thought: steel is such a common material for tools because, primarily, of the abundance of iron; it's the most abundant metal. As such, a lot of research has gone into making tools and structures out of iron and iron-based alloys.
But what materials would tools and structures be made of if given an unlimited amount of any ores you want? (you have to smelt, alloy, and forge them yourself though) If iron didn't have the advantage of abundance, what would tools have been made of instead?
@eryn I imagine there are probably alloying elements you can add to bronze that would enable hardening, too
@Felthry absolutely, just that most things fall into either "can be cut with unhardened copper" or "needs diamond plated ceramic plate-press cutoff to even dent it" in the areas I'm attempting to prototype...not a lot of middle ground, sadly.
@Felthry hmm.
Copper and bronze?
I’ll admit I like copper because it smells nice sometimes and makes good pots and pans + pretty colour
@Brainship copper is far too soft to make tools out of. Bronze is also soft but less so, you could make tools out of it but they would wear out quicker than iron ones.
@Felthry ah fair enough, mostly thought of it bc of the Bronze Age.
And now we wanba jump down the hole of researching Bronze Age metal working :0
@Brainship go for it! metallurgy is fascinating
@Brainship I was actually just talking to @pearshapes@snouts.online in depth about this
@Felthry the thing where steel has allotropes and you can tweak hardness by quenching / tempering / etc is a big deal.
@starkatt I don't think it's only steel that does that though
aluminum alloyed with copper has some interesting hardening properties for instance
It's not only abundance. Iron and steel are incredibly workable after forging to shape into other things and to hold their rigidity. They can further be hardenend with heat, and can be welded together or cut and turned into more useful shapes while retaining those properties.
I heard that there's a titanium-gold alloy that's really good, and biocompatible even.
http://news.rice.edu/2016/07/20/titanium-gold-new-gold-standard-for-artificial-joints/
@Tathar titanium is quite annoying to extract from its ores, so even with limitless abundance I suspect this would be more expensive than steel--but still, with modern technology it's not that difficult.
In terms of number of steps, or in terms of needing specific stuff to extract it with? Because the latter is mitigated by limitless abundance too.
@Tathar Well, you need electricity to process it (it involves electrolysis, iwrc), so it's unlikely it would have developed early, and the titanium age certainly wouldn't have replaced the bronze age
Oh, I wasn't thinking in historical terms, but electricity could fall under limitless abundance too.
@Tathar I mean, the thing I said was abundant was the ore, I dont' think there's an ore of electricity x3
I'm just imagining miners prospecting for batteries now.
@Felthry as far as "simple" alloys, ones that I can forge myself? I'm a huge fan of brass and bronze. For most non-hardened applications, it holds up better than steel (because non-destructive-oxidation).
For high performance, the Inconel family of alloys is what I'd want. Especially once we get into sintering and ceramics applications, although it's been a while since I've reviewed the thermal expansion profiles of metals vs ceramics...