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[lucusLoC]

actualy to ge clear glass you need pretty much pure silica, if i remember correctly. most "glass made from sand" is greenish brown from impurities. fairly pure sands can be found, and indeed are the source of most glass today.

my pint was that mixing glass types almost always results in an inferior product, and you would have to track fractonal amounts.

on the other hand we could just lump all mixed glass into the arbitrary "brown glass" category. . .

[Neonivek]

Gem glass though shouldn't mix assuming it is what I think it is.

Tinted/stained Glass is fair game though

[G-Flex]

There's no such thing as "gem glass" though. Dwarves can't and probably shouldn't be melting gems in the first place; it wouldn't even result in anything particularly good or useful, and sometimes just plain doesn't make sense.

Gem windows, I figure, are just gems cut and arranged in a pattern around some sort of framework, inlaid sort of like stained glass or something.

[Neonivek]

That is what I assumed Gem glass was G-Flex.

Hense why it makes little sense to even melt it (Melting Diamonds? Good luck)

[G-Flex]

Okay, I was just confused because you said "glass", which it's really not.


I wonder if you really COULD melt diamonds. Well, certainly you can at some point, but then it's not really diamonds anymore, just melted generic carbon.

[orbcontrolled]

When you say gem glass do you mean "Crystal glass" or "Gem windows"?

I agree, gem windows are probably just cut gems arranged in a pattern.

If you mean crystal glass though: Crystal glass is made from rock crystals, which on wikipedia redirects to Quartz. If I am reading correctly, Quartz crystals can indeed be melted into glass at about 2000 F.
Assuming that the rock crystals in DF are indeed quartz, then it would make sense to be able to melt and reuse them like glass. Conceivably you could also mix them with regular glass, but like lucusLoC said, there wouldn't be much point.

[Neonivek]

The Melting point of a diamond is apperantly 3550 degrees Celcius.

To put this in retrospect apperantly a Volcano only reaches 1160 degrees Celcius (I have my doubts. Especially since I heard that Magma can reach 1300 degrees.. which oddly enough is cooler then Dwarf Fortress Magma)

Iron melts at 1535 Degrees Celcius
Salt Melts at 800c
Rubies melt at 3000 Degrees Celcius
Titanium is 1700c
Obsideon is 900c
The Mantle is 900-4000 degrees
Lead melts at just a bit above 300c (You could melt it in your Oven... Mind you that you very possibly would die afterwords)
Sand melts at 1500-1700 degrees
Bauxite melts at 2000c (Had to find out how you even melt things at this point)

Simply speaking... How the heck do you even produce that sort of temperature without melting your equipment with the technology available to dwarves? The Ground (dirt) melts at 1200 to 1500 degrees and 3000 degrees would make it very difficult to feed the fire.

From what people on the internet are telling me, at 4000 degrees the wood would just vapourise.

[2xMachina]

Well, for a small, small area, 4k C should be ok. Plasma arcs can go up to 20k C (though most say 5k+), which pretty much disintegrates/atomize the stuff caught in it.

I think you've to use electricity for higher temperatures.

[Neonivek]

Uhhhh... Alright, well that helps for modern technology.

For Dwarves it is a bit trickier

[sproingie]

Achieving the temperatures needed to melt diamond isn't that hard for modern technology.  The problem is, you need enormous pressure to actually liquefy it, on the order of 10 million atmospheres, a condition they only recently managed to create by using the Z Machine fusion igniter at Sandia.  Otherwise it just burns.  In a pure oxygen environment, a diamond will burn at a chilly 800 degrees C.

I'm pretty sure Dwarves aren't going to create any pure O2 environments, let alone the Z-Machine 

Now I'm pondering what materials we could create using a focused catsplosion array.   

[Aquillion]

Yeah, someone else already mentioned it, but historically, the way ancient glass production worked was that you had a small number of sites that produced huge amounts of raw glass, which they then exported as a trade good to large numbers of smaller glassworks over the nation (which would never produce their own glass, but focused entirely on working the raw glass they purchased into finished materials instead.

See Wikipedia on Roman glass making, for instance.  (Note that recycled glass was also very common, to the point where Roman writers of the time commented on its importance.)

Wikipedia's article on Anglo-Saxon glass again notes the importance of a distinction between glass-making and glass-crafting -- historically, it seems England imported most of its raw glass, since it lacked the raw materials necessary to make glass itself.  (Sound familiar?  In fact, the fact that you could do this so easily is probably part of the reason why glassware became so widespread.  Making glass from scratch is comparatively difficult and requires ingredients not found everywhere as well as fairly high temperatures, but crafting simple things out of raw glass is comparatively easy and can be done anywhere with a furnace.)

[G-Flex]

Yeah, it's like the difference between making chocolate and being a chocolatier.