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.
You're way off-base here. Just google it; sodium reacts on contact with water, to the point of it basically exploding if there's enough of each.
Alkali metals aren't exactly the most stable things on the planet.
2H2O + 2Na -> 2NaOH + H2
In other words:
Water + sodium metal -> lye + hydrogen gas
Also, saying that sodium is "half a salt molecule" is like saying that chlorine is; that sure as hell doesn't make chlorine gas safe or stable.
I didn't say that sodium didn't react, just that salt doesn't.
Admittedly I made it look like I did but oh well. This is probably a good opportunity to explain that positive and negative ions don't behave the same way reactively as their neutral forms. That's obvious enough for anyone that's had to take several years of chemistry courses that it feels like something that doesn't need to be said :\
Anyway to try and add something besides excuses in this post: a pebble of potassium dropped into water will fiz around and so forth in a kind of fun way but a fist sized chunk will probably send you through a wall or two before you could even turn to run and if you're still in one piece the burning plaster will probably finish you off. If sodium is half as reactive you can expect some serious consequences from it.
*And since the reaction produces hydrogen gas (K probably does too but I'm saying this anyway,) the fiery energy release is going to react that with oxygen in the air for even more explosive power.
Candles aren't burning the wax silly. That's just what makes the wick burn slowly instead of all catching on fire at once.
Candles are very much burning the wax. It's no coincidence that candles and lamps invariably use combustible hydrocarbons/lipids like wax, oil, tallow, and paraffin. The wick burns too, but its primary function is to draw melted fuel upward via capillary action -- hence the expression "wick up (a liquid)".
I'm all kinds of bad with chemistry today. Human combustion involves drawing their fat into their clothes so they can burn that way so I really should have known that. I was probably distracted thinking about how the melty pool around the flame is still technically solid rather than liquid.
I know it doesn't make chlorine safe or stable, I was trying to emphasize that it isn't a metal as in what we think of as bieng metals, iron, copper, titanium, platnium.
I knew Sodium is extremely reactive, just wasn't sure whether I was thinking of potassium or sodium at that moment.
But it is. It's a conductor rather than a resistor and it's on the d orbit section of the periodic table handing it the type of electron configuration that makes things metals. Zinc is a little more obvious as a metal because it's in that same orbital set but still lacking the malleability or whatever to generally be a construction metal. Uranium is a metal too but it's not naturally concentrated enough to look like much more than a general rock. Really most elements are metals- it's only that chunk of the table on the oxygen side that's not.
Now, if you mean it's not a metal in the game...
Personally I'm hoping they get homeothermy, just because it makes them more interesting and marginally less magical.
I wouldn't mind the
keeping fixed temperatures but for something like a magma
man I definitely agree.
Personally I'm hoping they get homeothermy, just because it makes them more interesting and marginally less magical.
I wouldn't mind the
keeping fixed temperatures but for something like a magma
man I definitely agree.
Why does everyone get so anal about dwarf fort being super realistic? Honestly, I don't want to strike chlorine just because chemistry says so.
It's a game about dragons, elves, dwarves, and skeletal carp which walk the land. I really don't want it to have to obey all the rules of chemistry.
And most of us don't want aquifers but we get them anyway. Fantasy just means the characters don't necessarily know how the world works with a bit of imagination manifested into real living things.
We want the game to match reality in the sense that we have cool ideas about things we could do. Dwarf fortress is one of the few games that doesn't say "this is a game and sorry, that's not part of the game play so you might as well act like that doesn't exist." It's got the kind of depth that you don't see anywhere else.
But basically we've got types of rock that catch fire so why not types that react with water? If the game's got all these reality matching minerals in it why not make them match expectations if it's practical to code? Most game designers act like they didn't pass high school science but bringing up the behavior of things like this amongst ourselves can spur various ideas and for Toady this dials back the possibility of him making the game not match expectations except when he had intentional reasons to do so.
But basically the fantasy setting doesn't have rules for this stuff. We like complex rules and much like Jurassic Park where they plugged frog DNA into the gaps where
Dino D N A didn't lay out it's recipe we stick reality into this to make a fuller experience.
Plus it's one more special feature that modders can use for extra-realism or higher fantasy. When it doesn't get in the way of fantasy I don't see why you can't do it.
