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[NW_Kohaku]

Spoiler: Just this alone is good argument for removing platinum from "smelting" (click to show/hide)

The classical procedure for separating the platinum metals begins with a mineral concentrate obtained as described above. This concentrate is leached with aqua regia, which dissolves the platinum and palladium and leaves the other metals as solids in the leach residue. The platinum is precipitated from solution with ammonium chloride, and the resulting crude platinum salt is recovered by filtration and then heated to decompose it to a powdered metallic form. The metal is redissolved in aqua regia, then reprecipitated with ammonium chloride and calcined to pure metal. The palladium, which remained in solution when the platinum was precipitated, is now precipitated by the addition of ammonia. After the palladium salts are recovered by filtration, they are redissolved and reprecipitated to form a pure salt, and this is converted to metallic form, usually by chemical reduction with formic acid.

I can get onboard with what Arkenstone is saying here. That is not terribly complex, but its also not obvious or as simple as 1 2 3. It also doesn't look like it would even be possible or easy to just smelt platinum bearing ore due to the impurities. The processes talked about do not really have much do with smelting as a practice.

So, we should probably leave platinum to be modded in via alchemy.

I would also like to add that while it is a complex process, the chemicals probably wouldn't need to be produced in industrial quantities, I bet a barrel of each would do. So I don't see industrial chemical companies as a good argument for it not existing before a certain time period, just a good argument for it not existing in huge quantities, or in the public domain of common knowledge.

I change my vote to no platinum smelting based on all the information provided.

Aluminum Oxide smelting is much much harder according to http://science.howstuffworks.com/aluminum3.htm and I don't see dwarves using electricity. So magic would have to be the only alternative to other advanced smelting for them. So I would say no aluminum either.

Thanks for the enlightening discussion.

I'd like to say again that I'd be for aluminum smelting so long as it's something very different from just throwing it in a furnace like everything else.  If it's something you have to build a special kiln and burn tremendous amounts of fuel to do, it's suddenly much more interesting.

Having platinum not available without a complex and out-of-the-way alchemy system in use, and possibly also making gold much rarer and hard to produce without either finding some more rare relatively pure deposits or else having to alchemically separate it from an impure ore would make those metals far more interesting and justify their presence more than simply making them an uncommon drop with a slightly higher arbitrary value. 

These things would make "kingly" metals feel like actual achievements to obtain, and make them suitable as the sort of thing you'd put on the top of your national monument, or on the throne of your king.  I'd like to see mandates from kings that weren't just for more chairs or banning an export of goblets or doors, but for demanding something that is actually difficult to produce and makes you have to try to complete them. 

THEN they have a gameplay justification for their existence. 


The only question is on how to make aqua fortis and aqua regia, and use them in the game...

Aqua fortis is made from either sand or sulfuric acid (which can be a side-product of coking coal) (alum also works, but isn't present in-game as of yet) mixed together with saltpeter and "cooked".  This means we can get coal tar as a bonus from coking coal or else just use sand together with saltpeter in some sort of reaction to create our aqua fortis.

Saltpeter can either be mined very rarely, or it can be produced artificially through distilling urine, straw, and dung together.  (Yet another reason to add urine to the game...  Urine is the only classical source for nitrates, which are a vital resource in chemistry, including the production of most explosives.  You want explosives? Add pee first.)

Aqua Regia, however, takes the dissolution of sal ammoniac (ammonia salts), which only form in volcanic vents (and can form alongside alum), and are not currently present in the game, in aqua fortis.  We could either try to get Toady to add them as a natural formation in the game, as a rare mineral in highly volcanic stones like possibly obisidan, or we could try to devise some sort of means of precipitating the salts out of the magma vents dwarves already have access to.

An alternate way to get to just plain hydrochloric acid (and one that is available much earlier, and could be mixed with aqua fortis (nitric acid) to achieve aqua regia, even if this is not the classical means by which aqua regia was produced,) would be to heat common salt with salts of vitriol (sulfuric acid). 

Oil of vitriol, as sulfuric acid, are, again, produced as a by-product of coking coal. 

We could thus turn a formula where coal tar distillates are used to create sulfuric acid that can be mixed with saltpeter to form aqua fortis, and that can be upgraded to aqua regia by adding in hydrochloric acids formed through the same coal tar distillates mixed with rock salt or other forms of salt. 

Because these require a handful of rare materials, this can encourage more trading with caravans for the small quantities of these materials you will need to produce small quantities of the substances.

