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[Bauglir]

Remember, they make adamantine thread out of it before making the clothes, so I don't think it's plates and suchlike.

[scrdest]

Remember, they make adamantine thread out of it before making the clothes, so I don't think it's plates and suchlike.

But again, we're talking about a material that is literally impossible to bend without breaking.

[Descan]

Because you can make a sword out of just iron, no leather or wood for the handle. Hammers don't have handles either. Beds are purely wood. And wooden everything doesn't need nails.

[alway]

Remember, they make adamantine thread out of it before making the clothes, so I don't think it's plates and suchlike.

But again, we're talking about a material that is literally impossible to bend without breaking.

In aggregate, sure. But are we talking in aggregate here? While it does take the ore to make it, are they actually using the ore itself? (edit: or alternatively they do use the whole ore, as I forgot about the obvious ability to melt it)

It could be they simply have a way to isolate disconnected atoms or clumps of atoms in the material around the ore, then fuse those into a thread made of rough, atomic scale chain-mail.  Doing so would certainly not be a simple process. However, a technique for doing so wouldn't be entirely inconceivable, considering they are a race of smiths so dedicated to their craft that they even live underground. Especially since adamantine is a relatively common substance in terms of geographical distribution, and so would be the focus of all this civilization's efforts of study. In a similar real world example, Damascus Steel was recently found to include carbon nanotubes, despite being forged a thousand years before the discovery of carbon nanotubes.

[GavJ]

Yeah, because a game that track that speck of mud beneath your dwarf second left toenails is going to abstract that other material.

Every industry in game has huge abstractions. Food preservation (or cooking, in the case of directly eaten meat, etc.), wood drying, the need for water in almost every industrial process (most glaringly brewing), straps in armor in general not just adamantine, the materials for making tools for all the workshops, the need for tools for things like installing doors or engraving, hoops for liquid tight barrels, generic mechanisms being able to fill any role without future insight, everything about crops, blah blah.

[i2amroy]

Because you can make a sword out of just iron, no leather or wood for the handle. Hammers don't have handles either. Beds are purely wood. And wooden everything doesn't need nails.

To be fair all of those things are possible (and have been done in the past), they would just have some drawbacks or would require more work (which is why they are less common today).

Spoiler: Full iron sword (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Full iron hammer (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Wooden platform bed (would be uncomfortable without matress though) (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Wooden peg construction (click to show/hide)

In fact the last one, nail-less woodworking was particularly common in some older cultures (such as ancient china, where virtually everything wooden was constructed without nails or glue due to the climate and woods available).

[Lagslayer]

They have to extract strands from the ore before it becomes useable. Most of the ore isn't even used, just the bits of adamantine they pull from it. I suspect it is made more rigid with later processing.

[Loud Whispers]

To be fair all of those things are possible (and have been done in the past), they would just have some drawbacks or would require more work (which is why they are less common today).

The only drawback is cost, because any good manual tools should be made out of as few pieces as possible, a single piece of metal provides the sturdiest tool. We don't have to do this for swords anymore, but knives, hammers and chisels in the pricey range are single-tang/piece with handles layered over or you're getting ripped. They're also very common.

[alway]

Because you can make a sword out of just iron, no leather or wood for the handle. Hammers don't have handles either. Beds are purely wood. And wooden everything doesn't need nails.

To be fair all of those things are possible (and have been done in the past), they would just have some drawbacks or would require more work (which is why they are less common today).

Spoiler: Full iron sword (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Full iron hammer (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Wooden platform bed (would be uncomfortable without matress though) (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Wooden peg construction (click to show/hide)

In fact the last one, nail-less woodworking was particularly common in some older cultures (such as ancient china, where virtually everything wooden was constructed without nails or glue due to the climate and woods available).

Actually, nail-less woodworking was pretty common all over, especially in far-flung locations without much local industry. In early America, for example, people would burn down vacant/dilapidated buildings to sift through the rubble for the nails. Basically just like Cataclysm: DDA. So if you could avoid using expensive metal by simply doing some peg-slot cuts on your cheap wood, you would do that. Especially on things like furniture, where you didn't have to worry as much about structural integrity (since wood is cheap enough you can just build your chairs like a brick instead of worrying about strength).

[Reelya]

Dwarves clearly wrap their beards around themselves for comfort on the beds.

Documentary about Dwarven beds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4tlcFHuZMA&t=153

[miauw62]

Nanomail seems like the most plausible (and coolest) explanation for adamantine clothes.

[Reelya]

http://science-beta.slashdot.org/story/14/07/24/172221/black-holes-not-black-after-all-theorize-physicists

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Black holes are singularities in spacetime formed by stars that have collapsed at the end of their lives. But while black holes are one of the best known ideas in cosmology, physicists have never been entirely comfortable with the idea that regions of the universe can become infinitely density. Indeed, they only accept this because they can't think of any reason why it shouldn't happen. But in the last few months, just such a reason has emerged as a result of intense debate about one of cosmology's greatest problems — the information paradox. This is the fundamental tenet in quantum mechanics that all the information about a system is encoded in its wave function and this always evolves in a way that conserves information. The paradox arises when this system falls into a black hole causing the information to devolve into a single state. So information must be lost.

Earlier this year, Stephen Hawking proposed a solution. His idea is that gravitational collapse can never continue beyond the so-called event horizon of a black hole beyond which information is lost. Gravitational collapse would approach the boundary but never go beyond it. That solves the information paradox but raises another question instead: if not a black hole, then what? Now one physicist has worked out the answer. His conclusion is that the collapsed star should end up about twice the radius of a conventional black hole but would not be dense enough to trap light forever and therefore would not be black. Indeed, to all intents and purposes, it would look like a large neutron star.

Interesting stuff. It fits with the relativistic calculations: time dilation should hit infinity as you approach an event horizon. Therefore nothing can actually go beyond the event horizon until infinite external time has passed. What this means is that rather than an empty "hole" you fall through, in practice you get this relativistic sludge which builds up outside the black hole, and resembles a neutron star. At least that's the new theory.

[Il Palazzo]

Interesting stuff. It fits with the relativistic calculations: time dilation should hit infinity as you approach an event horizon. Therefore nothing can actually go beyond the event horizon until infinite external time has passed. What this means is that rather than an empty "hole" you fall through, in practice you get this relativistic sludge which builds up outside the black hole, and resembles a neutron star. At least that's the new theory.

That's not correct, is it? There's no time dilation in the frame of the infalling object. It never reaches the horizon only for outside observers.

[Reelya]

From ANY external observers point of view, the first bit of matter never hits the event horizon. The atom right behind the first one is also an "external observer" compared to the first one, therefore goop is going to build up.

So, think about the 2nd atom falling in:

"when is it my turn to fall into the black hole?"

"after the first one"

"how long will that take?"

"from YOUR point of view, infinity"

[Sergarr]

Interesting stuff. It fits with the relativistic calculations: time dilation should hit infinity as you approach an event horizon. Therefore nothing can actually go beyond the event horizon until infinite external time has passed. What this means is that rather than an empty "hole" you fall through, in practice you get this relativistic sludge which builds up outside the black hole, and resembles a neutron star. At least that's the new theory.

That's not correct, is it? There's no time dilation in the frame of the infalling object. It never reaches the horizon only for outside observers.

The events must be the same for all observers. From the outside perspective, you don't fall into the black hole, therefore, you don't fall there from any perspective, including your own. Sounds logical for me.