Legends

Bunny · 2012-06-17 00:31:05

Not every magical weapon is forged of meteorite iron under an unusual planetary conjunction, inscribed with gilded runes of ancient power, and imbued with supernatural strength and sharpness through mystical rites and sorcerous incantations. In truth, many of the most powerful weapons of lore are possessed of far humbler beginnings — common metal, torn from an enemy's grasp in a dire emergency. If the warrior survives the day, the weapon will likely be kept. Polished, sharpened, and re-sharpened, it will be carried from battle to battle, becoming as much a part of the man as his own arm, and as his name rises from warrior to hero to legend, so too will an aura of reverence and awe begin to surround the blade. Legend and belief are powerful forces, and it should be no surprise that a powerful artifact might have become powerful simply by dint of everyone believing it to be powerful. That is, after all, where the gods came from.

Corporal Forsythe · 2012-06-17 00:35:51

Being the killjoy I am, I should point out that meteorite iron is still the exact same thing as earth-mined iron

Bunny · 2012-06-17 00:40:03

But it's from METEORS.

So it's like...magic...and shit.

Unknown · 2012-06-17 05:18:00

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Justice4243 · 2012-06-17 16:45:13

There's SOME truth in fiction the the meteorite thing:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThunderboltIron

"Real-life meteoric iron often contains traces of the rare, superdense metal iridium, which significantly strengthens the metal, and there's a reason why they're called iron-nickel meteorites now: they contain a lot of nickel, sometimes having a fine structure formed of interleaving alloys of nickel-iron and iron-nickel. And nickel strengthens a steel, so the old meteorite-hunt was justified. Before forging became advanced enough to make iron-alloys, this was one of only two ways to get them (the other being to dig them up and hope they're good enough), so this concept is linked with Cold Iron. Even when cold-wrought iron was outdated, at least it was a source of ready nickel.

But there was a trick: various alloys in meteorites have iron and nickel but aren't steel. Sometimes a lucky Inuit tribe (nickel alloys remain pliable at low temperatures while carbon steel becomes brittle and prone to breakage) got tons of metal they coldhammered into tools, but sometimes a smith faced an apparently very good, malleable, magnetic metal... which he could not temper like a normal iron, until someone said "screw that" and mixed it with a real steel, thus adding carbon — and reducing the level of nickel.

Even if these samples had no nickel in them, they contained very few impurities, which was very difficult to find or manufacture in any large amount prior to the industrial revolution (specifically the patent of the Bessemer process in 1855.) As an alloy, steels can only have around two percent of their total weight as carbon; beyond that, they're classified as cast iron and display increasingly brittle behavior. Starting with low carbon steel from meteorites makes it much easier to add carbon back in to just the right amount, making a metal that is hard enough to hold an edge but ductile enough to not shatter under strain."

Legends

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