in the case of swords. Bronze? shit, shut carve a mold and boom, any blade you want. Just grab a file to clean and sharpen that shit. And you get a nice, uniformed product that everyone is used to using, not to mention you can mass produce it faster. Sure, it's not as strong, and you start pounding it against something harder it's gonna be less effective, but its still great stuff
>Isn't damascus steel always worse than just pure steel?
modern day? probably. Back in the original days when "damascus steel" actually came from damascus? Nah, reports are it was way better. Probably because it contained crucible steel, which was better than what most were making at the time.
>You take iron and make a three foot sword out of it, it will shatter like unto glass,
that's utter bullshit.
A low-carbon wrought iron is not brittle at all.
in fact, its the opposite. its soft. softer than bronze. a wrought iron will readily bend, but the important thing is if it bends too much, then it fails with a ductile tearing process - sort of like soft toffee, it stretches.
and that tearing is irreparable (at least without reforging).
but if its "only" bent sideways 30 degrees or so, you can stick it under your foot and bend it back straight. (ish). the problem doing that is it slowly gets weaker, and will eventually break.
but it is not, in any way "like glass". That is nothing but utter fantasy.
pic related - on the left is steel - a granular breakage process. on the right is wrought iron's failure mode - a tearing, ragged failure.
he may be mixing it up woth pig iron. which is crazy high carbon steel, which makes it hard and brittle. plus it usually has relatively high amounts of impurities which also makes metal brittle.
Iirc, in contrast to most of the user replies, specifically forged bronze with a particular tin content can be as strong and as hard as milder steels. This was well known in the ancient period and was a reason nobody fucked with iron. Any idiot could pour bronze into usable molds, yeah, but the real art was in forging it into superior tools and weapons.
Iron, by contrast, needs higher temps to work, and can go all kinds of ways due to all kinds of factors. You need a much higher upfront investment in terms of skill and equipment (especially forge and bloomery), but once you get the hang of shit iron is more afforadble than bronze. You cant get the same performance out of it, but plenty of people were able to get iron alloys that worked well enough for their needs, like pattern-forged swords from the norse, who figured out how to selectively harden parts of swords so as to save material and make sturdier weapons out of trash iron, or Roman smiths who figured out how to make the outside of lorica segmentata harder and less flexible than the inside (thought to be a kind of crude steel). Hell, that same armor was phased out in favor of plain chainmail, due to its ease of maintenance, ease of manufacture, and durability. For the same reason as bronze was left behind, the extra value of the protection wasnt worth the logistic costs of maintaining enough infrastructure to have this shit when you had iron that was far more prevalent and worked well enough.
If I were you, Id specify between forged and cast bronze. Dunno if they look different, but the difference between a poured copper alloy and mild steel qualities should be pretty apparent. Then put actual god-tier steel above that.
>iron
>brittle
Pretty sure vikings specifically didn't know how to make crucible steel. But they had wide reaching enough traders that they could get it. Vikings went as far as Baghdad which is probably where they got a lot of stuff from central asia like crucible steel.
They knew how to work it but being an especially valuable steel for them they'd do stuff like make a wrought iron axe with a steel edge. or the ulfburt swords made of it.that were just really expensive.
Steel =/= high carbon steel
Just look at different viking swords. Some are shitty steel and others are made from high carbon damascus steel.
Ulfberht marked blades were made by Frankish monastic foundries, not vikings. they were traded down the Rhine, and up the North sea coast into the Baltic.
viking smithing was at best pattern-welding, and much of the evidence in fact indicates that domestically produced blades in Scandinavia even as late as the 10th C were relatively poor quality forge-work
>I wanted to make that steel since it's better, but I'm not sure how to justify that.
You can't justify it because it's metallurgical idiocy.
At it's simplest, steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. You already have iron in this setting and, because you have furnaces to make iron, you already have carbon too. Sooner or later someone is going to come up with either bloomeries or crucibles and then they'll have steel. Steel is so fucking easy to make that even niggers in east Africa 2000 years ago figured out how to make it despite not being able to make bronze or other alloys.
The only way you'll be able to "justify" your "ideas" is if your players are as fucking stupid as you are.
Iron that hasn't been turned into steel is kinda brittle. Of course ANY metal gets brittle if you cold work it
only that's completely arse-backwards.
