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[Gwolfski]

"Hmm? Everything? Nice...."

Request quality steel, a tonne or so of platinum, few tonnes of silver, sand  and some skilled glassworkers.

@amp: do we have quartz-bearing rock?

[Amperzand]

Only perhaps twenty grams of platinum are available, in ten-gram ingots. Silver, while slightly more readily accessible, is available as ten half-kilo ingots, and steel, while shipped here in bulk, is both of lower quality than the Homelander metallurgy currently in use, and largely in forged form, as blades and armor.

It would appear that this caravan was intended to keep the fortress afloat, while more valuable or special-purpose materials are sent later, upon the Liason's return. Besides, it becomes clear that such materials as platinum are expensive enough to need a good explanation of their purpose, Mountainhome's Mandate or no.

No large quantities of quartz have yet been found.

[Gwolfski]

"Platinum is necesary for lighning-weapons and improved production facilities for other weaponry."

[MoonyTheHuman]

"Platinum is necesary for lighning-weapons and improved production facilities for other weaponry."

moony adds in "its also useful for sparkplugs to use in engines..."

[Gwolfski]

"Weaponry and weaponry production, you see."

[chaotic skies]

"I'm not trusting you to build weapons, Gwolf. You've already proven you're slightly insane, and I've seen way too many things made by insane people to know where this is going. No. Moony, you seem to be mostly sane. I would probably give you platinum, but if you start acting insane, I would take it away."

[Elagn]

Gwolfski, what type of lightning based weapon do you plan? Lightning based weaponry doesn't exist on earth, so what makes you thing you can make it here with minimal infrastructure and virtually no basic research? And why is platinum so needed? Copper is a very good metal for electronics, especially at the level we are at. Maybe if we spend 50 to 100 years we will need much platinum, but we have nowhere near the basic research yet for any practical uses of it.

Oh, and dont order sand, order raw glass. It is much easier to ship, lighter, and just as workable for new projects and usages.

[Amperzand]

[I mean, you could build rail guns. They'd suck, and platinum is an immensely impractical rail material, but hey.]

[chaotic skies]

<<I'd like a railgun. In the future, when we've gotten the dam up, and figured out batteries better.>>

<<As amp said, platinum isn't a good material for a railgun round. Steel is, because it's heavy, affected by magnets (which IS important), and fairly easy to get.>>

[MoonyTheHuman]

"Gwolfki, if your thinking diamond tipped railgun slugs, your thinking what im thinking about to do later.."

[Amperzand]

[That would be fairly pointless, since hypervelocity weapons rely mainly on density, not hardness, for armor-penetration. Railgun slugs don't need to be magnetic, incidentally, just conductive, and preferably heat-resistant. The main difficulty is in getting rails made of something strong enough for more than two shots at usefully high energy, and in creating stable capacitors to provide the instantaneous amperage needed for the purpose. Batteries are almost useless, since they discharge far too slowly.]

[This here is a fairly good demonstration of a low-tech railgun. Sorta.]

[chaotic skies]

<<The battery thing was for storing large amounts of energy. Think a charging station.>>

[Amperzand]

[Oh, you'll definitely want energy storage, but useful batteries are not useful railgun capacitors.]

[chaotic skies]

<<I was also kind of thinking of this instead of a railgun, but I'm not totally sure which would be more difficult. I need to look into this more.>>

[Amperzand]

[Coilguns require considerably more complex technology than a railgun. Railguns are, at their basic principles, pathetically simple. They're also only really remotely worth building as heavy weapon emplacements, either for large vessels or stationary fortifications. If you want something useful for infantry, you'd need coilguns, but they happen to be harder to make.]

[It's noteworthy that both of the linked videos portray weapons less effective per-shot than the standard firearms your dwarves currently have access to, and both use technology beyond your current reach.]