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Old 12-13-2019, 09:22 AM   #49
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: [LT Armor Loadouts] Expensive Greaves

Quote:
Originally Posted by blacksmith View Post
Not at all, you are not casting thin sheets of bronze with a person as the mold. Castings are going to be far to thick to be of use as armor until worked. Casting weapons far more practical that armor.

So no you are not talking about much difference in the amount of working.
How thin can you manage to cast something? A bit of research online indicates around 3 mm using sand casting or similar, which would be DR 6 when made of good bronze. That's thicker than the greaves we're talking about, so they probably can't be cast to shape (they need to be pounded out to get to the correct thickness, and that's not going to be easy to do if they're already shaped). The question, then, is how much more expensive it is to cold-work bronze into shape as opposed to hot-working iron into shape (hot-working is faster but uses up fuel - I assume the labor savings more than offsets the charcoal cost - and apparently isn't an option for bronze).

Of course, this suggests the possibility that DR 6+ bronze armor costs significantly less per pound than does thinner armor, which would certainly cause some... interesting effects.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pursuivant View Post
One factor which hasn't been mentioned yet is that rolling mills are TL5 technology.
[SNIP]
I'd imagine all this is why metal goods cost a good deal more prior to TL 5. However, the discussion is how price should increase when you make armor out of bronze. The only way (outside of royal proclamations or similar) for bronze items to consistently* be 4x the cost of iron armor is if bronze costs 4x as much as iron and requires 4x as much labor (which may mean 4x as many man-hours, or workers that are paid 4x as much for their time, or some combination of more man-hours and more expensive workers). I don't really see anything in your post that indicates bronze would be more expensive to work than iron (aside from large plates being impossible to forge-weld, but you can get your big plate from casting, which is why bronze was still used for plate armor at TL 2).

*Over a variety of armors, that is. Realistically, the cost of bronze itself is going to vary wildly depending on the cost of copper and tin. The cost of iron can also vary, but probably not as much as bronze (iron's a pretty common metal, once you figure out how to work it).
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