Iron is ductile. Iron is not brittle.
steel is brittle when heat-treated and with a high martensite structure. with a pearlite of bainite structure, its far less so.
nah you're definitely thinking of pig iron.
Pure or wrought iron is relatively soft and ductile compared to steel.
Pig iron is really high carbon content. like as much as 8% compared to high carbon steels 2%. Pig Iron is hard and brittle, its also an intermediary step in making steel and no one made a finished product from pig iron.
Historians have better gramar than this.
>you mad bro?
Iron is super common, coalesced goethite can be found in lakes, swamps and postglacial plains.
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If it's ancient, it's going to be bronze.
If you want it better, it's going to be steel and much newer.
Mass production of steel is fairly new.
>How do you like to represent the differences of various metals within your system of choice?
Hairstyle and accessories, for the most part. Otherwise, more progressive genres tend to have flashier magic effects, countered by the heavier and grindier genres just plain doing more damage.
Oh, wait. Metallurgy.
>Historians have better gramar than this.
>gramar
What about the japs? Didn't they have super shit iron ore full of silica, literal iron sand, that required an extensive refining process? Iron sand could be the only source of iron, and tough most people can refine it into regular iron, the process for steel making from it is lost?
>Didn't they have super shit iron ore full of silica, literal iron sand, that required an extensive refining process?
No. the iron sand is simply a bit less yeild per tonne than other ores.
>and tough most people can refine it into regular iron, the process for steel making from it is lost?
nonsense.
there's nothing remotely "lost" about the process - plenty of japanese smiths still use if to make tamahagane.
its only "lost" in the sense that large-scale industrial manufacture has abandoned it in favour of bessmer processes.
>tough most people can refine it into regular iron, the process for steel making from it is lost?
thats not possible. if you can make iron then you can make steel. It's actually harder to get pure iron than it is to get mild steel with historical smelting processes.
Unless its the lowest of low fantasy why not include a very rare fictional metal? You really can't go wrong with mithril.
Not even taking the piss here, but Obsidian is ridiculously sharp. 'Thrones has populaized it as some kind of magical elemental weapon, but it's sharp and rare enough for it to be pretty interesting enough on it's own. The fact it's harvested from volcanoes it also pretty metal. It's not really sword material I admit, but for daggers, knock yourself out.
What about in terms of magical resistance?
(I am fairly sure) bronze is less easily oxidized, so that would be better protection against water/ice magic, but what about fire resistance and electricity?
No.
A bloomery either makes plain iron with no carbon in it to speak of, steel or some mixture thereof. Fining is a process where you more or less melt the metal, keep it exposed to air, and prod it a bit. The carbon burns off, the melting point increases, and as it turns into iron the whole thing solidifies again. So unless you for some strange reason have steel and absolutely must have iron, you never do this to bloomery metal. You do it to the pig iron from a blast furnace, because that contains lots and lots of carbon, so much that you can't even forge it.
Now after we have fined out pig iron to iron, we can forge it out into some suitable shape. It's now wrought iron. This wrought iron can be used to make blister/shear steel through the cementation process (if we're that late in history, it didn't take off until the 17th century, other methods were used before that, though usually based on similar ideas).
>so there's none of the slag in it
Oh how poeple wish that was the case. There's less of it, but there's certainly various non-metallic inclusions in there, wither slag or shit that may as well be slag, because it's all non-metallic inclusions in the end. Part of the hot strip mills job is thus to crush them as finely as possible, because two small bits are much less harmful than one big.
>there's nothing remotely "lost" about the process - plenty of japanese smiths still use if to make tamahagane.
I'd hazard a guess that basically no Japanese smith runs a tatara. Instead it's The Society for Preservation of Japanese Art Swords that has a tatara they run as needed (IIRC it's the only one in Japan, that tatara is a rather large form of bloomery furnace, requiring a number of people to run, so it isn't for an individual smith wanting to make some traditional iron in his back yard). They then sell the tamahagane, primarily to sword smiths those are mandated by law to use tamahagane and nothing else.
titanium-iridium alloy
titanium is very tough but you can't give it an edge as fine as steel, iridium is very hard allowing the alloy to hold an edge with for a modest reduction in toughness. the spine is pure titanium, so cracks don't propagate.
this (sword?) would also be corrosion resistant to the extreme, important if you want the weapon to be functional in the present