Quote:
Originally Posted by John_A_Tallon
I invite you to refer to the journal article. Demetriou et al didn't phrase things in such a pat way. That was all me, based on the information they provided in their article and existing data on RHA. And as I stated, this is a fictional version of an alloy with only a limited amount of published data. I rounded up the DR numbers to make the material an interesting choice for inventor characters and GMs.
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The real reason you should mostly ignore such numbers is perhaps a bit subtle.
Hardness or rupture energy or whatever values for exotic new materials are almost always either calculated, or reported for very small samples. Values in the literature for steel are almost always measured for bulk samples. Why does that matter? Because the real world numbers for actual materials account for stuff like imperfections, cracks and scratches. If you use the same kinds of calculated or too small a diameter to be cracked numbers as is typical for new materials, you can easily conclude steel is 5 or 10 times stronger than steel.