[Niyazov]

in the 14th and 15th century in europe there was apparently such a high demand for nitrates for use in gunpowder that so-called petermen would buy or steal urine-infused soil from latrines, stables, chicken coops, etc. In ancient Rome urine was so valuable that some emperors began charging for the right to collect it through a tax called the "vectigal urinae".

[NW_Kohaku]

in the 14th and 15th century in europe there was apparently such a high demand for nitrates for use in gunpowder that so-called petermen would buy or steal urine-infused soil from latrines, stables, chicken coops, etc. In ancient Rome urine was so valuable that some emperors began charging for the right to collect it through a tax called the "vectigal urinae".

My favorite was the fact that there were actual laws that said it was illegal to ever throw your urine away.  You had to supply your chamber pot's contents to the government because the nitrates were so critical to the survival of the nation.

And let me point out that urea, the active component of urine, is actually NH₄⁺, and that is the body's primary way of eliminating nitrogen.  The four major chemical components of proteins in the body are CHON (with occasional P and K and some other very minor elements, but those four make up about 90% of the human body by mass), and the body already eliminates CO₂ through respiration, and H₂O through perspiration, so the body needs urine to eliminate that last element, N.

N is the most critical element in the NPK trio of critical elements for fertilizers for plants - those plants need N for their proteins as much as humans do.  N comes in the form of NH₃ ammonia.  Ammonia in nature is given to those plants through the great old cycle of life, distilling NH₄⁺ Urea through bacterial decomposition.

Urine is the single most important fertilizer in the world.  It contains well over 90% of the world's nitrogen supply, and nitrogen is the most critical fertilizer element.  Your pee is the key to the cycle of life. 

It also happens to be the basis of virtually all explosives. (Based upon nitrogen's incredible energy release upon returning to it's "natural" state of the triple-bonded N₂ form found in 78% of the atmosphere.)

In the 18th and 19th centuries, use of gunpowder from pee had so critically drained our strategic supply of pee, needed to put back into our farms so that we could continue eating, but instead used to just shoot each other as gunpowder, that we had to literally circle the world looking for more pee to steal to fuel the imperial conquests of the age.  The empires ran on pee, and the fate of the world rested on how much pee any given empire could acquire.

A major, decisive blow came when England finally managed to wrest control of the guano mines (literally, they were mining the ancient, fossilized poop of millions of years of seabirds, and fighting wars over the right to do so,) in South America from the Germans, thus sealing the fate of Germany.

It was only the Haber-Bosch Process, invented just before the outbreak of World War 1 that ever broke this chain of events, by giving humanity the power to create artificial pee from large concentrations of electricity and a lot of air, water, and some methane. 

The Germans lost World War I not because of any strategic or military failure, but simply because they starved to death.  Against Fritz Haber's warnings, they used all their remaining pee, and all the artificial pee they could create from the Haber-Bosch process to make gunpowder for the war, rather than using it as fertilizer, and in the end, the people of Germany were down to boiling shoe leather for food before they rioted and forced the nation to surrender just so they could get something to eat. 

Almost all of human history revolves around the chemistry of pee.

And people make jokes about how adding pee into the game is a bad idea...  Ignorant fools.

[Sadrice]

Urea is NOT NH₄⁺, it's (NH₂)₂CO.  It slowly breaks down to either ammonium or ammonia in water (wikipedia contradicts itself, but the two form an equilibrium in water anyways, so they will both be present).  This is why all of the old recipes that require ammonia specify that you need stale urine.  If we directly excreted ammonia, our urine would have a dangerously high pH, so our bodies convert it to urea, which is neutral.  Urea makes a good fertilizer, because it slowly releases ammonia over time.  Also, adding too much ammonia to your farms will raise the pH above the level plants can survive.

[NW_Kohaku]

Urea is NOT NH₄⁺, it's (NH₂)₂CO.  It slowly breaks down to either ammonium or ammonia in water (wikipedia contradicts itself, but the two form an equilibrium in water anyways, so they will both be present).  This is why all of the old recipes that require ammonia specify that you need stale urine.  If we directly excreted ammonia, our urine would have a dangerously high pH, so our bodies convert it to urea, which is neutral.  Urea makes a good fertilizer, because it slowly releases ammonia over time.  Also, adding too much ammonia to your farms will raise the pH above the level plants can survive.

I never said we needed to pee directly into charcoal to create gunpowder, or that we need to pee directly onto our fields to fertilize our crops.

Historically, ammonia was farmed as "lant", which is, basically, just urine left in a vat to distill down into ammonia by the bacteria that decompose urine. 

