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[Vanaheimer]

I've pictured adamantine as a kind of cross between hydrogen and carbon nanotubes, with a bit of obsidian thrown in for good measure.

Stronger than all hell, sharp enough to quite easily dismember anything not armoured, and incredibly light.

Assuming the dwarves made a regular battle axe shaped battle axe out of adamantine, it could still do quite a bit of damage. The blades of battle axes are not very thick, and something that is both substantially harder than steel and capable of holding an edge down to an atomic level will not even be slowed when the edge hit the armour. So, while the armour will need to be deformed by an inch or so to completely cleave someone in two, even if the dwarf didn't have the strength to bend the armour the enemy would still have a rather nasty cut in their body. Another strike or two in the same area (where the armour is weakened) and it would be easy to cut someone in half.

Now, if they made their adamantine axes as the incredibly thin discs discussed earlier... might as well be using a laser.

[GoldenShadow]

So what happens when an atomic edged adamantine axe strikes an adamantine shield? Does it bounce off, or slice through?

[Oliolli]

Am I reading this right? The thread has gone back to the original topic?

What is this..?

[Teneb]

Am I reading this right? The thread has gone back to the original topic?

What is this..?

The thread was derailed so much that it got re-railed.

What have we done?

[Girlinhat]

The circle of life.

[Vanaheimer]

So what happens when an atomic edged adamantine axe strikes an adamantine shield? Does it bounce off, or slice through?

hmm....

With my somewhat rusty understanding of physics, I *think* it would cut through. Probably not as easily as the axe would cut through a steel shield, but it should make some dents.

[Gizogin]

So what happens when an atomic edged adamantine axe strikes an adamantine shield? Does it bounce off, or slice through?

hmm....

With my somewhat rusty understanding of physics, I *think* it would cut through. Probably not as easily as the axe would cut through a steel shield, but it should make some dents.

It wouldn't dent, because adamantine has no give whatsoever (when it breaks, it shatters).  I'm not actually sure what would happen, though.  I don't think it would bounce (at least, it wouldn't bounce much), because that implies there's some elasticity, which adamantine doesn't have.  It might cut through, if the conditions were just right, but I think the most likely outcome would be the axe simply being deflected and skating off.  Alternatively, one or both of them could break, but that would require a great deal of force.

[wierd]

In a nonyielding material like adamantine, the fracture point will occur instead of cutting.

This means that one of 4 things will happen.

1) the axe doesn't have enough kinetic energy to fracture either itself or the shield. The blow bounces off harmlessly.

2) the axe has sufficient kinetic energy to reach adamantine's fracture point. The axe is thinner on the blade than the shield is thick. Stress yield in the blade edge exceeds the fracture point, and it ceushes and spalls like glass struck with a hammer. (More correct, a glass axe hitting a granite boulder.) Chips of the axeblade will flake off at the best, or the blade will shatter spectacularly (see, gimli's axe when swung at the one ring scene from the peter jackson movie.)

3) the axeblade is very thick, with a low beveled angle. (Perhaps 89deg on each side) the edge is still finely honed, but is made thick this way to distribute the fracture load. It strikes a shield of lesser thickness.  The adamantine shield splits in half from the focused fracture force, and large flakes pop off at the impact site.  The finely focused edge of the blade crushes into powder, but doesn't shatter the whole axeblade because of the increased thickness.

4) the blade and the shield are equal matches, and both chip and spall from the impacts.


(Exotic option, reserved for highly exotic matter)

5) the axe blade fuses to the shield like a weld.

[Arkenstone]

Given the low maximum kinetic energy of the axe, and the high strength of adamantine, I'd say you'd get case 1 most of the time.

Also, I doubt the last one is possible given that if the energy is great enough to melt adamantine, the momentum is probably great enough to shatter it.


Also...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I was thinking of this senario over the weekend...

Lets say we have a reaaaaally long rod of adamantine, lets say 9.5*10^15m long (thats about a light year). You are at one end of the rod and your friend is at the other. Since adamantine is perfectly rigid and will not flex when force is applied, if you spin the rod clockwise the entire rod will spin as one. Your friend, one light year away, would see the rod begin to spin at the exact moment that you spun the rod. Your friend would know that you spun the rod long before the light allowing him to see you spinning the rod arrived. If this is correct, the perfect rigidity of adamantine would allow the trasfer of energy and information much faster that the speed of light.

Actually, I brought a similar problem up with my physics professor a while ago.  Turns out that the force you apply to the rod will propagate in waves.  Even if these 'normal waves' propagated instantly in adamantine, due to relativistic effects it'd still look like they were travelling the speed of light.

Either that, or you'd be able to send messages backwards in time (this would require physics-breaking though).  Yeah, relativity's wierd like that.

[Girlinhat]

He said "like" a weld.  There's the option that the adamantine axe will slice partway through the adamantine shield, but because of the freakish properties it won't actually slice much of it.

Imagine if you invented a teleporter, and jumped into solid stone.  It sort of, occupies the same space...

[wierd]

That's an interesting angle, but not what I was going for.

I was approaching from the "room temperature" bose-einstein condensate held together by "OMGWTFKITTENS!" (The physics of this phase of matter only happen a few kelvin above absolute zero. Higher temperatures make the phase unstable.)

A bose-einstein condensate could be imagined as a "superparticle".  The constituent particles inside an atom become so resonant that they literally collapse into a unified quata.

If adamantine is such a substance, then hitting it with more of the same substance with sufficient energy would result in the two quanta merging.

(There *is* an experimentally observed limit as to how many atoms can fuse into a condensate before the energy density results in a micro big-bang like explosion however.)

Further reading:

Bose-einstein condensate

[Shinziril]

Actual weapons testing will show you that adamantine battle axes bounce off adamantine armor.

Engineers, ruining lovely theoretical physics since forever!

[wierd]

Given the high temperatures of the BEC, it would take "a jolly good slam" to get the fusion effect.

This might explain how they turn "adamantine wafers" into "adamantine platemail".

[fluffhead]

ever swang a baseball bat at something hard.  Remember how hard that thing vibrated, wouldn't it vibrate atleast?  or does that too imply give and elasticity and not happen.  If it wouldn't vibrate, could you find it's resonant frequency and vibrate it apart if you took some really big speakers and such?

[Mrhappyface]

I'm going to post this. A combination from what I got from my Freshman Geo 101 course, and DF.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)