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[nightwhips]

Wait a minute...
Adamantine:

 - can be sharpened to a perfect edge which never dulls, but blades made of it can become stuck in bodies

They can? Do we know this?

[Blizzlord]

Wait a minute...
Adamantine:

 - can be sharpened to a perfect edge which never dulls, but blades made of it can become stuck in bodies

They can? Do we know this?

Combat logs?

[Gizogin]

Wait a minute...
Adamantine:

 - can be sharpened to a perfect edge which never dulls, but blades made of it can become stuck in bodies

They can? Do we know this?

Arena testing would confirm it, but I'm almost certain it's possible.

[Uthric]

having said that dwarfs would know there stuff about blades so would use the correct cutting edge based on what maternal they where using.

[Fniff]

Basically, I think that's more dwarven ingenuity then fantasyium. Dwarves are the only races who know about it, so it would make sense that they would eventually figure out a way to mine it. Maybe it's a special way of mining, forging, sticking into people... But, we'd have to ask the dwarves if we wanted a definite answer.

[Agent_Irons]

I always figured given the way adamantine is mined and processed that it's a lot of monofilament threads embedded in rocks. You mine them by mining out the rock around the threads, basically. Heat up the threads and press them into a felt sort of thing(wafers). Then heat up the wafers and press them into sword shapes. Because they're made of monofilaments, crazy cutting power. Because they're mostly empty space, super light!

[Lysabild]

This metal is silly and beyond quality.

[Uthric]

and now we move on to slade war hammers.

[Blizzlord]

 
After doing a bit of research I found out something horrible for this science. The impact fracture of adamantite is only twice that of steel. Meaning only twice the force needed (I think) to shatter it.

[Gizogin]

- snip -
having said that dwarfs would know there stuff about blades so would use the correct cutting edge based on what maternal they where using.

Are you sure you didn't mean to post that in the "obsidian blades" thread?  Though both seem to be similar.

Anyway, a little bit of raw exploring has revealed that adamantine can form edges five times as sharp as those of obsidian.  Now, I'm not entirely sure how DF defines sharpness, but obsidian is bordering on the physical limits of sharpness.  I vaguely remember reading somewhere that obsidian blades can get to a single molecule thick.  How something can be five times as sharp as that is baffling, but I like to think adamantine somehow has an edge that can pierce the quantum foam.  It reminds me of Death's scythe from the Discworld books.

[Fniff]

It IS...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The material that sealed away the demons. You don't skimp out when you are dealing with sealing something that terrrible away...

[Zsword]

I figure the reason that Adamant can be 5 times sharper than something the size of a molecule is that the Addy molecule is 5 times smaller than an Obsi one. (Just my little thought on that)

[kaenneth]

Can an adamantine blade cut a slade block?

[miauw62]

So, not only is it not a metal, it also defies its own properties at seemingly arbitrary times.  Clearly, we cannot hope to apply physics to this literally fantastic material.
That said, let's apply physics to it some more!

Sig'd

On a serious note, thats why only dwarves have adamantite axes, humans might be able to mine it, dwarves use their beards to influence the adamantite to change form. A dwarves beard is specialized in his job, therefore a legendary miner has a much better mining beard then a legendary weaponsmith, who has a beard that influences metals to make armor much more.

This also explains why dwarves can have a city on just a soap pillar, the beard of the soapmaking dwarf causes the soap to become rigid.

[miauw62]

But, we'd have to ask the dwarves if we wanted a definite answer.

Okay. Who wants to sacrifice himself for !!science!!?