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[MaximumZero]

Maybe it was frozen at the point of reaction by Armok?

[Ivir_Baggins]

In that case, could it be unfrozen?

[Urist McGyver]

Dude, whatever...

[ASCIt]

Especially considering the two convert into pure energy on contact...

[Masta Crouton]

could a large adamantine wedge, driven down via some sort of machine, split several atoms, making a sort of nuclear self-destruct sequence? or is simply splitting a line of atoms not enough to start a chain reaction?

[cryopyre]

Has anyone mentioned it might be a near frictionless material? This should explain its ability to shear flesh and thinner metal armors while simultaneously not diving to the center of the earth when accidentally dropped.

[wierd]

I recall reading about a year ago that ATLAS successfully created several picograms of anti-hydrgen by capturing positrons and anti-protons in a magnetic bottle trap, and laser cooling them until they formed the anti-atoms.


The latest paper that I can find states that they were able to contain the anti-hydrogen for over 1000 seconds, suggesting that it is at least stable enough for study.  They were successful in measuring a mass for this material, suggesting that anti-matter does not have anti-mass.

[Oliolli]

Based on all this, I propose that adamantine can be honed to an edge thickness of less than one quadrillionth of a meter (I'm not very good with logarithms, so someone else can work it out more precisely).  This is well below the radius of a single proton.

How much would that be relative to electrons? Something smaller? Something much smaller? Would a blade of that size even be useful? Wouldn't it just go through all the empty space between the target's atoms? Too many questions?

[wierd]

Based on all this, I propose that adamantine can be honed to an edge thickness of less than one quadrillionth of a meter (I'm not very good with logarithms, so someone else can work it out more precisely).  This is well below the radius of a single proton.

How much would that be relative to electrons? Something smaller? Something much smaller? Would a blade of that size even be useful? Wouldn't it just go through all the empty space between the target's atoms? Too many questions?

an electron does not really have an effective point particle size under ordinary conditions. Electron orbitals are treated as fuzzy quantum uncertainty clouds where if you were to perform a point measurement, you have varying degrees of probability of detecting a point particle electron entity.

(Really, due to the wave/particle duality of the electron, it really does exist as a fuzzy cloud and not as a particle UNTIL you look for it to collapse the wave function.)

The size of the fuzzy cloud an electron bound to an atom manifests as is considerably larger than an atomic nucleus, because the clouds are highly energetic, have very strong pauli exclusion with their full integer spin, and very strong EM repulsion.

The vast majority of the volume of the atom is comprised of the electron clouds surrounding it.

That the edge of the weapon is thinner than an electron orbital is.... interesting.  It means that adamantine is not baryonic matter, or at least, is not atomic in nature. 

[khearn]

Also: I think adamantine projectiles deserve a little love, here. I don't know the science, but I think a decent bow would solve the main problem of adamantine - implementing the proper force or whatnot - because it's the bow you have to bend back, and the adamantine arrow would go flying off at the speed of sound. The light weight would actually work for you, assuming it doesn't just cause the arrow to bounce off the other guy, I think.

I really have no idea, but it seems to make common sense logic.

The projectile wouldn't be fired at the speed of sound, because the bowstring doesn't move at the speed of sound with no projectile (warning: don't try this, firing a bow with no arrow can break the bow because the stored energy ha no place to go but back into the bow).

As for damage, ever played with nerf projectiles? They're a little less dense than adamantine, but in the ballpark. Sure, you can make them move pretty quickly at first, but they slow down in a very short distance because they have a very low mass to drag ratio. Try shooting a nerf arrow 100 meters. Can't be done with any launcher I can imagine. But a decent bow can shoot a wood+steel arrow 100 meters with plenty of force when it gets there.

(sidetrack warning!) Hmm, I wonder just how far a nerf arrow could be shot? At some speed the arrow would either melt or be crushed.  I suspect you couldn't get a nerf arrow beyond the sound barrier. I guess you could determine the force on the front of the arrow at a given speed based on the coefficient of drag, and compare that to the compressive strength of nerf and come up with a speed at which the arrow would be crushed. Then start with a speed slightly below that and figure the deceleration based on the force and the mass of the projectile. Then do the calculus as the projectile decelerates (since the drag, and thus the force, and thus the deceleration would be constantly changing as it slows) to find out how far it would get. Too much work for me at the moment, but I'd still bet a dollar that you couldn't get a nerf arrow to go over 100 meters.

Shoot, now I'm sorely tempted to try making an air-powered nerf gun to see just how far one can go.

[wierd]

Nerf arrow wont fly very far.  Supply too much energy, and it will turn into confettii rather than fly.

Here is why:

Nerf bolts are mostly air already, and the surface is rough and deformable. It has very little density, and very little mass.

This means 3 things:

1) The mostly air, and deformable feature makes throwing a nerf dart not much better than trying to blast air across a room. The energy introduced rapidly disperses against the air it displaces as it flies. by deforming on the nose while flying, a portion of the energy exerted is converted to internal thermal energy via the compression, which is useless for keeping the projectile moving.

2) It has very little density. This means that it displaces a large volume of air as it tries to fly. Air has air resistance, and the more volume it displaces, the more resistance the bolt will have. This is by design. Nerf is intended to have very low density so that when kids shoot each other with them, the risks of personal injury are reduced to laughable levels.

3) it has very little mass compared to the air it is displacing. This means that the energy "reserve" it carries as inertial mass in motion is small, so the falloff from air friction is very steep.


