That is not how physics works and you know it.
Isn't it? Thermodynamics? The Magmaman transfers enough of his heat to the sword and hand that his core temperature drops to the point where the magma solidifies.
Then the game's fact that "Cold damage" is all the same will shatter the magmaman.
Problem is your hand is typically hotter that the air round you all and the sword is room temperature at lowest. If that little heat loss solidified the magma man the air would have him always walking around with a solid outer shell anyway.
A sword made out of ice would be used up attacking it but we know exactly what happens when magma falls into water so you'd just need to model that as a wound in pretty much the area that was attacked.
A lignite sword would pretty much undo any of that sort of progress and probably make a crispy dwarf or ten.
I think it has something to do with potential energy.
Can a candle melt an iceberg before the candle runs out of wax. Or in this case, can the magmaman run out of magma before the wooden sword runs out of wood, the answer is obviously the magma man will win.
Candles aren't burning the wax silly. That's just what makes the wick burn slowly instead of all catching on fire at once.
Sodium isn't a metal...
Not to mention that it reacts violently with water (or is that potassium), and is half of what makes salt.
Edit: Look here http://www.webelements.com/ its in the same column as hydrogen, the pink group are the transition metals.
You should look at Aluminum, that one is the highest heat capacity of the real metals.
Potassium definitely does. Sodium is half of a molecule of salt and that just dissolves in water (though it does make the water conduct electricity much better.)
If you know about the salt bridges used in batteries it makes sense that sodium conducts very well.
I never said make a sodium sword. Dumping a bag of sodium of a magma man would really disperse his heat.
Well no, that's not quite how it works. Heat flow from hot to cold and it flows faster if something is cold (or the source is hotter- either way it's the difference that matters,) but for materials that heat flows through very quickly this isn't quite what's happening. They have low specific energies so what's really happening is that they heat up with very little energy which also means they heat up fast and so the hot parts quickly move energy to the colder parts but are likewise quickly heated back up since it's a small amount of energy involved.
They would still need to be sending the heat somewhere and since the air is the only medium we've got to deal with here sodium wouldn't really have that sort of impact.
But, adding much sodium to a defined glob of magma is going to increase it's volume. A magma man is not exactly a sphere but we can probably still apply the same general math to it. As a sphere gets larger it's surface area increases by a square while it's volume increases cubically, or to the power of three. Presuming the magma man didn't just get hot by sitting in magma but that it generates much of it's own heat it will quickly make up for any heat loss adding the sodium but will now have overall more heat energy stored (and perhaps more generated,) in it's increased volume while it will be only losing heat based on it's surface area so overall it will be harder to cool down.
Now, if you take a look at your computer (if looking in the case isn't too hard,) you'll see one or several odd metal blocks that have the overall shape of some cube but much of the area is hollow with it just having ridges that extend up from the base. This heat sink is for the express purpose of conducting heat into itself and then into the air. The low volume and high surface area swing things in a very different direction than spheres and these can very quickly puff heat out into the air. Nonetheless the air does fairly quickly become whatever temperature the heat sink is and thus there is no more heat transfer but the many fans in your computer keep fresh low temperature air flowing through for the fastest loss of heat manageable through such a setup.
SO, if you made steel heat sink type objects and embedded them in magma men and then turned fans on them you could potentially cool them down for some rather bizarre statues.
And on that note, did anyone notice the devlog midday update?
One more to go, and I can finally green this section out on the list. Issues today were dwarves pitching off their uniforms whenever they had to get a bite to eat (as when they are set to not use their backpacks for food) and checking out sleep order scheduling. Last up is cleaning up various hanging issues with equipment management.
Squads done within November, as he predicted. Rejoice. Also, hilarious.
"Chow time! I couldn't wait to get out of this stuffy uniform!" What is it with dwarves and nudity right now?
You tell them to take off their clothing and they're already drunk enoug that they just decide it's a party.
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3669713 times)