[LT] Iron and Steel Armor

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Fwibos

I couldn't find the answer wilst searching this thread or others.

The doubling should be taken as referring to basic set armor, not low tech. This comes up again and again; try this thread.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Fwibos

A friend is running a game where the tech level is a little Janky. It's tech level 4+1, essentially. In high tech, it says that steel doubles the DR for armor at Low-Tech's weight or keeps LT's DR at 50% less cost and weight.

No, it says steel doubles the DR for armor at the Basic Set's weight.
That rule was for use with the Basic Set armor - Low Tech was naught but a twinkle in various authors eyes at that point.

[gruundehn]

On the "cold iron" part, IIRC historically cold iron was unforged iron. You could make something from iron ore without having to run it through a forge. How it was done, I do not know but I remember reading about it.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

On the "cold iron" part, IIRC historically cold iron was unforged iron.

You don't. No-one knows for sure exactly what 'cold iron' refers to; it may just be an epithet.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

You don't. No-one knows for sure exactly what 'cold iron' refers to; it may just be an epithet.

For example, many people in sf fandom have heard Rudyard Kipling's poem "Cold Iron," an emulation of a medieval ballad. Now, in the first place, Kipling say "iron, cold iron is master of them all"—referring to it first just as iron, and only then as cold iron, which suggests that he is using "cold" as an epithet for iron generally and not as a special kind of iron. In the second place, Kipling contrasts "cold iron" not with "hot iron" or "steel" or other ferrous materials, but with other metals entirely:

Gold is for the mistress—silver for the maid—
Copper for the craftsman cunning in his trade.

If "cold iron" were a special form of iron, then the natural choice would be to list the non-cold forms of iron contrastively. And finally, in the ballad, we read of "cold iron" as the material of which cannonballs are made, and later of which the nails that pierced Christ's hands and feet were made. None of those things can reasonably be supposed to have been made of some special rare ferrous alloy created through an exotic and little-known process; therefore Kipling was not referring to such an alloy.

Given how many sf and fantasy writers were influenced by Kipling, I expect that the phrase "cold iron" spread out in substantial part from that source; and that later, readers who weren't well informed about poetic language, or who didn't know the original source, or people who had just heard the phrase, made up the "exotic form of iron" theory to try to make sense out of it.

This is reinforced for me by the fact that I've heard several different theories of what "cold iron" is supposed to be. . . .

Bill Stoddard

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Anthony

You don't. No-one knows for sure exactly what 'cold iron' refers to; it may just be an epithet.

It's probably not even historical. I've never heard anybody produce an example from before Ben Jonson, where of course it's a poetic term. The first few technical paper I see using it on Google Ngrams use it quite conventionally, for a piece of iron that's cold - indeed they mostly seem to be interesting in how it heats up from friction or hammering.

[Anthony]

Also, the phrase 'cold steel' is quite common (similar to cold iron) and pretty clearly just refers to steel (and, oddly, is used to refer to the steel used in flint and steel; I guess a firestarter can still be cold...) My general assumption is that iron and steel are 'cold' because chunks of metal feel cold, and iron and steel are the types of metal people were most likely to encounter in large chunks. For that matter, there's the wonderful phrase 'cold, hard cash', which presumably refers to metal currency.

[DanHoward]

Yep. It is just an epithet.

[blacksmith]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Worse, start a supers campaign, get four different supernatural creatures as the party (they know this is a supers game, right?), three of which are vulnerable to "cold iron" ... and none of them can agree on what they actually mean by the term "cold" iron!

One person means wrought iron, one person means cast iron, and a third means any iron! The one who didn't make their supernatural critter vulnerable to it thinks that "cold iron" should be either meteoric iron or alchemically-treated iron.

Cue a six-way discussion between the GM, players, and the channel's resident mad engineer over what exactly is "cold iron".

Give them different levels of vulnerability with respect to their own definition of cold iron. The wrought iron one being very rare, cast iron being just rare as it is a poor material to make weapons out of but there are a lot of cast iron pans around so at least it is a common enough material to fine and the all iron gets a common.

[blacksmith]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Yes, and iron at, say, 500°F can have it. Most people would not dream of calling that "cold iron." Especially not if they tried to pick it up.

A blacksmith would call it cold, as it is well below a decent working temperature.