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[RCIX]

I don't think forging swords is a complicated science.

Yea, it kind of is. Have you seen those history programs on how samurai swords are made 9like that makes me an expert ), even way back in the 13-1500s (whaddya know, it's in DF too)? They went through a crazy complex process to get a good sword. Read more at this WIkipedia page.

[Psieye]

And about the artifact, its an artifact you know its more for the show off, the fact its core is made of gold bars or not isn't really important i think, it's just a pure art work, if most of the material is made of gold, then it deserve the golden hammer name.
Its a bit like the real parad armor, they were pure art work and used all kind of materials gold included, they were fonctional non the less. A golden hammer isn't that much irrealist to me.
If it use some jewelry technique, and such item most probably would use them, then its not hard to imagine it with an inner steel structure and edges and some really big golden coating to get the gold weight adventage. They are few golden hammer in real life legend too, so i don't see the problem at all. I'm pretty sure a craftmen of that level would definitly find a good challenge in making such an item, both nice and fonctional, the masonic orders for exemple made a lot of items like this in history.

..................

You know, I don't feel like watching this thread go through the same arguments yet again. Let's completely change the topic: Elona has a materials system where Scrolls of Change Material make really really weird things happen. A character can equip a robe made of glass, a hammer made of cloth and a machine gun made of paper loaded with bullets made of wood. They'd be really sucky statted, but they still function so far as doing damage is concerned.

[ShakyJake]

Well, just had my own artifact golden warhammer made. It even has menacing spikes of dog leather! And since I never really saw the practicality in Dwarf Fortress addressed, I have to ask, "Is this a weapon I should even consider giving to one of my military dwarves?". The quality article on the wiki seems to suggest that weapons made of gold (or anything not traditionally used in weaponsmithing) have a 50% quality multiplier. Does this apply to artifact weapons made from random materials, too? If so, seems like the steel warhammer my Hammerdwarves are already using are nearly three times as good.

[G-Flex]

Make sure you aren't looking at a 40d article. The materials system was rebuilt from the ground up, and quality/material damage modifiers are gone in favor of more realistic properties. So you can basically ignore all of that.


As of my last testing, blunt objects made of absurdly heavy things like gold worked quite well, regardless of other properties (like gold's softness) or the fact that it would be too heavy to wield effectively; the density doesn't impede the dwarves much, but allows for a heftier swing.

Of course, swing speed multipliers (and some other things) may have changed very recently, so I'm not 100% sure of this anymore.



On the off chance that you're playing 40d: Weapons have a modifier for quality and a modifier for material, applied separately, as described in the relevant wiki articles for that version.

[ShakyJake]

Ahh! I think you are right, and it was a 40d article I had read. If the materials now matter more than just the 50%/66%/100%/133% denominations I'd read for materials in that article, that's pretty cool. I can see how blunt weapons would be improved by more dense materials, but how about edged weapons? Is steel still king? Or would there be any reason to experiment with aluminum or otherwise, as unrealistic as it may be?

[Double A]

DF wins in combat, but... dragons, bronze colossi, giant cave spiders, man-eating fish, zombie elephants, magma held back by wooden walls, short people who live underground, hippies elves, doomsday machines, humans that managed to survive all this. That's realism?

There are completely different types of realism in play here, and you're talking about the wrong kind. There are elements of DF that are supposed to work via similar rules of real life (physics in general, material systems, how bodies function, geology in most cases, etc.) and elements that are added on top of that (fictional but otherwise mundane creatures, magical systems, presumably-magical creatures like fairies and giant cave spiders, hell-pits, etc.). We're currently talking about the former.

Furthermore, if someone is sufficiently strong, they could probably do a lot of damage with a maul.

It doesn't matter, because they could still do more damage with something else, at least in most cases, so you'd still probably be better off with something different, unless you're so ridiculously large and tough that you don't need to worry about penetrating armor or ability to cause serious damage at all (which would rarely be the case unless your dwarf is fighting groundhogs and rabbits), in which case you'd still probably be better off with a lighter weapon.

I also realize, that with time, swordsmithing has become much more complex. However... before, when it was actually needed instead of just a hobby of people who have too much time, it wasn't all that complex. Get iron. Heat iron. Smack iron against hard surface with hard surface. Wash, rinse, repeat.

