# Is steel lighter than wrought iron?



## Peregrine (Sep 18, 2017)

I know cast iron is dark gray.

Is wrought iron gray, while steel is slightly lighter gray?

Is high-quality steel slightly lighter than low-quality steel?

Why this logic/way of thinking?

1) Carbon is dark gray or black:
- Charcoal and coal is black or dark gray
- When you overcook meat, you will see that it turns black and that is what happens to carbon matter
- Cast iron has a lot more carbon than either steel or wrought iron and it is the darkest iron
- When flesh and bones are cremated they turn into dark gray or black ash

2) The more carbon something has the darker it is (not in the case of diamonds because they have a different chemical structure), take for instance cast iron, cast iron is darker because it has much more carbon than either wrought iron or steel.


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## Malik (Sep 19, 2017)

The amount of carbon in steel is very low; usually less than a percent, give or take. Steel is not noticeably different in weight than iron.

Pure iron -- wrought iron -- has a weight of 7,850 kg/m^3. A cubic meter of iron weighs 17,306 pounds. And 4 ounces, if you're really counting.

Steel for practical, sword-making purposes is iron plus ~0.3-1.7% carbon (any higher or lower and it can't take a heat treat). Medium-carbon steel that combines both toughness and ductility (strength and break resistance) is around 0.4-0.6% carbon. We see this in 5160 and 1060 steels, both used for practical swords today; the "60" at the end of the number refers to the carbon content: 0.60%. I've seen some amazing blades made of high-carbon, 1095 steel at .95% carbon, but made by master smiths. 

High-carbon steel weighs around 7,840 kg/m^3, 22 lbs lighter than the 17,306-lb., 1-cubic-meter block, above. There is no noticeable, practical difference in weight between anything made of steel vs. iron that a human being can lift.

Cast iron is generally any iron mixed with enough carbon to lower the melting point enough for it to be cast in a mold. Steel cannot be cast, at least by artisanal methods. _Conan_ lied. Cast iron is considered (in modern times, anyway) iron mixed with over >4% carbon, so it weighs around 7,000 kg/m^3, lighter than both pure iron and steel, but again, not enough to notice any difference.

It's very hard to tell steel from iron at a glance, especially with mild steel or some low-carbon steel alloys, and doubly so with hand-forged steel. On an artisanally produced weapon that has a steel edge welded to an iron core, the weld line is visible and often there will be pattern marks in the iron and steel differentiating them. Steel in a pre-industrial environment was a wildly different animal than what we think of as steel today.

The best way to tell steel from iron is the spark test; steel held against a grindstone throws off a different array of sparks compared to iron.

There's a type of 1% carbon, tool steel called "silver steel" that is actually silver, as a result of the carbon content. So, carbon actually makes steel, well, steelier. Which, I'd imagine, is why "steel gray" is a color.

I hope this helps.

There's a whole huge thing on steel on my blog at Steel: The Everything of All Things | Joseph Malik.


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## Peregrine (Sep 22, 2017)

If there was a civilization in fantasy that knew how to make high-quality steel like Damascus steel. And it happens that their armies are composed of professional soldiers like English and French soldiers in 15th century. How would that affect battles.
Will battles be longer and more exhausting? Would armor be more resistant to arrows and melee weapons like tanks?


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## Malik (Sep 22, 2017)

I cover exactly this in the blog post that I linked, above. Like, exactly this. 

If you have an abundance of steel armor, you have a huge worldbuilding hurdle.

If your world has a method to make enough homogeneous steel to outfit everyone in steel armor, then not only do you have to come up with a new style of combat (if you want to make it believable, mind you), but you will also have a world with steel for everything: steel stairs, steel doors, steel beams reinforcing your castles. The Bessemer blast furnace, which allowed for the mass creation of sheet steel, helped kick off the Industrial Revolution. (This is all in that same blog post, in more detail.) 

Even if you have a magical way to make this much steel cheaply, you're now writing steampunk or gaslamp fantasy, because you have an industrial, or proto-industrial, or magic-industrial, society. Which is totally cool, too.

