Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
Well, part of that is because the cost of steel per pound falls sharply between TL3 and TL5, thanks to the shift in metallurgical techniques. But also, I was looking not at cost as the limiting factor, but at weight.
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My point was that if one is looking for a relative value of energy storage density (energy per unit weight), my cost table was derived by normalizing energy storage density times a constant that made a reference "normal" bow cost exactly the same as the bow in the
Basic Set. So for comparison, looking at my cost numbers is looking at how much energy a given bow staff can store given constant weight. Fiberglass and carbon fiber, as examples, are monstrously efficient at it. Steels? Not so much. Horn and sinew, surprisingly so, and really good for bow due to their surprising values of max strain.
Of course, all of that is in the article, either explicitly or in the equations.