You're completely wrong. When something is a practical trade and not just a hobby, it's a lot more finicky and complex because the product needs to be useful instead of hanging over your mantle. Seriously, if you think more people put care into making a shitty display sword than when it's a matter of life and death for everyone involved, you're extremely far off. Weaponsmithing was an extremely important part of military society, and as Lord Shonus just said, anybody making a sword that way would be making a death wish, because either he'd get himself killed trying to use it, or get himself killed by the widowing families of people who did.

Weaponsmithing and metalworking were developed for millenia prior to the current era. Any sort of cursory research whatsoever would make it clear to you that the aspects of it we're currently talking about applied back then as well as they do now. No, they didn't have liquid nitrogen, but they had to exercise an extreme amount of care and training.

Also, just-plain-iron was barely ever used to make weapons, to my knowledge. Maybe sometimes, but generally speaking, that stuff was made out of steel of some variety or another.

I get it now - don't post without doing research. Or when tired.

Sorry for my assumptions. 

[Solace]

I can see how blunt weapons would be improved by more dense materials, but how about edged weapons? Is steel still king? Or would there be any reason to experiment with aluminum or otherwise, as unrealistic as it may be?

Silver, lead, gold, and platinum hammers = yes (in that order). Anything non-standard for blades = no. For axes (edge and blunt), no one seems to know exactly how a platinum axe would work.

[G-Flex]

G-Flex has something of a romantic view on quality control. The medieval blacksmith had no chemistry. He didn't know what retained austenite or fine pearlite were. He had no factory, no assembly line. He didn't even have a real thermometer. All he had was his forge, his experience, and whatever apprentices he thought he could rely on. Hell, he couldn't even be sure if he had a source of iron where all the impurities went out with the slag, and his only real way to test was the "grab some random swords from the group we just made and make sure they can hold an edge and don't break" method. The Middle Ages was absolutely jam-packed with charlatans and bullshit artists of all sorts. Good blacksmiths, who worked hard, did a lot of testing, and saw things that others didn't, were valued.

That's a fair point. I wasn't trying to imply that smiths knew exactly what was going on chemically or had any particularly good quality control, just that they had to know their craft and have a working (albeit more practical than scientific) knowledge of metallurgy.

It was "have good weapons and armor or die". And a whole lot of people did exactly that.

Haha, yeah, I suppose that's fair too.

[CognitiveDissonance]

To bring this to a more fruitful discussion, let's talk about dwarven vanity.
What if I was a Dwarf king, and I decided I must have a functional war hammer?

Can GOLD be improved via fairly simple smithing to be weapon-grade? I really don't know anything about metallurgy, but I found an interesting PDF [link]

What if the weapon was a very large, reinforced  Spitting Maul  in order to take advantage of the increased weight?

Reinforced how? I don't really know, but I'm thinking of a steel frame to house the gold weight - much like what we have in cars, maybe even with steel caps on the hitting sides to minimize the impact on the gold, while still retaining the benefits of the gold.

Is that feasible?

[Double A]

New theory: a weapon trap with a maul would be extremely effective.

[LordSlowpoke]

New theory: a weapon trap with a maul would be extremely effective.

On my way.

[Rkui]

What if the weapon was a very large, reinforced  Spitting Maul  in order to take advantage of the increased weight?

You don't need to increase the weight off a wood splitting axe, because you need first to hit the axe in the wood, then lift them both the axe and the peice of wood overhead, turn it in the air so the wood is up and the hammer head of the axe is down, then you throw this all down. That's the own weight of the wood that make it split when the hammer head hit. If you just try to split the wood with the edge like in hollywood films you'll need twice the effort if not more to make the same job. If the wood peice is too heavy to be lifted you need a quoin or 2 and you use the hammer on it to split the wood.
Beleive me i still split the wood i cut for the winter.

[CognitiveDissonance]

What if the weapon was a very large, reinforced  Spitting Maul  in order to take advantage of the increased weight?

You don't need to increase weight on wood splitting axe, because you need first to hit the axe in the wood, then lift them both the axe and the peice of wood overhead, turn it in the air so the wood is up and the hammer head of the axe is down, then you throw this all down. That's the own weight of the wood that make it split when the hammer head hit. If you just try to split the wood with the edge like in hollywood films you'll need twice the effort if not more to make the same job. If the wood peice is too heavy to be lifted you need a quoin or 2 and you use the hammer on it to split the wood.
Beleive me i still split the wood i cut for the winter.

I meant an oversized version, made for war

[Rkui]

So you want to split goblins? 

[CognitiveDissonance]

Yes, yes I do!