Does Dwarf Fortress supports period of time before a creature starts taking damage due to temperature difference or long term temperature damage?
Yeah, this is an interesting question. To be honest I don't really know how it works in real life either. I've wondered about this while cooking meat -- recipes etc. will often say to cook the meat to such-and-such temperature, but presumably the meat has to spend some amount of time at that temperature to actually finish cooking.
This article says that "most of the protein unfolding kinetics [from thermal denaturation] are observed on time scales greater than 10 ms," so that's pretty fast -- DF can probably treat temperature damage as instantaneous, i.e., once a tissue reaches a temperature (keeping in mind that temp. is still tracked as a body part property) it immediately takes all the damage appropriate for that temperature. Likewise, with cold, ice crystals form very quickly when the water is sufficiently cold (yes, I'm ignoring supercooling), so making cold damage instantaneous is also reasonable.
So I imagine gradual damage will result only if you have gradually changing temperature in your body parts, which would require some nuanced balancing in the heat transfer and homeothermy stuff.
Anyway, we don't really know what temperature damage means in the new tissue system, or how it heals, so who knows.
Why does everyone get so anal about dwarf fort being super realistic? Honestly, I don't want to strike chlorine just because chemistry says so.
It's a game about dragons, elves, dwarves, and skeletal carp which walk the land. I really don't want it to have to obey all the rules of chemistry.
Is there a specific rule of chemistry which was discussed in this thread, and which you want DF to ignore? I mean, it goes without saying that some rules of chemistry are necessary in DF and some aren't feasible -- quantum mechanics, for example.
With temperature actually impacting your body Newton's laws of cooling are much more relevant. On the scale of proteins it's much more binary but that's such a small scale it barely makes sense to think about it -"How do electron orbits produce democracy?"- so we're really concerned with how quickly exposure to extreme temperatures results in changing the temperature of your organs.
The game seems to do continual damage in the cold, and that's realistic enough for getting frostbite, though some future tweaking wouldn't be a bad thing either. For heat they mostly just seem displeased by the air temperature rather than taking damage from it, and this is also reasonable because IRL we mostly just need to stay hydrated to handle desert temperatures. Non-hominids have really crappy endurance at high temperatures and simply have to rest at the hottest part of the day in warm areas but DF doesn't seem to have mechanics for tissue damage from working while exhausted so they just go rest somewhere every time.
It's those extreme temperatures where this becomes kind of screwy. The game has conditions for lighting things on fire and judging by the new structure high temperatures not involving fire will be able to damage tissue layers but it might only consider that when fire is already involved so that's hard to say.
Extreme cold is going to be more complex. The classic fantasy setting doesn't really feature cold so extreme that you can't survive it by bundling up. It's probably still a really miserable situation but they get by. Some trashy or cartoon-y fiction straight up freezes people in blocks of ice but DF probably shouldn't involve that, or at least not before the magic arc.
Now, I don't see a reason to be ultra realistic about freezing but if the game allowed limbs to freeze to the point they became brittle enough to shatter that would be a very interesting way to lose your arms, much like wrestling firemen and such. I'm not quite sure about the best way to describe that with text but I'm sure something could be worked out. As for the medical issues with dropping to (near) that temperature but keeping the limbs in tact and rewarming them- well, I think it would be best for us to test out the new medical system before deciding if that should mean having to amputate the arms or what. Extreme frostbite does technically mean nerve damage (well, dead tissue all around,) but this is a fantasy setting so I'd say it's up in the air right now.
I KNOW chemistry disagrees, I'm trying to say that its not what everyday people would think of as bieng a metal. Actually, I didn't really know or had forgotten that it was called an alkalai metal, but I knew it wasn't in the same group as the transition metals.
Everyday people who payed attention in chemistry think of sodium as a metal. The fact that it reacts to oxygen and water hardly make it seem less metallic; iron does that, too. But then, most elements will react to oxygen and/or water, whether metallic or not.
Oddly chemistry wasn't required in my public education. (Then again the teacher I had was so bad that most of his students left no wiser about chemistry than students who hadn't taken the course.)
Oxygen's high reactivity is mainly why we refer to the reactions as reduction and
oxidation.
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