[LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

So, I'm currently GM-ing a low-fantasy-bordering-on-horror campaign inspired by Dark Souls. A thousand years ago, the main culture of the setting were the recipients of a divine boon that made them amazing blacksmiths (i.e. in their hands, iron had the melting point of lead), so they easily made steel weapons and late TL4 plate, even if their furnaces are TL1, 2 at most.

That boon is due to end in a month, and I was wondering just what kind of chaos would ensue. Assume that the biggest portion of their economy is based on metalworking. How soon would steel need maintenance which could not be done anymore? What components of infrastructure used iron or steel at TL4, and would now become irreplaceable? What adjustments would need to occur if an entire culture would have to switch to softer metals overnight?

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Metal items generally require much lower heat for maintenance (pounding out dents and the like). Anything which reaches melting temperatures...well, tends to melt the piece, which pretty much means you're starting over again. Most maintenance is simply stuff like sharpening, cleaning, and oiling, which generally don't need heating at all.

Iron/steel structural members are minimal at TL4. Depending on which flavor of TL4 you're using, there might be big chains used in suspension bridges (not used in Europe, but were used in China) and maybe to reenforce some kinds of structural members in elaborately vaulted buildings. Existing ones can probably be maintained reasonably well, but new architecture won't be able to freely incorporate such items.

Assuming Earth-like conditions, the supply of new metals plummets overnight, and you're stuck with copper alloys and lead. The problem isn't with hardness (good bronze is about as hard as reasonable-quality iron; indeed, early iron was worse than bronze), but with supply. There's much, much less copper than iron. With the barest trickle of new production, metal prices increase sharply, and it just gets worse as existing iron items slowly break and otherwise wear out from use. I wouldn't care to guess how fast that'll happen, though.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

I basically agree with Turhan's Bey Company, but there is the problem of maintenance. Many TL4 structures need constant repair, and that requires metal tools.

PS: That "ending of the boon", how does it work? Do people know in advance? Can they prepare by developing other technologies? If the main culture received to boon, what about the others? Can the people simply hire some engineers from another culture and shift to bronze?

How will people cope with the end of the boon mentally and culturally? Will people simply shrug and continue with work with other technology or will there be religious war, mass panic and hysteria?

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Just one question: has any sort of alchemist (magical or historical) discovered aluminum? If yes, they may just be able to create the purest iron possible.

If not, corrosion is dependent on environmental factors, meaning those living in deserts will have steel much longer than those near the sea.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Which could have a noticable impact on ships and long distance sailing. If ship construction is similar to real world TL3-4, there should be a decent amount of nails being used to hold them together. This would make sea travel more expensive and dangerous, do you really want to risk a week or two on a ship that may not have been properly maintained? Or do you go with an unproven concept that may fall apart in a strong breeze? Or can you reach your destination by land, even if that would take longer than by ship?

At least until some non-iron/steel using way of building long distance cargo holding ships has been discovered. But until then, most trade and travel will probably be across land with shorter trips to cross unavoidable water.

Any civilization that relies heavily on sailing could easily fall apart entirely.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

At Earth TL 3-4, it was common to use copper nails or wooden pegs ("treenails") simply because iron or steel nails corrode so fast in seawater. I haven't seen anything in this thread to indicate that the culture has stainless steel or other means of comprehensively protecting steel from corrosion.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Eh, there's decent evidence of trans-Atlantic travel well before steel became a thing. Non-iron nails can do their job with a decent amount of corrosion, but, iron swords and armor will become useless in short order.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

So in the last thousand years, noone has developed better furnaces? Despite knowing what hotter temperatures could do when working iron? Especially when there are seemingly rival cultures who didn't receive such a boon?

It seems likely that the power exchange simply moves to the few who have bothered to find alternative methods for iron/steel working (remember, that they would've have the benefit of steel tools and goods to this this, and a good knowledge of the medium, which makes things a lot easier). Or that alternatives are very quickly financed in an attempt to recapture what has been lost.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Properly cared for steel tools that don't see a lot of use can last a century - half of my hand tools belonged to my father and are 50 or 60 years old - so the crisis isn't immediate.

Heavily used stuff will wear out faster, but most craftsmen who are well equipped now will still have usable gear in a decade or more. Your economy isn't going to crash overnight, or even this year, though the long term outlook is pretty poor. Nobody *new* can enter a profession that requires steel tools - your economy can't expand and is going to start contracting with a half life of decades in those industries, which is most of them.

The first really major crisis is probably plows - TL4 food surpluses are not large, so every farmer whose efficiency drops because his plow breaks mean somebody somewhere starves, and plowshares are worked pretty hard. Next year is probably OK, particularly if the planting season is already over, but if you don't solve this one pretty fast the year after that will be a hard year and half your population is going to be dead in a decade.

