Make bronze makeable

[rklenseth]

I don't really care if it is a realilistic recipe or not. Cantr would be better off with a simpler recipe. Copper and tin are both somewhat rare, throw in the need to aquire a fuel to smelt it and it is still an unaccessable alloy to the majority of Cantrians, but it might be just the thing to help kickstart a few interesting mountain civilizations which use all sorts of alternative technology.

But the problem is that the original intention for Bronze was to be an inferior metal to Iron and Steel so Bronze either has to be made easier or Iron and Steel harder. I don't think solving the problem would be the latter so what can be done to solve this problem? Here are a few of my solutions...

1. Take out the rarer resource (phosophorus) in Bronze making
2. Add more phosophorus throughout Cantr as an available resource (thus making rare no more as well as there are other industrial uses for the stuff)


Those are the solutions that have been tossed around in the past but the 2nd solution is out of Resources hands (that is a Jos only decision from my past experience on the Cantr Staff).

[Piscator]

I think you should take the zinc out of the recipe, too. Before Cantr I had never heard that it is used for bronze.

[formerly known as hf]

Phosphor is necessary for producing a tin alloy

Do you have any details? For what exactly and in which form do you need it? .

It acts as the reducing agent.

An ore isn't a pure metal - it's usually oxidised (chemically combined with oxygen)
Another agent is required to 'reduce' (chemical term) and turn an oxidised ore to a pure metal.

Phosphor acts as the reducing agent for tin ore. But can be found in charcoal. It would also, theoretically, be possible with bone ash (for the purposes of Cantr where smelting is multi-fuel).

And there I was, thinking my A-Level chemistry would never be of any use...

[Piscator]

I would like to see how you reduce something with phosphates (bone ash). And I also can hardly imagine that you use elemental phosphorus as a reducing agent in the process. Not if you have carbon available. It would be quite hard to reduce 100g of raw material with 1 g of phosporus also.

[formerly known as hf]

I said theoretically(ish)

And, no, the element wouldn't be used as the reducing agent - hence my initial comment, ages ago, which said having the element as a requirement was plain silly (that, and the fact that it was unobtainable...)

[Jos Elkink]

Haven't read the above discussion, but didn't we make bronze something interesting to discover on the new islands ... or are we again going to make it available to everyone? We keep doing that - when are we really going to get intercontinental trade?

[the_antisocial_hermit]

I'm not sure it's possible to make bronze easily on other islands... I have a char that I was going to have make bronze, because she found a map (and iron was not readily available, so I thought, 'oooh that would be so cool to make just to make it and have a char that uses bronze!') and most of the things she needed seemed to be around, not really close, but feasibly worth the distance; then I found out one or two resources that were not anywhere on the map, and probably not close enough to make it worth the work. Thus ended her search and my excitement over trying out something new.

[formerly known as hf]

But bronze is worse than steel.
And steel has Cantrian decades of trade development.

Bronze would only be useful in a few areas - and those areas would have no links for intercontinental trade.
So why would bronze be a catalyst for intercontinental trade if no one wants it?

I think the fact that 0g of bronze has ever been created in the months it has been available is all that is needed to say that it has not encouraged trade...

Intercontinental trade may well flourish - but only if there are important gains. Intrigue in new locaions and interesting, but almost usless, new resources will only provide very limited impetus.

If you were to make alluminium (example) as important as it should be - and include it as a requirement in adavnced machinery and vehicles - and make the resoucres spread over continents - you would quickly see a trade in the resources develop...

[Marian]

I agree with what pretty much everyone else, said, you should take out the need for phosporous and zinc. If it was just copper and tin, one of my chars would be making lots of bronze right now.

(And why not make it easier? everything else is simplified...otherwise why not require water and yeast to make bread, and don't let yeast ever be found on any island with wheat )

And I don't think there's ever going to be intercontinental trade for bronze ingredients, because any place developed enough to have that level of trade in the first place is already going to have iron and steel. The only way people will ever make bronze is if its a reasonable alternative...either easier to make then iron, or at the very least at an equal difficulty.

[Marian]

Well it won't let me edit my post, but I was just going to add that I agreed with hf. I don't know about aluminum, but it's most likely that you're going to see trade between islands when you're dealing with something that highly advanced towns want (highly advanced meaning after the iron age), but don't have a good alternative for.

So if there are places that don't have timber, or rubber or diamonds or whatever, you'd probably see it there once they got to the technology level where they needed it.

[rklenseth]

Haven't read the above discussion, but didn't we make bronze something interesting to discover on the new islands ... or are we again going to make it available to everyone? We keep doing that - when are we really going to get intercontinental trade?

The original plan for bronze (at least from my mind) was to be a new type of metal easier to make than iron and steel but a bit better than anything wood. It was more for balance purposes than for newer islands. I think we (meaning those Resource Department member before the current lot) were planning on making osidibian the other type of metal that could be found on other islands. We just never got anywhere with that since we got distracted easily to other projects.

[Nosajimiki]

there is ofcourse another problem with intercontinintal trade which is that very few places have detailed info on what is on other islands. I know a place on treefeather that would pay a kings ransom for timber... but IC, no one knows that timber exists on the other continant b/c no one has ever seen a map from there ... they just don't know how to get it.

[MrPenguin589]

I think there should be two main types of metals in Cantr. We have steel, and we need another, but the other needs to be about equal to steel, but with slightly different properties.
For example, we could make bronze slightly less powerful than steel, but have it so that it doesn't decay as quickly.
Or have it so that you can make things with it quicker.
There has to be a reason to have bronze. Right now, nobody wants it because it's worse than steel and harder to make.
If it were a rival to steel in some way, and it were about as easy to make, then it might become mainstream.
And if you made it only availible on one island (like K-Island, for example) then others might hear about it IC and want it.
So yeah, that's my input on the subject.

[wichita]

I think there should be two main types of metals in Cantr. We have steel, and we need another, but the other needs to be about equal to steel, but with slightly different properties.

Sounds like iron.

[Frits]

If islands and areas don't differ from each other there's hardly a need for (intercontinental) trade. If you can't make your iron with propane then you use coal instead, it sure beats sailing for x years to get gas. Unless a town is really well organised and i haven't seen this happen or else it doesn't last for very long.
Iron maybe is the poorest example cos every char depends on it so much. Cloth would work very well but is of much lesser value. If you take the realistic viewpoint and compare with earth there are many examples. Silk only in east Asia or cotton, found in the subtropics and potatoes were growing somewhere in the Caribean, today potatoes are grown all over the globe. Many different kinds of trees exist, some are good for building, other kinds for burning, those are some of the typical ingredients that made all the cultures that so prominently existed over time.

Actually i think that's all in the past due to the penetration of television.