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[Sus]

I've always imagined that adamantine is sort of like the "monofilament wire" of cyberpunk fame: incredibly light, practically frictionless and absurdly sharp down to the molecular / atomic level.
Thus, if you make a thin, flat sheet of the stuff, it will slice through most materials with little effort.  (Because the stuff is so absurdly hard, you can probably forge an adamantine blade that is arbitrarily thin.) The functional equivalent of an *adamantine short sword* would probably be a lightsaber: a (near) weightless blade that can cut through solid steel.

[Blizzlord]

It's not lighter than air.  The density of air at sea level is about 1.2 kg/^3.  The density of adamantine is 200 kg/m^3.  Zsword made a (wrong) calculation that the molar mass of adamantine was less than that of helium.

So if his calculation was wrong, can we still calculate the weight of Adamantine with the information we have?

Adamantine has a density of 0.2g/cm³. 0.2*1000000 = 200000g/m³ = 200kg/m³.

[Awessum Possum]

So not lighter than air, but it would float in water. Interesting.

Also in response to Jernak's comment, I think that for adamantine everything is soft.

Seriously though adamantine weapons are like lightsabers.

[NonconsensualSurgery]

The deciding factor is the thinness of the blade.

Girlinhat's drawing is correct. How deeply a blade penetrates when slashing has a lot to do with how hard it is for that blade to part the material it is trying to cut. You have to bend it with the wedge to keep the cut going. The only way to do this is with a lot of force, or a blade so thin the angle of deformation is minimal.

The sharpest blade available in meatspace is not diamond. It's obsidian. If you fracture a glass just right you can produce a nearly monomolecular wafer so thin that it will stick upright into a rock when dropped and remain there firmly. Neurosurgeons sometimes use such a piece of broken glass on a stick for procedures where they need to make perfectly clean cuts.

The reason you can't cut an I-beam in half with these (incredibly dangerous, very kid unfriendly) perfectly fractured glass slivers is that glass isn't hard enough and your sliver shatters when you try to cut anything. Adamantite is strong enough, and probably would pass the stuck-into-a-rock-when-barely-dropped test with flying colors. You would also be able to swing it much faster.

This assumes dwarves are smart though. In game terms, the volume and contact area of an adamantite axe is the same as a steel one and not like a gigantic rounded razorblade on a stick. An axe with the normal blade profile will probably leave a nice mark on iron armor but won't necessarily penetrate like the gaze of Chuck Norris.

Now, an adamantite spear on the other hand...

[King DZA]

I sometimes wonder what a dwarf in full adamantine plate looks like. Does he hop around in an utterly impervious suit of wafer-thin armor like a neon-blue easter bunny

I certainly hope it's this. Because that would make the mental imagery of sending them into battle against vile beasts and untold horrors just so much better.

[Girlinhat]

I would imagine that dwarves are smart enough to make an adamantine axe that behaves in a reliable way.  I say this not because they are smart - countless iterations of wall building and channel digging show their intelligence - but because dwarves know how to kill.  Every dwarven child instinctively knows how to produce an axe, sword, spear, shield, breastplate, floodgate, quantum entanglement mechanism, and atom smasher without any training or documentation.  Dwarves would know how to make an adamantine disk, no questions asked.

[Zsword]

except I'm decently sure Styrofoam is heavier than air... Adamant is lighter than Helium, which everyone, I'm, is aware of the fact that is lighter than air... meaning...

You do know that the mass of a macroscopic object isn't necessarily proportional to the atomic weight of its constituent elements, right?

I do know. XD Sorry guys, my math be teh incorrects, Molecular masses and there relations was never my strong point in chemistry, needless to say, though I'm glad my flaw did produce some funny mental images for everyone. ^^

[WaffleEggnog]

From what iv heard (and expirienced) sharp adamantine weapons are amazing, but blunt ones are terrible. Unless your planning to smack someone about with said axe, it should be fine

[Blizzlord]

From what iv heard (and expirienced) sharp adamantine weapons are amazing, but blunt ones are terrible. Unless your planning to smack someone about with said axe, it should be fine

This is no discussion of its capabilities in-game, but some fun hypothesising the actuall capabilities of a real metal as translated from the raws.