In some ways you are in luck though, because other TL4 industries, most significantly glassmaking, require high temperatures too, so you don't have to invent everything *completely* from scratch. Depending on how this boon worked you may need to invent a lot though. Real ironworking before about mid TL5 actually involved relatively little melting - because cast iron is frankly a fairly lousy material. If this boon got around that, and one assumes it did or it wasn't really all that valuable, these guys may have no ironworking techniques at all. Even if not prices are going to go up (if for no other reason than you need more fuel), but if you are lucky your civilization may just be looking at half century long depression rather than total doom.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

As has been said, most iron and steel products will last for centuries if they are well maintained. Those that wear out can be replaced with bronze with no trouble so long as copper and tin are available. There were very few TL4 items that could only be made from steel. The only short term effect on society would be an increase in the cost of iron/steel items - depending on how much material is in the production pipelines. People would very quickly learn to look after what they have - recycling and repurposing would be even more prolific. As usual with situations like this, those who will be most affected will be the poorest members of society while the rich will barely notice.

There will be almost no long term effect. Bronze can be used as a short term replacement and TL1 furnaces have no trouble making iron and steel - it just takes longer and is less efficient. It won't take long at all to develop TL4 furnaces if the rest of society is TL4.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

I'm not saying that it isn't possible, I'm saying that it's unlikely that the shipyards still have the knowledge to make decent ships without iron nails. Or are willing to experiment with "inferior" materials for long distance sailing. It's quite possible that some enterprising soul manages to make a push for non-iron nails, but it will meet resistance while iron nails are still available. Even if no new ones are made, there'll still be people clinging to the iron ways for several decades. "We know they're going to make some new iron soon, just give them a bit of time" and "We're about to close a deal for some iron, just hang in there" will likely be common.
The various sources I've been able to look up suggest that iron was the primary metal used for ship building even back then. They may of course be wrong, and if so my assertations could be so as well.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

One such is smelting iron. A lower melting point for iron is not itself relevant to needing high-temperatures and charcoal or coke to produce iron in the first place: the reduction of iron from its oxides is not a process of melting, and indeed traditionally took place without melting until the Industrial Revolution.

It might be worth reminding the folk reading that the melting point of pure iron is 1538 C (2800 Fahrenheit), and wasn't achieved in industry until about 1850. The "cast iron" made before then (as early as the fourth century BC, in China, a thousand year later in Europe) was not jusy iron that had been melted and cast, but a mixture (solid solution) of iron with iron carbide. That has a much lower melting point and very different mechanical properties. The material in this fantasy campaign won't be cast iron even though it has been cast, it will be wrought iron even though it wasn't wrought.

One thing worth noting is that it's much easier to get fine detail in castings of material with a low melting point; you can pre-heat the mould and then the narrow channels and grooves don't get blocked with menicuses of frozen melt, which is what happens when molten iron cools rapidly in a mould because it's not practical to heat moulds to 1538 C. With a gift that allows melting iron at only a few hundred Celsius these people are going to produce iron artifacts that look quite unlike the forged iron and steel objects we are used to. Also, iron objects are going to be cheaper for them than they were for our ancestors because they will save not only a lot of fuel but also a great deal of labour workibf bloomery iron into bars, forging out the slag, and tediously shaping and welding iron pieces with the hammer and anvil.

Another point is that they might not have steel. Their bloomeries might not produce iron with significant carbide in it with the melting point of iron so much below that of iron carbide. Their workpieces won't carburise in the furnace, because they won't be forged. And finally, their iron melts below the Austenite-Marstenite transition temperature, so they wouldn't be able to quench their steel if they did make any.

The higher temperatures won't do those things if the iron melts at 327 C. You need steel to be solid at about 550 C or above for to heat-treat it.

Moreover, these people would be working steel in the forge because they can much more easily and accurately cast it.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

I have a Seventeenth-Century table than is held together with trenails.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Even if shipyards run by the military and their contractors don't have knowledge to make ships without iron, it will always be cheaper for civilians to make do without metals. After all, rope and wood is all you need to make a sea-faring vessel! Of course, some sort of sail makes things much easier, but, doesn't require metals.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Iron is going to be cheap in this setting (until the gift goes away). It will melt in the smelting furnace and form a puddle under the slag, so the fuel and labour of forging the slag out of the refinery bloom, all the work that gave wrought iron its name, will be saved. Also, it will be far easier and cheaper to shape: nails could be made by thousands in a cheap, reusable open mould rather than by tediously hand-making each one.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

And all theories posted about ships and such are based on what happens AFTER iron stops being cheap, and giving time for iron-clad ships to rust into oblivion ;)

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

In this situation, all that will happen is that you will have two different groups of craftsman. The first group makes iron products using the lower melting point provided by the boon while the second group make steel products in the same way that we have always done historically. If this is the case then there will be almost no interruption to society at all except that craftsman will move from the first group to the second and start using these techniques to work with low carbon iron as well.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

That would involve trade between the culture that got the boon and other cultures that could still make steel, right?

