Cantr II Discussion Forum

Nosajimiki wrote:REALLLLY SLOW.... , anyway I'm for the simplification method. Looking at some maps I see a few places on the old islands where bronze would likely become popular if it were only copper and tin... because that's about all that is there. Since these places are probably still kindof primitive being in the mountains, I think bronze weapons would be befiting. I'd also like to see bronze shields.

I DO agree.

Wilmer B.

lol everyone would hate if this happened but heres an idea, instead of making bronze easier to get make iron and steel harder to get, bronze should of came before iron anyways, but so many people would have a fit if suddenly bronze was more econmical than iron and steel.

Bronze will never be accepted as long as iron and steel are easier to make and more abundent in the cantr world simply put, we should either a. historicaly correct the mistake by making bronze easier and more econmical to make than iron and steel or b. since we already messed up make bronze more useful and stronger than iron and steel.

as to option b. we could prolly just rename in entierly, this is Cantr not the real world, things arnt the same, this bronze could be a new metal with many more uses than we imagin just becuase it not realy bronze, think of it as cantr's first exotic metal that could be found only on cantr.

ive said my peice, ya i know your all gonna jump on this like a pack of wild animals but somone should stand up and speak logicly (in a made up world thats not easy)

ps: ingore the typos its 3 am here and im tired.

No no no! Bronze is a good alternative for stone tools. Should be as easy as possible to make. Iron is difficult enough

I don't see why bronze should need more than copper and tin ore and a little charcoal. I wonder who had the idea with the zinc and phosphorus in the first place. I can't imagine Bronze Age people added these elements to their alloys, I think they did't even know them.

Piscator wrote:I don't see why bronze should need more than copper and tin ore and a little charcoal. I wonder who had the idea with the zinc and phosphorus in the first place. I can't imagine Bronze Age people added these elements to their alloys, I think they did't even know them.

I don't know who had the idea in RD but phosphate ores (as opposed to the element phosphorus) have always been a critical catalyst in the creation of tin from the main tin ore casserite - The whole ancient bronze smelting process relied heavily on this and no ancient bronze could be produced without it since there was no way to produce tin without using some phosphates . Zinc whilst not essential does produce a more durable and harder bronze than basic copper tin mixes .

Where did you read that phosphates are necessary for producing tin? I looked around a bit and noone seems to mention it.
If we really need the phosphates, why don't we use bone ash. Should be quite easy to aquire.

If phosphate ores are the same thing as what you get from bone ash then... the correct choice would be limestone. As it is for all the other smelting/refining projects. IRL primivite iron production didn't always have limestone, so they used animal bones. Which we have tons of in Cantr. I proposed a middle-stage-filter that would be made of.. was it clay and timber? Or something... Anyway, it kinda got burried in there. We wouldn't really need a project that bad, but what we should have is replacing limestone with ground bones either fully or partially.

The main problem is that Cantrians deal with everything in grams. Someone from bronze age wouldn't be adding a gram of this and a gram of that, they would put whole layers of tens of kilos of material in the smelter, and the smelting process might take days, or at least one day. At least for iron. I'm not very familiar with bronze smelting.

http://www.unr.edu/sb204/geology/rome.html

Piscator wrote:Where did you read that phosphates are necessary for producing tin? I looked around a bit and noone seems to mention it.
If we really need the phosphates, why don't we use bone ash. Should be quite easy to aquire.

It's something I thought I knew - but could be mistaken

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/940106/tin.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelting
http://www.neo-tech.com/businessmen/part3.html

Some more links. Anyway, a person would just take a stone of a certain colour if they had been leaking metal earlier.

I don't think you could substitute limestone with bone ash, but you could use seashells instead. They are mainly composed of calcium carbonate, too. Bone ash could be used as a fertilizer or to manufacture porcelain.

I mentioned before that phosphorous is not required as an additional, seperate 'ingredient'

Phosphor is necessary for producing a tin alloy - the kind introduced into Cantr. But charcoal would have traditionally provided the reducing agent.

There is no damned way ancient civilisations would have extracted phosphor as a seperate element to include in the smelting process. I'm not even sure that it is seperated in modern phosphor bronze processes?

Phosphor is necessary for producing a tin alloy

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

formerly known as hf wrote:I mentioned before that phosphorous is not required as an additional, seperate 'ingredient'

Phosphor is necessary for producing a tin alloy - the kind introduced into Cantr. But charcoal would have traditionally provided the reducing agent.

There is no damned way ancient civilisations would have extracted phosphor as a seperate element to include in the smelting process. I'm not even sure that it is seperated in modern phosphor bronze processes?

And I mentioned that it should be removed since it is barely a part of the process and can probably be ignored but for some reason it hasn't been done yet. This would be easy to fix for the resource department but since I'm not in the department anymore I'm not sure what they're hung up on in this discussion.

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.

Using my personal scale for rating the rarity of substances (with categories of Ultra Common, Common, Uncommon, Scarce, Rare, Exotic, and Ultra Rare), I see that phosphorus is rare, copper is scarce, and both zinc and tin are uncommon. I agree that it is too hard to manufacture bronze at the moment, but no consensus about how to properly change that has been achieved within the RD (it has admittedly been on the backburner though).