[MUD-Dev] Re: Nutirtion and a Resource Question

[Ling]

On Sat, 24 May 1997 coder at ibm.net wrote:

> On 23/05/97 at 10:44 PM, Jeff Kesselman <jeffk at tenetwork.com> said:
> >Right now I'm workign on a political/economic overgame that drives
> >the dynamics of this comemrical MUD Im workign on.
> 
> >(2) There are basicly 5 kinds of tool construction materails
> >available in this
> >
> >    world: wood, iron, obsidian, glass, ceramic
> >    I knwo the properties of all but ceramic, which I am not clear
> >on.  What can be made from ceramic?  Can you get an edge on a ceramic
> >object?  What about tensile strength and weight?

This is something from memory which I hope helps anyone/someone, anyway,
it's just one of those things which are good to know.

Today's lecture is about the forging of steel as done by the civilisation
which I've forgotten situated on the Silk Road:

A method of making high quality blades was utilitised which has only
recently been uncovered by archeologists.  It's called co-fusion.  There
are two types of iron, wrought iron (pure) and cast iron (full of carbon).
Co-fusion is whereby you place wrought iron in a pot and stick nuggets of
cast iron on it.  By heating it so the wrought iron is smolten, the carbon
diffuses from the nuggets to the wrought stuff.  That's it in a nut shell.

Western Europe make steel by taking wrought iron and mixing in anything
they could find, eg: leather, trash, someone's baby to get steel.
Naturally of much lower quality.

A bit of chemistry: steel = iron + a little carbon, the extra carbon makes
it super strong.

Sorry if there are vast chunks of the above which are wrong, this is from
memory.  If you're interested in reading a more accurate version complete
with other methods, then I can dig out the original article on it.

Oh yeah, there's a cool method whereby varying the amount of carbon in
strips gives you a stripy blade.  Also called Damocles blades or something
like that.

Um.

  |    Ling			   "All solders leave a girl behind,
_O_O_  Freshwater fish since 1976   That worships and adores 'em,
				    But mine's here on Ghoyogi, too,
				    Which is, like, unbelievable awesome."
						- PFC Waldo DR Dobbs
			         (DR stands for Diminished Responsibility)