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Only if that entire culture was incapable of working with steel. Was the boon given to every person or just a select few? How hard would it be to encourage steel workers from another culture to come work for you? Why haven't these people already been conquered by someone who could outfit his army in steel weapons and armour?

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Iron-clad ships? The OP said TL4.

Did you know that HMS Warrior, launched in 1860, is still afloat?

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Might be interesting to know how many original parts, though.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

The framing, hull, and armour are original, and pretty much all the armament and fittings are restored.

As it typical for a startling innovation, HMS Warrior was very quickly rendered obsolete by refinements on her basic idea. She was taken out of service after less than twenty years and used as a storeship for fifty years, then she was stripped and her deck concreted over for use as a pontoon dock for another fifty years, then restored as a museum ship. It's unusual to refit storeships, and no-one does a refit on a pontoon dock.

I remember an article in Scientific American about the time her restoration was complete, and the Duke of Edinburgh (who led the campaign for her restoration) going on a bit about her durability. This is an ironclad iron-hulled ship — an early one — that you could pour a slab of concrete over and neglect for fifty years.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Thanks for the prompt and detailed response, guys! I really appreciate it.

They have no idea. Until recently, they believed themselves to be the entirety of mankind, not really knowing how big the world is or if distant lands are populated (spoiler: they are). Aside from advanced metalwork and some ritual magic, they are very much an early bronze-age society, have scarce written records, underdeveloped transportation technology and no contact with other offshoots of humanity. Iron also has a very spiritual aspect to them (those fantasy-iron properties like "wards off evil and blocks magic" are caused by the boon, and will stop working shortly). The fact that iron's properties are a temporary blessing, and not the natural state of things, have just been uncovered by the campaign's protagonists.

The original recipients of the boon were a tribal bronze-age culture with mostly oral traditions. Their attempts at empire-building, for which the boon was originally intended, were met with several catastrophes and a wholesale exile to the remote continent where the campaign takes place. Lax timekeeping and lack of historiography ensured they would repeat their mistakes. No one remembers anything about a "boon" and merely consider iron to just behave that way naturally.
I was wondering about that. How early did alternative ways of smelting iron or making steel exist? Like, crucibles for example. Would they be plausible for a TL1-2 society? Would some crackpot inventor still be able to make small amounts of steel that way?
Good! My intention was for the transition to be near-apocalyptic, and a food shortage will do quite nicely for a violent unraveling of society.
So far, I've shied away from "magic as art/science" thing that typical fantasy settings have. There are no studious wizards or alchemical entrepreneurs. We use Path/Book ritual magic, and it usually involves dealings with otherworldly entities, so practitioners are seers, priests, bards, old crones in the woods, etc.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Crucible steel likely goes back to the Third Century BC in Sri Lanka and southern India. Note well that you need iron, already smelted from its ore, to make crucible steel.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

So, if I understood correctly, under these made-up rules, the iron would be easily cast, but would have the properties of relatively pure iron? So, weapons and armor made from such a material would be softer than steel, but not as brittle?

By "quite unlike" do you mean they would more easily be made elaborate? That fits neatly with the image I presented to the players so far, where the fashion was ostentatious to the point of tastelessness, e.g. impractical full-body metalwork as street-clothes. I'm just not quite sure what decorative techniques they'd have access to (boon aside, they're technologically TL2, possibly 3).

So, just having lower-temperature iron has no bearing on making steel. That's fine. I'm assuming that means I'll have to use the stats for iron weapons and armor, which have a higher chance to break.

Ok, none of that then.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

I think that's right, yes.

Yes, and things like bells, pots, lamps, helmets, cuirasses, stirrups, basket-hilts and so forth (which were difficult to forge and therefore which continued to be made of bronze or brass long after iron came in for simply-shaped objects such as blades) might be cast in pure iron. Mail might never be invented. Swords might be cast all in one piece with the blade, cross-guard, tang, and pommel.

Correct. If anything it is an impediment, since the problems of shaping iron way below its melting-point led to it being heated repeatedly in a bed of hot carbon while it was being forged (and while the refinery bloom was being wrought into bars). It incidentally picked up carbon while that was being done, resulting in mild and case-hardened steel. That won't happen if it is being cast.

There might still be a little carbon in some iron, as a result of iron carbide forming in the blast furnace — it used to be part of the art of a smith to use different parts of the bloom for different qualities owing to different extents of carburisation. But I think there will be less with the iron melting in the furnace, and in any case these people won't be able to harden steel if they do get any, becasue theirs will melt long before it reaches heat-treatment temperatures.

Yes, the stats should be as for iron. I'm not sure though that "breaking" is exactly right. Blunting and bending, perhaps.

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

so no druids, Brahmins, Bards/Skalds , No linear B script, Cuneiform or else?

Re: [LT] No-steel-pocalypse! Lifespan of iron & steel equipment?
 

Was remade as an Oil Jetty in the 1920's, so I doubt there's that many. Pity. That kind of stuff nullifies the warranty.