12-13-2011, 01:45 PM | #11 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [LT] Iron and Steel Armor
Quote:
I'm of the opinion that "cold iron" is just a poetic epithet for iron, like "the red blood poured on the ground" or "he drank the sweet wine" or "they faced bitter death." (Or "rosy-fingered Dawn," for the classical trope.) You can see it used that way in Kipling's ballad "Cold Iron": the prototype of cold iron was the nails driven through Christ's hands and feet, and the Roman army didn't use rare meteoric iron for that sort of job. All iron is cold iron. Then modern people who didn't grasp the nature of poetic language in an oral literary tradition started reading the older literature and making up bizarre theories about what the epithets meant. But whether I'm right or wrong, the mere fact that there are opinions as divergent as mine and the "meteoric iron" theory shows that "cold iron" doesn't mean anything unequivocal and doesn't define a proper limitation. Time to make them be specific. Bill Stoddard |
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12-13-2011, 03:19 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
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Re: [LT] Iron and Steel Armor
Heck, I'm inclined to be literal minded at people, and would cheerfully turn that into "iron below 10 degrees Celsius" (or possibly 0 Celsius, the freezing point of water for folks on other systems)
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12-13-2011, 03:23 PM | #13 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [LT] Iron and Steel Armor
Quote:
Bill Stoddard |
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12-13-2011, 03:41 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [LT] Iron and Steel Armor
Because the path from literalism to calling something so hot it glows 'cold' is a rather confusing one?
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12-13-2011, 03:57 PM | #15 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [LT] Iron and Steel Armor
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12-13-2011, 04:02 PM | #16 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: [LT] Iron and Steel Armor
Because there's another transition at the Curie point (770C = 1418 F) that's much more plausible than that. After all that's where iron gains its magical property of magnetic attraction.
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-- MA Lloyd |
12-13-2011, 04:04 PM | #17 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: [LT] Iron and Steel Armor
Quote:
I've come to think the closest it comes to a clear distinction is it's iron if the guys making it reduced it from ore, and steel if they remelted it and/or added something to it on purpose. Even that has exceptions, but its much closer than most other versions based on chemistry nobody naming the various classes of products had any idea about.
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-- MA Lloyd |
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12-13-2011, 04:26 PM | #18 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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Re: [LT] Iron and Steel Armor
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12-13-2011, 04:31 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [LT] Iron and Steel Armor
Quote:
Bill Stoddard |
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12-13-2011, 04:33 PM | #20 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: [LT] Iron and Steel Armor
Nah, he just needs a frequency of occurrence, I don't need to know what something is to have it come up in a game. Particularly interesting if they took it with different frequency. "Sorry, Bob, apparently this guy's bullets count as cold iron for you. Jim, you're in luck, they don't fit your definition".
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Tags |
armor, low-tech |
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