Bronze vs. Iron vs. Steel

[tarchon]

Well, with the density thing, you basically have less mass for the same cross-section, or else a worse (read: more obtuse) cross-section for the same mass. The lightness would only mean that your weapon would be easier to deflect, in exchange for being a bit less tiring over time...unless you wanted to move the balance closer to the hilt, but that would make it even worse at cutting...

Well, there's a reason why steel swords didn't commonly have lead plates welded on, even though it's quite possible and it would amplify the weight of the blade. I think you're vastly underestimating the complexity of both the physics and the swordplay. Different qualities are required for different purposes, which is why there really were such things as bastard swords, spathae, gladii, rapiers, kris, scimitars, etc., all of which had very different merits that were sufficiently apparent for their users to bet their lives on these diverse weapons. If nothing mattered but the hardness and density of the sword, I doubt such a variety of forms would exist.

For instance, with the edge, there's also the consideration of stiffness. A weak metal can only be honed to the point where the leading edge just has enough thickness to hold its shape. This is related to hardness of course, but it isn't exactly the same thing. If you have a metal stronger by volume, the angle of the leading edge can be shallower. Also, in transmitting the kinetic energy of the sword into the edge, there's a certain disadvantage to elasticity in that when the edge strikes and object, the body of the sword will actually flex somewhat, reducing the efficiency of energy transmitted into the blade, so stiffness would make a difference there as well.

As for an HRC 65 steel against a medieval blade...

Well, let's just say that sword-length pieces of steel like that tend to break when stressed.

Very much so - there's much more to it than density and hardness, but "tend to" isn't quite the same thing as "always does." The modern metallurgical solution is obviously to use a composite structure, which is exactly what's done with a lot of high-end cutting blades (and effectively what pattern welding does). Plus, I actually saw descriptions of steel swords made of alloys with HRC 65 on the net, so it's clearly far from impossible.

 

[S'mon]

What I do in my campaign - current world time period is ca 1500AD-tech (sans gunpowder). 2000 years ago the ancestors of the current people, the Old Imarran Empire, had tech roughly equivalent to 300 BC, they were using bronze for armour (mostly scalemail & breastplates), and iron for shortswords. These are all just as good in terms of damage and DC as modern equivalents. Since bronze is softer than steel the armour may be heavier, but generally not enough difference to worry about.
A PC IMC has a Fighter cohort, Larius, who's from this era, he's specialised with the Shortsword, which isn't optimal compared to the modern greatswords, but he can usually manage well enough.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

As an aside, has anybody ever thought the following about D&D metals?
Adamantine = titanium (very hard)
Mithril = aluminum (strong as steel but lighter)

Imo, and very roughly:-

Adamantium = tungsten/steel alloy
Mithril = titanium/steel alloy

Titanium is very light as well as very hard.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Well, I'm not sure that iron is that much more difficult to extract or process than both copper and tin so I'm not sure that it would be more expensive to anyone with access to the ore and the technology to make a hot enough fire to smelt it. Are there any other factors, other than the technology to make fires hot enough to smelt iron (involving a bellows or fuels other than wood) that make iron more expensive to exploit or use?

Caution: Here, I'm going beyond what I'm certain of and into the dreaded realms of what I "think":-

I believe that copper and tin are more easily obtained than iron if the main source of the ore is panning for it, because these metals are more common on the surface of the Earth whereas the iron is mostly inside. I believe that once you start actually mining, iron is the more easily obtained mineral.

I believe that the real difference between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age might be better described by replacing "Bronze Age" with "Panning Age" and "Iron Age" with "Mining Age."

But, I'll happily defer to someone more knowledgeable on this, because I quite literally heard it from a bloke in the pub. He seemed well-informed, but you never know...

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

But does that presuppose that the modern day has been wholy unable to improve upon what the ancients could do? That there's nothing better than maybe one day wholly recreating what the ancients had?

That's great for a Dark Ages style game, but that's not really what my preference is, nor can I believe it's universally shared otherwise.

First of all, let me say that this has been a simply amazing thread to read. I certainly have very little to add to the technical discussion.

In terms of genre, however, I think this position can be modified.

The reason why ancient artifacts are presumed to be better, true even in Indiana Jones BTW, is that it makes the actions of the adventurers positive in a very huge sense. That is that the recovery of such artifacts is directly contributing to the culture at hand. It is the most progress oriented depiction of technology within an adventure genre. It's not simply a Dark Ages approach it's true of almost every heavily progressing period. When Victorian and Pulp era adventurers go out they always find something better than what they brought with them. Where it isn't straight up tech it's the tech of the earth itself, strange minerals and herbs and such, or, in the case of Indiana, God tech.