[Gizogin]

This thread is awesome.

Anyway, now I'm wondering about Large, Serrated Adamantine Discs.  If what's been hypothesized thus far can be treated as accurate, then an adamantine disc trap would presumably be devastating.  I don't have a great deal of knowledge in the field, so someone more experienced should definitely correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine that a serrated adamantine disc, spinning at high speed, would be able to cut through just about anything (though adamantine can do that normally).

[Putnam]

Hmm... an adamantine atom? Let's see...

the density of Iron in dwarf fortress is 7.85, the density of Adamantium is 0.2... Adamantium is about 02.5% the density of iron.

The Atomic Mass of iron, is 55.845...

~2.5% of that is 1.422~, which is our in theory atomic mass of Adamantium... this makes  Adamantium... nearly as light as Hydrogen, bein ~.4 heavier, and ~2.6 lighter than Helium...

... damn.

Actually, Dwarf Fortress has atomic mass as part of its material simulation. The atomic mass of adamantine given is... 55.485.

Huh.

[nightwhips]

This thread is awesome.

Anyway, now I'm wondering about Large, Serrated Adamantine Discs.  If what's been hypothesized thus far can be treated as accurate, then an adamantine disc trap would presumably be devastating.  I don't have a great deal of knowledge in the field, so someone more experienced should definitely correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine that a serrated adamantine disc, spinning at high speed, would be able to cut through just about anything (though adamantine can do that normally).

I would suspect that the serrations are just for effect. They serve to change the angle of the cut relative to to the surface being cut, so the point of contact has higher force. Given adamantine's edge, I don't think you really need that sharpness. If it can cut through armor, it's damn well sharp enough to penetrate flesh.

Now imagine an adamantine corkscrew. A single-molecule point, then just using the force within the set trap to keep going straight through the armor.

[Flying Dice]

In regards to the issue of where all the mass of a given adamantite weapon goes, I'd imagine it as something like this: You've got a monomolecular, double-crescent battleaxe head that doesn't thicken (or hardly thickens) between the blade and the shaft, but below the bottommost part of the blade it resembles a normal battleaxe. So, while it is still acting as a wedge, it is essentially forcing open a gap between the component molecules of the target, meaning that there really isn't any major requirement for applied force; dropping it blade-down would likely nearly cut someone in twain, and the force behind your average soldier's swing would be more than enough for that. In similar fashion, a sword blade wouldn't be a blade so much as a less than paper-thin sheet of adamantite attached to a hilt and guard.

[Gizogin]

Wait a minute...
Adamantine:
 - is perfectly rigid, but can be made into threads, and thus into flexible cloth
 - is completely impossible to break, but can be mined by even the most inexperienced dwarf wielding a no-quality copper pick
 - is a terrible conductor of heat
 - can be sharpened to a perfect edge which never dulls, but blades made of it can become stuck in bodies
 - melts at temperatures higher than most found on Earth, but can be forged and reforged by dwarves in an ordinary forge

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!

[Blizzlord]

Wait a minute...
Adamantine:
 - is perfectly rigid, but can be made into threads, and thus into flexible cloth
 - is completely impossible to break, but can be mined by even the most inexperienced dwarf wielding a no-quality copper pick
 - is a terrible conductor of heat
 - can be sharpened to a perfect edge which never dulls, but blades made of it can become stuck in bodies
 - melts at temperatures higher than most found on Earth, but can be forged and reforged by dwarves in an ordinary forge

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!

How about calculating the exact amount of pressure needed to break the monoatomic blade? To see if the thing can actually parry a blow without shattering in a hail of death and gore.