I was being less technically accurate and in places somewhat hyperbolic in order to make a point which was more abstract than technical.  It wasn't supposed to be technically accurate, so there's no point in grading its technical accuracy.

[Sadrice]

I was responding to this, specifically.  I would have quoted it, but I can't select properly on my phone so I would have had to backspace through the whole post.  Sorry if I seemed nitpicky, I didn't mean it that way.  I just think chemistry is fun and tend to go an tangents.  So what about them platinums?

And let me point out that urea, the active component of urine, is actually NH₄⁺, and that is the body's primary way of eliminating nitrogen.

[Arkenstone]

To summarise; just because platinum is by and large extracted from relatively impure desposits does not mean that purer desposits couldn't be nor haven't been found.

The point is if they have been found, all my research has yet to turn up a record of it.  And since I have found several sources stating that platinum never occurs naturally in pure form, that's what I'm going with.  The only trick is figuring out if any of the impure forms would be processable by dwarven science.  I've ruled out deposits with other PGMs (besides possibly palladium) so the only viable lead now is on "Ferroan Platinum", but I've been too busy lately to chase it.  I'll get back on the case eventually, I hope.

As for what could be found...  For all we know, there could vast fields of pure platinum and native aluminum along with diamonds the size of soccer balls or even naturally-formed buckyballs down near the mohorovicic discontinuity, far deeper than even the deepest modern mineshaft.  Does that mean we should model every theoretical possibility?

[runlvlzero]

I urinate on my compost pile all the time =P

But yeah, urea is freeking in everything, just go to your cosmetics section in the store... or look at some of those medicines, they still use it (its probably cow, or some such)... but who knows... fun info for those that didn't know, thanks NW_Kohaku.

[Niyazov]

hey. hey. hey you guys. nickel wasn't purified until 1751. maybe I'll start a 12-page thread about how terrible nickel is.

[NW_Kohaku]

hey. hey. hey you guys. nickel wasn't purified until 1751. maybe I'll start a 12-page thread about how terrible nickel is.

Sounds good, but you can't really determine how long a thread is going to be, unfortunately.

[Mr. Palau]

hey. hey. hey you guys. nickel wasn't purified until 1751. maybe I'll start a 12-page thread about how terrible nickel is.

Yes but impure nickel is workable and has been used for a very long time, whereas Aluminium is not workable until it is refined. Platinum has only been used in an impure form, which is why it is proposed that it's impure form be kept.

Link to how nickel has been in use for over 2,000 years, at least. http://www.aerodynealloys.com/products/nickel/history.php

Although it is mistaken for silver and appearently tin, but dwarves would know better.

[Sadrice]

The author of that page has questionable reading skills.  At the bottom it says that it was paraphrased from the wikipedia article, and includes this interesting bit:

The use of nickel is ancient, and can be traced back as far as 20 BC. Bronzes from what is now Syria had a nickel content of up to 100%.

While the wikipedia page it was sourced from has:

However, the unintentional use of nickel is ancient, and can be traced back as far as 3500 BC. Bronzes from what is now Syria had contained up to 2% nickel.

Just a slight alteration...

Nothing I've found so far indicates nickel being used as anything other than an accidental small component in alloys in the time periods we are looking at, but this book (Economic Mining, written in 1895) describes a process that is moderately complex, but probably doable by dwarves.  The next chapter in that book (you should look at it, it's pretty cool, and has great diagrams of furnaces in the iron chapter) covers platinum.  It describes a smelting process involving smelting it with galena to form a Pt-Pb mixture that can later be separated.  This yields mostly pure platinum with a bit of rhodium and iridium, which it describes as "well adapted for ordinary uses", and the most exotic ingredient is Borax, which is a somewhat rare evaporite mineral that dwarves could probably find, and is only a flux anyways, and so could probably be replaced.

[Mr. Palau]

The author of that page has questionable reading skills.  At the bottom it says that it was paraphrased from the wikipedia article, and includes this interesting bit:

The use of nickel is ancient, and can be traced back as far as 20 BC. Bronzes from what is now Syria had a nickel content of up to 100%.

While the wikipedia page it was sourced from has:

However, the unintentional use of nickel is ancient, and can be traced back as far as 3500 BC. Bronzes from what is now Syria had contained up to 2% nickel.

Just a slight alteration...

Nothing I've found so far indicates nickel being used as anything other than an accidental small component in alloys in the time periods we are looking at,

Well yes, hence:

Although it is mistaken for silver and appearently tin, but dwarves would know better.