When you portray the adventurer's technology as best, then the genre inevitably slips toward the decline. If it isn't of the civilization then it's of the adventurers in question. Thus the distinctly cyberpunkish ideal of most sci-fi military fiction and most military fiction in general. At the least you have a Clancy style situation where the emphasis shifts away from the men on the edge to the people at the hub of the education base.

There are sub-genre exceptions to this dynamic: super-heroic ones where the heroes are the personal and individual source of the tech and the star-trekish fleet style of adventuring where you make the tech on board. Both have their problems in terms of simulating the adventurer dynamic in that they are extremes of individualism and ego in the super-heroic and corporatism and super-ego on the other.

I'm not saying you can't bend genre, but that there is more at stake in the depiction of technology in the genre than simply an idea of history. It's part and parcel of the ideal of heroism and action being depicted.

Either way, it's certainly appropriate to give the dwarves a weird technology. Fits all of the above genres perfectly.

 

[John Morrow]

"Rapiers" were a relatively short-lived technology, and some archaeologists are even skeptical that were regularly used as weapons, proposing that the rapiers were more of an exaggerated status-symbol form of the more common dirk. They were definitely more thrusty than slashy, but as thrusting weapons go, they were not particularly advanced, and the form is thought to be a limitation of the casting technology. The whole evolution of the European leaf-bladed sword shows a general trend toward a slashing weapon.

I think you are looking at Northern European technology while I am looking at Mycenaean technology, where the technology progression was different. The Mycenaeans likely got their hacking swords from other parts of Europe late in the Bronze Age (it's a big part of Robert Drews' thesis in his book The End of the Bronze Age). But older Mycenaean burrials certainly have the "rapier" style blade and Mycenaean art does depict people using thrusting weapons, both spears and blades. For example:

http://www.hartzler.org/cc307/mycenaean/images/42.jpg (man using dagger on lion)
http://www.hartzler.org/cc307/mycenaean/images/45.jpg (battle scene in gold -- look at the middle figure with the long blade)
http://www.hartzler.org/cc307/mycenaean/images/61.jpg and http://www.hartzler.org/cc307/mycenaean/images/62.jpg (two battle scenes with barbarians from Tiryns)

All look like people stabbing with blades to me.

As for "relatively short-lived", how much time does that mean? The thrusting blades may have been used for hundreds of years before being replaced by the superior hacking Naue Type II in the Mediterranean area.

quotes Oakeshott: "Leaf-bladed cut-and-thrust swords were used all over Europe up to about 900 B.C. or later until 'the thrust is almost unused and swords are made just for cutting' [Oakeshott 1960:31]"

That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of bronze as a metal, though. It has to do with making the blade and handle a continuous piece of metal (rather than riveting the blade to the handle) so it could withstand hacking and the benefits of hacking over stabbing when trying to hit an opponent (mentioned in the article). My point is that they did seem to make long thrusting blades out of bronze use long bronze blades to thrust.

It may not be an overwhelming factor, but I'm thinking the basic limitation of stiffness makes bronze an unlikely choice for a thrusting weapon except as a head, like on a spear, or a very short weapon like a dirk.

the limitation of the stiffness of bronze also makes it a less than optimal choice for slashing weapons. As I pointed out, hit armor, bone, or opponent's weapon and you've got a bronze sword that's shaped like a boomerang. Basically, bronze is not an ideal metal for long thin things like swords that are going to get slammed into hard things. That's all they had, though, so they did use it for both long pointy blades and shorter hacking blades, both of which could become difficult to use after a blow or two.

I'm not disagreeing that bronze probably makes a better hacking sword than a thrusting sword. I'm simply pointing out that the Naue Type II and other hacking leaf-bladed swords appeared late in the Mycenaean period and were a technological advancement. Before that technological advancement, they did seem to use bronze for thrusting blades.

(Edit: Spelling)

 

[John Morrow]

Since I don't understand how you can divorce access to the ore and the more involved smelting from the extraction and processing expenses, I don't believe I can adequately answer your question.

What I meant was when you add up all the effort to get a copper ingot and a tin ingot and turn it into a bronze alloy, how does that add up to all of the effort needed to get an iron ingot. That I need to use a bellows on my fire to increase the temperature isn't a big increase in effort. How does panning compare to mining for return on time invested? How much extra effort is it to have to get two different metals together in the proper proportion to make bronze? And so on?

In other words, does it really take more man-hours to get workable iron than workable bronze assuming that the ores for each are readily available?