Talk:Adamantine

A few questions: If it's so heavy that a sword made out of it would be as heavy as a house, why do people want it? What use is it? And how do people suggest using it to harvest ironroot if you couldn't actually make any useful harvesting tools out of it? --Idran 12:08, 8 February 2007 (PST)

Sounds like humans and other reasonably strengthed races are looking into the question of how to actually -use- the metal, one area of exploration being alloys. I imagine there are other races with strength enough to use it, though--dragons come to mind, griffons, orks, etc.

I also think that one possibility is to just lower the scale: make knives or other hand weapons. It'd be silly for a dragon to fly around with a sword in hand, but a sort of thing that slips over the hand with metal claws on it, that'd be another thing.

There's enchantment as a possibility--to make the metal lighter--but that's cheap. Or you could find a way to make the weapon sentient and--wait for it--pull around it's own weight.

My Q is this: are we talking the average Gaeran-/Doman-sized house (which begs the question, how large is that?) or the average real-world house (which, really, begs the same question--I'm imagining a 3-room ranch).

--Dia 16:05, 8 February 2007 (PST)

I'm thinking of something along the lines of a single story, 2 bedroom house made of wood. And the use of Adamantine is that nobody really knows what its use is. Unlike the other metals, there's not a lot of samples of it, and what little they do have they haven't done anything with it. It's been theorized that an alloy of it would be usable, so that's the current plan among smiths. While having an adamantine sword would be sweet for chopping down buildings, they're far from actually processing enough of it to use.

The part about Ironroot is a misnomer, I'll edit that.

-- Adam

If one found a way to cut it, I can see it being used as decoration, a la jewels or inlays. It's rare, heavy, hard--at current, almost totally impractical--thus precious! (Think platinum rings).

Take a look at some marquisite; when I first encountered jewelery set with marquisite, I thought from its color that it was a metal. It's actually pyrite (fool's gold, FeS2), but the imagery has stayed with me. It's this type of stuff that occurs to me when thinking of the above. (If you want to search for images of the cut stone, you can also search the spelling marcasite; marcasite is a mineral of FeS2 which crumbles too easily for jewelery, but the spelling is so similar I imagine there's jewelery listed under it.)

The ability to cut adamantine may be a lost technology--there might be, say, a polished facet of the stone somewhere, or an over-sized sword (all the more frustrating for its near-uselessness). --Dia 17:32, 8 February 2007 (PST)

If all you need for something to be precious enough for it to be considered jewelry-worthy is for it to be rare, heavy, and hard, how come no one's made jewelry out of osmium or iridium?

That aside, I can see why some people would want it, but if the only reason it's so clamored for is so that people can find a use, I don't see it being anywhere near as popular as this page seems to suggest. A curiosity to some smiths, sure, but not something so sought after that people will be willing to pay any price you'd wish to set. What if it turned out to be entirely useless, where would they be then?

If that did turn out to be true, though, that'd be awesome; you don't see enough things that "people are theorizing" about turn out to be utterly false. :D --Idran 00:47, 9 February 2007 (PST)