04-23-2014, 03:11 PM | #11 | |
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Athens, GA
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Re: Writing up metallurgy for a campaign
Is this realistic fantasy? It would be interesting to create a variety of fantastic material with different properties...
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04-23-2014, 03:23 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Vermont
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Re: Writing up metallurgy for a campaign
For fantasy, I wouldn't worry too much about the minutia of how much DR or HP a bar of different metals has.
What matters is: who does equipment made of this material differ from equipment made of the standard material (especially weapons and armor). This is a much simpler enterprise. FREX: Treat Bronze as Steel, except CF 5. Mythril weapons never break and weigh 1/2 as much CF 100. Mythril Armor has +4 DR and 1/2 Weight for CF 100, or can be made thicker: +8 DR, full Weight, -1 DX, CF 200. Etc... Only very rarely will you have to determine how difficult it is for your adamantium axe to cut through the mythril bars of a jail cell. In those situations, just make something up.
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04-25-2014, 09:10 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: Writing up metallurgy for a campaign
As a cheat, you can always use the stats for high tech materials and just call them by different names.
GURPS Low Tech, GURPS Fantasy and some of the Dungeon Fantasy books have material you can mine - so to speak. |
04-30-2014, 10:40 AM | #14 | |||
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: Odense, Denmark (Northern Europe)
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Re: Writing up metallurgy for a campaign
Long time without me having time to check back in here. Okay, some thoughts.
See, this is the question I'm trying to figure out myself. How does GURPS define "strength" in relation to DR/inch? Quote:
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And yeah, it's very interesting to create a host of fantasy metals. Where does your quote come from? I didn't find anything of particular use in Low Tech. I haven't had the patience to figure which one(s) of the DF books I could potentially use (there's like a million of them). Fantasy actually didn't occur to me, I'll have a look. If you can guide me to which ones of these books (and maybe also chapters/pages), it would be fantastic.
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04-30-2014, 02:01 PM | #15 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Writing up metallurgy for a campaign
GURPS does not define "strength" in that context. It defines DR as resistance to penetration by projectiles, and scales it so that RHA steel has DR 70/inch and other materials have strength in proportion. Some people find the proportion by research and others make it up.
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04-30-2014, 02:57 PM | #16 |
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Re: Writing up metallurgy for a campaign
The problem--or, at any rate, a problem--is that I suspect that you're after a formula which is far beyond the scope not just of GURPS but of just about anyone who isn't a technical specialist. As I understand it, RHA-equivalent is sort of the yardstick for discussing modern armor, so people who come to GURPS with real-world armor stats expressed in RHAe can come up with an equivalent DR. However, coming up with an RHAe for something is what scientists call Very Difficult, and doing the massive work involved is the realm of materials engineers with government grants. So GURPS authors don't have a method for determining DR beyond:
1) If there's a published RHAe for the material/item, use that. 2) If not (which is probably universally the case for anything historical), make something up that looks good. At any rate, even if you were to come up with RHAe values for a range of the sorts of alloys one finds historically, the inability of ancient smiths to precisely control their materials and manufacturing conditions puts some significant error bars of the quality of what they make from batch to batch. So you'd end up having to track a list of "Platonic ideal" materials and how close any given smith got to that on any given batch of material while smelting and alloying and the extent to which a later smith, making an item from that batch of metal, changed it. Oh, and without sophisticated testing technology, neither the smith nor his customers will be able to tell the difference with much more granularity than "this is junk," "this is OK," and "this is pretty good."
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05-02-2014, 05:00 AM | #17 | |||
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: Odense, Denmark (Northern Europe)
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Re: Writing up metallurgy for a campaign
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05-02-2014, 07:10 AM | #18 |
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
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Re: Writing up metallurgy for a campaign
Low-Tech assumed that a 1mm breastplate of RHA equivalent steel was DR 3 and that every +0.5mm granted an extra +1 DR. Bronze was exactly the same except that it cost more. Hardened steel added a flat +1 DR. The problem is that the DR includes the fact that breastplates have a deflective component that used to be PD in the old GURPS. The DR also incorporates some light underpadding that isn't thick enough to be DR 1 on its own. This seems to work ok at breastplate thicknesses but not at vehicle plate thicknesses. You have to use some variant of Douglas' "Armor as Dice" mechanics for those.
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05-03-2014, 01:48 AM | #19 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Writing up metallurgy for a campaign
As I said, armour equivalent to 1” of RHA has DR 70. Armour equivalent to twice or half that thickness has twice or half the DR. Projectile damage scales roughly with the square root of kinetic energy divided by diameter, and the DR of a flat plate scales roughly with thickness. (It seems that things get more complicated at very high velocities and high energies, but this works well enough for bullets and arrows).
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fantasy, metal, stats, worldbuilding |
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