And sometimes it's use in the Alloys may have been intentional http://www.dartmouth.edu/~toxmetal/toxic-metals/more-metals/nickel-history.html. They migh tnot have known that what made the material better was the nickel in the ore they added, but they likely realised that adding those types of ores to other metals made them stronger.

this book (Economic Mining, written in 1895) describes a process that is moderately complex, but probably doable by dwarves.  The next chapter in that book (you should look at it, it's pretty cool, and has great diagrams of furnaces in the iron chapter) covers platinum.  It describes a smelting process involving smelting it with galena to form a Pt-Pb mixture that can later be separated.  This yields mostly pure platinum with a bit of rhodium and iridium, which it describes as "well adapted for ordinary uses", and the most exotic ingredient is Borax, which is a somewhat rare evaporite mineral that dwarves could probably find, and is only a flux anyways, and so could probably be replaced.

That should work, although I don't know if you could substitute anything for the borax, as most flux stons are more common than borax I believe the original manufactorer would have done so if possible. Although it is not pure, so I suggest it have it's price reduced.

There should be two forms of Platinum, one produced via this method, which should be done in a furnace, and another produced by an other more complicated process involving alchemy detailed earlier, and of course only done at some sort of Alechemist's workshop. The first one should have it's price reduced to that of gold, due to the impurities in the metal, and the second should maintain all of it's value.

This site coroborates Sadrice's findings, http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Platinum.

[DG]

hey. hey. hey you guys. nickel wasn't purified until 1751. maybe I'll start a 12-page thread about how terrible nickel is.

Maybe you will, Milhouse. Maybe you will...

[Arkenstone]

Nothing I've found so far indicates nickel being used as anything other than an accidental small component in alloys in the time periods we are looking at, but this book (Economic Mining, written in 1895) describes a process that is moderately complex, but probably doable by dwarves.  The next chapter in that book (you should look at it, it's pretty cool, and has great diagrams of furnaces in the iron chapter) covers platinum.  It describes a smelting process involving smelting it with galena to form a Pt-Pb mixture that can later be separated.  This yields mostly pure platinum with a bit of rhodium and iridium, which it describes as "well adapted for ordinary uses", and the most exotic ingredient is Borax, which is a somewhat rare evaporite mineral that dwarves could probably find, and is only a flux anyways, and so could probably be replaced.

Aha, now that is the kind of research I'm talking about.  Congratulations, you've found the holy grail of sources for this thread.


The source places platinum only in alluvial deposits, which corroborates other research which places native platinum there.  That's already covered -however it's almost always associated with something else so I've half a mind to remove alluvial clusters.

Platinum has also been found associated with gold, but one of the other sources states that there is usually more platinum than gold so I'm not sure how to handle this one.  I guess we could always handwave it and just have platina as clusters in native gold.  But in several cases the platinum (or palladium) is already alloyed with the gold, and I have no idea if they'd be separable sans-electrolysis. (Thankfully it provides a name for this natural Pd-Au alloy: 'porpezite'.  I think we should have it smelt directly to white gold, handwaving the Pt/Pd difference.)

The book also mentions deposits "on" serpentine and in serpentine gravel, so perhaps platina should be found in clusters and/or veins there.
 
Platinum was also "found in-situ in ferruginous felsite and granite".  I don't think that the current representation of 'veins' in magnetite works well for this, because those are both igneous stones (intrusive, I believe) while magnetite is found only in sedimentary.  But while information on "Ferrosan Platinum" is sketchy it seems to occur in alluvial deposits as well as igneous.  I'm thinking that either platinum should be moved from veins in magnetite to clusters in hematite, or a ore of both iron and platinum should be added.


Reading more of the article (and also my own writing), I have redone my suggestion:

• The stone 'platina' should be found as small clusters in chromite, hematite, native gold, serpentine and olivine, and as veins in olivine as well.
• Platina itself is unsmeltable.
• The "Refine platinum (use lead ore)" reaction takes one galena ore (coded as ore of lead), one platina rock and one unit of flux and produces 4 platinum bars and 4 (or fewer?) lead bars. (Perhaps the number should be random?)
• The "Refine platinum (use lead bars)" reaction takes
• The "Make white gold (use gold ore/bars)" reaction(s) should take one platina and one native gold (or 4 gold bars) to a smelter and output 8 "white gold" bars.
• The "Make white gold (use platinum bars)" reaction takes one platinum bar and one gold bar and produces two white gold bars.