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

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Seneschal

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?

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.