Making a black blade

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Which turn out to have their own problems in terms of practical manufacture.

None that will interfere meaningfully with using it in a blunderbuss or shotgun (which are the most likely firearms to use improvised bullets in), and it shouldn't be that difficult with other weapons.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

And arrowheads?

Far as I know, the entire concept of silver weapons against werewolves is post-firearms.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Anthony

You can also have a non-metal blade, though all such options tend to be inferior weapons. A wooden blade made of ebony will certainly fit the look, though, as will an obsidian blade,

Obsidian would make a nasty blade from the POV of the other guy, though, ISTM. Yeah, inferior to steel for most purposes, but wouldn't it tend to make nasty, hard-to-treat wounds? And am I wrong in thinking that it might tend to leave flakes or shards behind in the flesh?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

If you fold steel more than around 15 times it loses all benefits of the process since the hard and soft layers effectively become one homogenous material.

If you try this on most metals, nothing happens, though copper alloys will probably work harden and shatter somewhere during the attempt.

It's amazing how magical people think this process is. And you *want* homogenous in the steel, that's what the process is for. Folding basically is a method developed to convert really *lousy* steel full of slag into something that wouldn't break on the first hit. The reason it's a pretty much purely a Japanese process was that smiths elsewhere could get decent steel to begin with....

Good blade properties do vary from point to point on the blade, but mostly as smooth function of position relative to the edge, not in alternating layers through the bulk material. Mostly it's final treatment stuff - case hardening and differential quenching.

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Quicksilver is mercury not silver.

Peter didn't say it was. He said that Quick-Silver was the name for a specific enchanted sword made of silver.


Hans

[Ed the Coastie]

Well, since it's a medieval setting, I doubt that laser-treating the blade will be an option. (Unless you decide that the sword was crafted by an ultratech race of Ancients...) But what about electroplating the sword with melaconite?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen

Peter didn't say it was. He said that Quick-Silver was the name for a specific enchanted sword made of silver.


Hans

He said the silver item was appropriately named quicksilver. Only a mercury item would appropriately named that. A silver item named that would be so only metaphorically or jokingly.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

He said the silver item was appropriately named quicksilver. Only a mercury item would appropriately named that. A silver item named that would be so only metaphorically or jokingly.

It's named because it is made of silver and is Enchanted to be quick. I don't actually know what the Irish called the sword in Gaelic, but I've translated the name of the sword as Quick-Silver.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by malloyd

It's amazing how magical people think this process is. And you *want* homogenous in the steel, that's what the process is for. Folding basically is a method developed to convert really *lousy* steel full of slag into something that wouldn't break on the first hit. The reason it's a pretty much purely a Japanese process was that smiths elsewhere could get decent steel to begin with....

No. Go back to the early medieval period, or the Viking Age, and you'd find pattern-welding. Exactly because they couldn't get decent steel to begin with, and for mostly (if not completely) the same reasons as the Japanees re-folding technique.

That's actully an issue in my Ärth setting. A bunch of mainly Irish smiths are starting to figure out metallurgy, so that they can create consistently good steel (game-mechanically, they turn iron ore and charcoal into Steel or even Advanced Steel, instead of into Iron) and so won't need to do pattern-welding, but may still do a less labour-intensive version of it, because it's expected and because it makes the blade look pretty.

(For that matter Quick-Silver, the Enchanted silver sword, may well have been pattern-welded out of two deliberately different alloys of silver, just to get the "snake blade" pattern effect. It wasn't, because the goal was maximum shininess, but assuming silver can be made into bars and then pattern-welded, it'd have been doable and as far as I know would have produced the visual look.)

In RPG terms, re-folding and pattern welding achieve the same, but re-folding should probably be more labour-intensive, and might tend to produce better results (bigger plus than p.w.), and is a better candidate for requiring some kind of special-technique binary ability, similar to the Perks in GURPS Low-Tech/LTC, or the analogous Lores in Sagatafl, whereas anyone with sufficient weapon-smithing skill (and in GURPS also at the appropriate /TL) can be expected to know how to pattern-weld a blade.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

It's named because it is made of silver and is Enchanted to be quick. I don't actually know what the Irish called the sword in Gaelic, but I've translated the name of the sword as Quick-Silver.

The flaw, if we must have one, is that pun exists in English. Less likely that it's so in Gaelic -- but I don't speak it.

How about Danish? Is the name for "mercury" composed of words for "fast" and "silver"?

My dictionary tells me the English word actually goes back to Old English "cwicu" (alive) and "soelfer", citing a translation from Latin "argentum vivum". Interestingly, this is the sense of "quick" as "alive", as in "the quick and the dead". It'd be a good name for a dancing sword, too.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

The flaw, if we must have one, is that pun exists in English. Less likely that it's so in Gaelic -- but I don't speak it.

How about Danish? Is the name for "mercury" composed of words for "fast" and "silver"?

It is in Sweden. "Quick" means "swift".