Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lemunde]

I've often wondered why this type of glass was never included as it has some interesting properties and has been around for quite some time making it perfectly acceptable as a material in Dwarf Fortress.  From Wikipedia:

Lead glass is a variety of glass in which lead replaces the calcium content of a typical potash glass.  Lead glass contains typically 18–40 weight% lead(II) oxide (PbO), while modern lead crystal, historically also known as flint glass due to the original silica source, contains a minimum of 24% PbO.  Lead glass is desirable owing to its decorative properties.
...
The addition of lead oxide to glass raises its refractive index and lowers its working temperature and viscosity. The attractive optical properties of lead glass result from the high content of the heavy metal lead. The high atomic number of lead also raises the density of the material, since lead has a very high atomic weight of 207.2, versus 40.08 for calcium.
...
Lead oxide additives first appear in Mesopotamia, the birthplace of the glass industry.  The earliest known example is a blue glass fragment from Nippur dated to 1400 BC containing 3.66% PbO, and is mentioned in clay tablets from the reign of Assurbanipal (668–631 BC), and a recipe for lead glaze appears in a Babylonian tablet of 1700 BC.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_glass

As a material in Dwarf Fortress it would ideally have increased value, at least twice that of clear glass, and it would be a better material than other glass types for making trap components.  How much better is up for debate.  By my estimation the increased weight and density would increase the damage potential by 50 percent.  The recipe would be fairly simple and obvious; 1 bag of sand and 1 bar of lead.  I'm not sure if using raw ore would be appropriate but that's something to consider as well.

[Executer]

"Crystal" is what lead glass is most often known as.  It could be neat to have in-game, and could be an alternative to the crystal glass made using rock crystals (which I think is STILL bugged >_>)

[NW_Kohaku]

This is one of those things you could mod in, though, given the control over workshop raws we have now.

Maybe you should just make it in a mod, and see if it gets popular?  I'm already planning on doing this with my own ceramics suggestion...

[Askot Bokbondeler]

i've tried ceramics and failed, what are your ideas, nw_kohaku?

[NW_Kohaku]

Oh? What did you fail at trying to do?  If it was the collecting sand thing, I'm working around it by just making a stone-grinding machine for the base materials.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

failed in many ways, failed generally. i'm seriously interested in ceramics and it was one of the first things i tried to mod in, when 31.01 came out, so i'd like to see your mod and the way you did your stuff

[sonerohi]

What I did: Make clay a stone -> prep work (drying, cutting, crushing and such as needed for what will be done with it) -> various shops by purpose (potters wheel, brickmakers, so on) -> firing.

You can easily get more elaborate with it.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

i had a clay glob be taken from a clay pit workshop(that you could build wherever you want, but you were supposed to houserule it to only be buildable on clay floor) then i had the potters wheel where you could build raw clay amphora(barrels) and urns(chests), etc. then i had reactions to fire those in a bin to turn them into ceramic... this part wast the most screwie one, as the guys would take a barrel with stuff in it and fire it into an empty ceramic barrel. the fact that they were called barrels and chests instead of amphoras and urns also annoyed me...

[culwin]

I support anything that makes lead useful.
Because it's pretty much useless (both in the game and real life).

[Executer]

I use it for barrels/bins (yes, I know, it makes them heavy)

[Lemunde]

"Crystal" is what lead glass is most often known as.  It could be neat to have in-game, and could be an alternative to the crystal glass made using rock crystals (which I think is STILL bugged >_>)

The crystal glass found in game is something completely different with a completely different manufacturing process and composition.  I'm not entirely sure if it was meant to be the same material or not.  I wouldn't be opposed to having it changed instead of adding a new material.

From what I can gather, crystal glass was actually used as a replacement for rock crystal.  Somehow Toady must have gotten this mixed up and assumed rock crystal was used to make crystal glass, not the other way around.  Although I guess you could argue that the alien environment that also gave rise to materials such as adamantine also produced natural glass formations in the form of crystals.

Still I think it's worth looking into adding lead glass as it has distinctively different properties from the crystal glass found in DF.

As far as modding in lead glass, I don't think it's that simple as glass materials aren't even found in the raws.

[Virex]

I always imagined it to be a kind of fused quartz¹ but upon further review it seems that Dwarfs don't have the technology to make it.