[MUD-Dev] Re: Spell components, chemistry, and the like...

[quzah]

From: Ling <K.L.Lo-94 at student.lboro.ac.uk>
Date: Wednesday, November 11, 1998 6:36 AM


>On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Hal Black wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 02:27:20PM -0800, quzah [sotfhome] wrote:
>> cornstarch(s) + water(l) -----------------> "goop" (sometimes solid,
>> sometimes liquid)
>> Try making some "goop" at home.  Get some cornstarch and mix in some water,
>> when you squeeze it it feels solid.  If you leave it alone, it turns to a
>> runny liquid.  Neat stuff. 8')
>
>Sounds like silicon putty.  Details are something like: Leave it alone and
>it'll form into a ball, place it on a slope and it'll run like a liquid,
>hit it with a hammer and it'll shatter.  Look into the impulse of force
>applied to an object for this behaviour.


Greetings again. I'm currently in the process of jotting down info on
the periodic table, element by element to plunk into my project. I was
wondering how one goes about finding out the properties of elements/
compounds like above. (How do I find out say, how brittle iron is?
Or that gold doesn't react to sulpheric acid, or whatever.)

(elements here)
I can get its color, melting point, boiling point, its color, mass
(in "amu" though I'll sound like a dunce and say I don't know what
an "amu" is; but it doesn't really matter, I'll end up with a scale
of sorts by which I can sort them by their mass if I like), their
density and once in a while a bit of extra trivia. But does anyone
know off hand of a good place to pick up useful info on oh, what
elements are found freely occuring in nature? (For example I know
now that all "alkali metals" are not found in nature; and I can use
heat to determine if someone will find others in nature (ie: It's
too hot for this to be solid, you won't see it here.) But is there
a list telling what don't ever occur, or any wonderful things like
that that I can use to give them more usefulness?) (Smell; I can't
tell what they smell like, so I can't describe them if you walk
into a gas pocket.)



   [Hal Black]
>> material is what it's made of.  Could be a mixture, complex structure,
>> or pure molecular/elemental type.  Lots of room for development here,
>> depending on how involved you want to get.  (are animals and plants the
>> same or different subtypes of "organic", etc...)  There are mixtures,
>> alloys, all kinds of neat stuff.  Go to your college book store and sit
>> down with a Chemistry 101 book and thumb through it for a while for
>> ideas.  There is some neat stuff in there. 


For starters, I'm dropping in the element table, from there, I'll add in
some common compounds, and I'll take it from there. There's no way I'll
be able to make it so you can combine X and Y and X in the correct amounts
and produce every possible compound/solution/whatever and make it be able
to be used correctly, so I am going to have to fake it and put in what I
can think up (with their correct proportions of X,Y,Z as reference) so you
can create things from my list.

I haven't even begun to touch upon organics right now. Not sure how I'll
do that. I may have to get boring and put in "blood", "flesh" or something.
After all, I want this to be useful, but not so taxing that it takes a
chemist/biologist to mix mud and conjure a golem.

>Like Adam Wiggin said, high explorer value. :)  Stuff like alloys is where
>it starts getting interesting.  Take a look at the production techniques
>involved in making steel.  Ideally, around 3% of steel should be carbon. 
>Methods of manufacture from pure iron include throwing random bits of
>leather junk into a molten mix and for impure iron, sticking pure iron
>nuggets on it to absorb the carbon.  Then there's the rather funky
>technique that produces blades that have wavy dark-light bands because the
>blacksmiths varied the carbon content, Damocles blades, I think.  This is
>what I like about rpgs, learning random stuff like this! 
>
>  |    Ling Lo (cod)
>_O_O_  kllo at iee.org


Nods, Damascus steel. I also need a way to find give real properties to
things; (a way to find their brittleness or something -- I'd hate to get
eight thousand pieces of email saying "X is not that brittle! Y doesn't
smell that way, and is a lighter shade than you describe."

-Q-