Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cleon" data-source="post: 6064869" data-attributes="member: 57383">Yup.There's also the question of how much of that 1300 pounds of iron they can extract from the ton of ore.Cimmeria is hardly at the cutting edge of Hybornian technology, so I'm thinking they would be using some kind of <a href="http://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Bloomery.html" target="_blank">Bloomery Furnace</a> to do the smelting. I can imagine more sophisticated states like Vendhya or Khitai might have some kind of blast furnace, considering how much steel they seem to use, but that seem unlikely for the "barbarous" north.Given good ore, a bloomery furnace yields <a href="http://warehamforgeblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/realistic-yields-for-bloomery-furnaces.html" target="_blank">25-50% of the ore's weight</a> in iron. So that ton of ore is probably 600-750 pounds of iron ingots/bars once they've finished smelting it. The rest of the iron being lost in the slag.So, would six or seven hundredweight of iron be enough for them? It depends what they're using it for. If they're saving it for armour, weapons and essential tools like knives or axeheads, plus maybe the occasional elite item like a cauldron for feast days, I reckon it might be enough if they get that much every year, assuming they recycle iron from previous shipments and it's not that big a settlement. If they're using it for everyday stuff like horseshoes, door hinges,  manacles to hold prisoners and so on they'd definitely need multiple  tons of ore per year.600-750 pounds is about enough iron to equip, say, thirty warriors with a sword or  axe (2 lbs), iron helm (4 lbs) and a coat of mail (15 lbs of iron? -  they weigh more than that, but a lot of its padding). Such items could last for years if looked after, so after a decade they could amass enough iron to equip 300 warriors - which might be the entire adult population of the village.You said they're exporting finished metal trade goods (e.g. weapons), so I'm thinking you would be safer making it more than one ton a year.</blockquote>

Verification