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<blockquote data-quote="ephemeron" data-source="post: 6335412" data-attributes="member: 21477">I could totally see orcs lagging behind the other races in metallurgy. Maybe orcish champions can be recognized by the armor and weapons they took as trophies from more &quot;advanced&quot; enemies and now use, or maybe the strongest orcs scorn better tools and proudly wield even more primitive equipment than the rank and file.Historically speaking, the Iron Age already means the use of steel, because the technique of case-hardening -- converting the outer layer of an iron object into steel -- was the key to making iron weapons that held an edge better than bronze.The technologies of iron smelting and case hardening seem to go back to about the 10th century BCE and to have started in Anatolia and spread out from there, with hints of earlier invention in a few other places. (There's a theory that the Mycenaean Greeks, together with several other Bronze Age civilizations that seem to have collapsed about the same time, were overrun by iron-using invaders -- that could be a model for technologically-superior orcs!)<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery" target="_blank">Bloomeries </a>were the first type of iron smelter and weren't superseded until the 14th century CE(!), when the blast furnace was invented. And after that, it wasn't until 1855 when the Bessemer process made mass conversion of iron into steel practical.The relatively slow progress of this aspect of metallurgy means that you can basically do what you want and claim it is inspired by history. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="ephemeron, post: 6335412, member: 21477"] I could totally see orcs lagging behind the other races in metallurgy. Maybe orcish champions can be recognized by the armor and weapons they took as trophies from more "advanced" enemies and now use, or maybe the strongest orcs scorn better tools and proudly wield even more primitive equipment than the rank and file. Historically speaking, the Iron Age already means the use of steel, because the technique of case-hardening -- converting the outer layer of an iron object into steel -- was the key to making iron weapons that held an edge better than bronze. The technologies of iron smelting and case hardening seem to go back to about the 10th century BCE and to have started in Anatolia and spread out from there, with hints of earlier invention in a few other places. (There's a theory that the Mycenaean Greeks, together with several other Bronze Age civilizations that seem to have collapsed about the same time, were overrun by iron-using invaders -- that could be a model for technologically-[I]superior [/I]orcs!) [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery"]Bloomeries [/URL]were the first type of iron smelter and weren't superseded until the 14th century CE(!), when the blast furnace was invented. And after that, it wasn't until 1855 when the Bessemer process made mass conversion of iron into steel practical. The relatively slow progress of this aspect of metallurgy means that you can basically do what you want and claim it is inspired by history. :) [/QUOTE]

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