NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 8369223" data-attributes="member: 50987">Did someone ask an engineering question?  Civil engineer here to help!Let's see.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A goldpiece is approximately 1/50 of a pound, so 1 million GP is about 20,000 pounds, or 100 tons of gold.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In an average gold mine, you get one ounce of gold from 1 ton of gold ore.  Some ores are richer than others, but this is a good baseline.  So to get 100 tons of gold, you would need to dig and process 3.2 million tons of ore.  Ooof.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It takes about 10-20 years to construct a mine: dig the shafts, lay in the tracks, build the smelters, lay the water pipes, etc.  Once the mine has been constructed, they can begin extracting ore.  But let's assume the dwarves already have the mine, and it's already in operation.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">More people doesn't necessarily mean more ore: only so many workers can fit in a mine tunnel at the same time.  Adding more tunnels won't necessarily help, unless there are more ore veins to follow.  (This is one of the reasons why modern gold mines are usually strip-mines.  More room to work, safer, easier to construct...)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Modern equipment (explosives, power drills, bulldozers, diesel-powered ore hoppers, front-end loaders...) can dig and process about 50,000 to 100,000 tons of ore per day.  I don't have numbers for manually digging through rock with pickaxes and shovels, but I imagine it would be much, much slower (pick your favorite number here; I'd estimate 5-10 tons per day.)  But let's say your dwarves have the D&D equivalent of heavy equipment: magical pickaxes, steam engines, golems, etc., and let's wave our hands and call it 20k tons per day.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Once the ore has been dug, it needs to be processed.  A modern ore processing facility can process about 7,000 tons of ore per day, using cyanidic acid baths and such.  I don't have numbers for smelting, but I imagine it would be much slower as well.  So let's again assume that the dwarves have the D&D equivalent of modern chemistry and metallurgy (magic furnaces, alchemical baths, etc.) and call it 3,500 tons of ore per day.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">SO:  to dig 3.2 million tons of ore, your dwarves would need 160 days, or just over 5 months (not counting the 10-20 years needed to build the mine in the first place.)  But it takes much longer to process 3.2 million tons of ore into gold:  at 3500 tons per day, they would need 9,15 days, or about 2.5 years.  In 201 years, that mine would produce about 80 million gold pieces. </li> </ul>Hope this helps!EDIT: Corrected an embarrassing math error.</blockquote>

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