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[wierd]

Unfortunately, it is a right pain to do, mainly because the CO2 needs to be pumped, and if temperature, or more usually, pressure falls below the required levels, it turns into dry ice, jamming the pump, which then explodes as the dry ice sublimes.
There are much more convenient defatting solvents, like ether, which can then be evaporated from the product and collected for reuse.

While you could definately do that, ether could engage in a number of unwanted interactions, and the resulting lipids may not be useful for soap making or .....consumption......

Supercritical co2 is cheap, and chemically safe. It is the food safety that sees it used commercially for decafinating coffee. (Where it replaced TCE and other organic solvents.)

Granted, the pressures involved are outside the capabilities of dwarves, and collecting that much pure co2 would require air gas distillation, which is also something beyond dwarven science. (You big bottles of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, etc via this process.)

Since we want to still be able to.....eat...... said fat, ether, tce, and other industrial solvents aren't safe enough.

[Sadrice]

SupercriticalCO2 is certainly the best way to do it by miles in a modern industrial society, I meant that it is way way beyond the limits of dwarven ingenuity.  I can see them managing some intense pressures, using their dwarven metallurgical genius to produce strong airtight vessels, but the pumping apparatus may be a titch fiddly.  Of course, they can hand pump magma with iron parts, which modern industrial society would probably tell you is impossible, so maybe they're pump design geniuses as well. Adamantine parts may make it easier, too.

I suspect there are easier ways for dwarves to get CO2 than distilling the air itself.  They could react limestone (or chalk, or marble) with acid and harvest the resulting gas.
Perhaps the mountain homes are a bit better at alchemy than the colonial fortresses?  That or they have some damn good small animal dissectors.

Also, they used to use benzene to decaffeinate coffee. And more recently, dichloromethane, which at least is only a suspected carcinogen.

[wierd]

Oh, I agree. Dwarves could never do it without a major boost in metalurgy. Since they haven't discovered how to process bauxite into aluminum, (or even electricity..), I question the maturity of their metalurgical skills.  The extraction hardware would be prone to stress fracture from metalurgical impurities, and as such, prone to explosion, even if they wrapped the vessels in adamantine strands or webbing clown silk.

The suggestion was in response to the "how could you possibly get fly fat outside of microscopic quantities?" Question.  Granted, you would need 50lb bags of dead flies to get a couple ounces of fly fat in my estimation.  Flies do have lipids in their bodies, because they have mylenated neurons... but most of their body mass is chitin and water. Insects do not store adipose tissue, to my knowledge. 

[Sadrice]

Insects have an organ called the fat body, which is largeish (varies a lot depending on the insect in question, I have no idea about flies), surrounds the gut, and stores energy as glycogen, and triglycerides.  I dunno if entomologists call it adipose tissue or not (can't find my Internal Anatomy of Insects book), but the cells in question are called adipocytes.   Larval insects tend to be pretty fatty, and wikipedia says Sago Palm Weevil larvae are high in unsaturated fats, and also says they taste like bacon.


Flies are under significant pressure to be light and maneuverable, but at the same time, would benefit from having plenty of energy on hand to power flight.  I suspect they would tend to have more glycogen than fats in their fat body, though, as that is easier to quickly turn into energy available for muscles.  This might make fly fat kinda reminiscent of vertebrate liver in flavor.

[wierd]

I knew grubs stored lipids, but did not know that insects stored adipocytes. If they have adipocytes, then they have genuine fat.

The quantities will still be quite small for something like a fly though. As for glycogen... more likely the taste will be weakly sweet. The liver taste from liver comes from the metabolites in the liver, including the b and a vitamins stored there. Glycogen is more of a carbohydrate than a lipid though. (Its a little of both...)

[Argonnek]

Regardless of how they got the fat out of the fly, how do they get enough flies? All of the methods suggested above require extremely large amounts of the little bastards to get anywhere near enough fat out of them. Would the mountainhomes have specialized fly-grabbers that ran around in the food stockpiles for weeks on end, doing nothing but flailing at clouds of bugs? And I thought being a cheese maker would be a sucky job.

[wierd]

A simple "bottle fly trap" would work.

Basically, it is an upside down bottle with a funnel stuck in the bottom, with the wide end facing down.

In the bottle, you put stinky cheese, rotting meat, a XXpigtail sockXX, whatever, something that attracts flies.  The flies fly up into the funnel and through the bottle neck, but then are too dumb to escape.

These are commonly made in modern types out of 2liter pop bottles. You cut off the top 4 inches or so, invert and stuff back inside, then turn it over and hang it up.  They are placed in commercial cattle pens and horse stables to control fly populations.

This is easily within reach of dwarven science.

[Sadrice]

The usual bait in my childhood was chopped up bits of rattlesnake, or if that wasn't handy, beef liver (my family was vegetarian, and thus did not have meat handy).  It may also make it less pleasant to eat than even ether.


Raising flies en masse in somewhat more sanitary conditions would be easy, though.  I may have to try to mod in fly farming for my dwarves...  I already modded ants to be hiveable (producing honeydew from their aphids, brewable into ambrosia, with edible eggs instead of royal jelly).

[rtg593]

Eh, it might not be that hard. Pressurizing a gas is simple, and I think we have a graphite stone around here somewhere, don't we? 95% pure oxygen can be produced by pressurizing air into a zeolite (stilbite, for example).

Anyway, it's a porous rock that can be used to filter oxygen out of the air, the tech basis for O2 concentrators. Burn the graphite, flush nearly pure O2 over it (carefully, lol), and you get a buttload of CO2.

By the by, the simple O2 filtration system is my explanation for dwarves being able to smelt things hotter that any material in the games burn temp. Dwarven oxygen furnace

edited to correct phones autocorrecting errors, lol