The launch distance of a nerf arrow could be greatly enhanced by taking a bamboo skewer, poking a hole longitudinally down the axis of the shaft, and then stuffing the resulting channel with copper-clad BBs. Further enhancement involves putting a hard plastic cone on the front.

Both of these increase the nerfdart's ballistic coefficient, permitting it to travel further, and faster.

[Shinziril]

I used to be active in a Nerf modding community.  One of the guys who had some fluid dynamics experience did a simulation on the basic Nerf darts, and I'm pretty sure I remember it being physically impossible to get them to go more than . . . . what was it, maybe 150-200 feet?  Even that requires quite a lot of force; 100 feet was a much more typical "high" value, and that was usually with homemade weighted darts.  The normal ones just don't have enough momentum to push through the atmosphere for very long. 

As for the OTHER derail, yeah, Ring Gates cause all sorts of problems.  Another fun one was casting a permanent Reverse Gravity field and then putting a big metal cylinder on an axle halfway into the field, so that it would have a constant, enormous torque on it and generate huge amounts of power (but watch those bearings!). 

[forsaken1111]

Completely off topic:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I had a dwarven artificer with a set of ring gates. One was situated inside a covered wagon with two halflings inside around a mounted ballista. The ballista is aimed at the ring gate, the other end of which is mounted on his gauntlet. The ring gates also had a rope through them attached to the trigger mechanism of the ballista. He would point at someone and tug on the rope, launching a ballista bolt through the gate and at the enemy. The halflings would reload for the next shot and then tug the rope to let him know it was ready.

Unrelated: also the bolts were rigged to explode.

[Girlinhat]

Actually I'm not sure.  Today we make arrows out of carbon fibers and whatnot, making them lighter and thinner, to achieve better flight.  The thing is that an adamantine arrow is not a nerf dart.  While similar weight, your arrow will be non-porous, very thin, and very fast.  Any wind is negligible, and a proper adamantine arrow wouldn't have an arrowhead, it would just have a point (with perhaps a groove to encourage bleeding).  It would more resemble a needle than an actual arrow.  That considered, it would slice through the air amazingly well.

The issue then, is energy.  We know that a bow will contain a certain amount of energy when fired.  If it's firing a wooden rod, then it will fire the rod.  If it's firing a metal rod that's 2x the weight of wood, then it will take 2x the energy to achieve momentum and thus fly like half as fast.  By contrast, if you make a carbon fiber arrow, then it might be 1/2 the weight, requiring 1/2 the energy to move and flying 2x as fast.  Of course in practice it's not so clean cut, but the idea is solid.  A given force upon a lighter object will propel the object further and faster.

In effect, an adamantine arrow would act more like the crossbow from Half-Life 2, it'll penetrate just about anything because it will fly at ridiculous speeds.  It would need a needle point and a VERY slow taper to penetrate, because it would have rather poor "punch" but an amazing edge.  If any of its penetrative power were converted into blunt contact, it would drain its energy pretty fast, but as long as it's achieving clean punctures then not much would be able to stop it.

"The flying ☼Adamantine Bolt☼ strikes the goblin in the head, shattering the skull and ripping the brain, passing clear through the other side!"

Of course in DF, projectiles are blunt damage, so none of this matters in gameplay.

[wierd]

off topic..

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Never played D&D, pen and paper.

I get the strong sensation that I would seriously torque off the DM though. People at work routinely call me "Cliff Clavin", and "Encyclopedia Brown", by varying degrees.

In recent years, I have learned to be quiet, and just let people hold their misconceptions and misinformed status.... since opening the can of astrophysics/particle physics/advanced geology/$Hard_Science causes people to look at each other, then at me with a look that presupposes that I am hiding an alien mothership somewhere. This tends to kill conversations very quickly, which is awkward.

In a D&D nerd setting, with a DM trying to enforce rules, bringing up nasty consequences of instantaneous travel, gravity reversal (eg, TRUE anti-gravity), and insanely overpowered buffs and feats is totally game breaking and totally antithetical to the role a DM plays, which is to keep the game going and believable at the same time.  While the players might well be able to comprehend what you are saying, they will be prone to say "Dude, it's a game! Just play!"



Personally though, I would probably be tempted to make rube goldberg contraptions made of silly and dangerous spells, and their "unintended" consequences that when used in concert leave no choice but for silly adventurers to be reduced to a spray of subatomic particles, or some other silly thing, regardless of how quickly they can dodge with that enhanced bluff. (and prove it mathematically.)

I would resist this temptation with great earnesty.

On topic:

The bolt still needs control fins to avoid tumble.  It needs to spin around its long axis to do this as well.

If the bolt tumbles rather than rotate around its axis like a thrown football, then the erratic air resistance from the changing exposed surface area would make the bolt impossible to aim, and make it lose its energy far too quickly.  this is why arrows have fletchings.

Fletchings are either a solid part of the arrow (See for instance, the control fins on a rocket), glued on with an adhesive, inserted into a groove and held in with twine, or some other means of fastening.

While the adamantine could possibly endure hypersonic velocities due to the mirror smooth surface and subatomic edge\point, the fletchings are another story unless they are a physical projection from the body, and not made of some other material.

Ordinary arrows and crossbow bolts have the fletchings made of another material, which would rapidly delaminate from the body of the bolt above the sheer strength of their respective materials, or adhesive.

This is important to consider.