Armor was iron, unless you were a king or a patrician. Because iron armor was plenty good enough. A wealthy knight or lord might have a few pieces of steel on his kit; iron mail with a steel gorget, or something. In a pre-industrial society, a suit of steel armor would be like a private jet plated in gold. Blog post on armor, here. 

Alternately, you can just bleep over all of this and say all your armor is steel even though nothing else is, and have the swords slice through the steel armor anyway. Most fantasy authors do exactly this, and not many readers know enough about the intricacies of steel to care. I've only rarely seen iron and steel, or different grades of steel, delineated in a fantasy novel, and usually half-assedly (Oooh, "Valeryian Steel" is like steel, only _better!_), which is one of the reasons that I drill down on it in my series. 

After all the worldbuilding that I put in around my metallurgy, my first editor wanted me to take it all out because he was afraid it would just confuse everyone. So this might not be a battle you want to fight. You will get rambling messages from readers promising you that katanas can slice through anything because didn't you see Highlander that was totally accurate that time that the sword sliced through the concrete pillar.


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## pmmg (Sep 22, 2017)

Dude, I appreciated both your articles on armor. Lot of good info there. I would certainly use it if I was going for a strong fantasy realism, but I am not sure that is always the goal. I think a lot is to be said that metal armor is time consuming to make and linen armor seemed pretty effective without all the cost and hassle. I consider using that in my stories, but I am not sure it quite fits with the vision I have of the characters in it. I am okay, I suppose, with a bit of, yeah, this is not really how it was, but then do I really care when their are dragons flying and wizards blasting things apart. Does make me question Mithril a bit more though...Where was that blast furnace the dwarves used?


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## Malik (Sep 22, 2017)

pmmg said:


> Does make question Mithril a bit more though...Where was that blast furnace the dwarves used?



More to the point, what did they work it with if it was so hard? (Pulling iron into wire by hand through a draw plate is heinous. Doing it with steel is nigh-on impossible without machinery. Doing it with something harder than steel? Yow. Plus, then, how do you flatten it if it's so hard? How do you drill it? How do you cut rivets from it? How do you compress them?) 

And if mithril is hard enough to withstand a swordblow, why didn't it break? The harder something gets, the easier it cracks. That's physics.

If it was so light, how did it stop the cave troll's spear? A thrust from a 400-500 lb. combatant into a shirt of what amounts to butcher's mail on what's essentially a small child -- one-fifth his mass, and with no gambeson or padding -- would have shattered Frodo's ribs, torn his sternum, collapsed a lung, bruised or ruptured major internal organs, broken his neck, or all of the above. They'd be carrying his furry ass out of there, "mithril" or no, and he'd spend the rest of his life drooling in a bed in Rivendell. Tolkien was a brilliant linguist, but he didn't know shit about armor.







*Victory, bitches*.​
Anyway, it all belongs up there with the Hollywood BS about no one wearing a helmet into battle. Which we see in more and more fantasy novels, now. Cue long sigh.

Like I said, realism is a trap. You can make it fun; I do. But it takes a lot of work.


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## pmmg (Sep 22, 2017)

Well, I agree. Little Frodo would have been toast to the trolls spear thrust, but I will confess, I do find I don't fret too much the movie depictions. If they were all wearing helmets, I could not see who they were, so something has to be given to 'well, its a movie'. 

I figure the answer to Mithril is because they were dwarves, and there are dwarf reasons.


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## Horus (Sep 29, 2017)

I'm not touching the frodo thing, but Mithril is something I don't find too out there. Titanium is about the closest thing we have in relation to it. Titanium is insanely strong, but lighter than almost all steel alloys. It has high degrees of resistance to damn near everything from corrosion to heat. It can be fairly flexible too, but it isn't too prone to outright breaking. It has a melting point a little higher than that of iron (100 degrees C or so), but beyond that because Titanium is so much lighter than steel... it gives when you strike it (which is a good thing in some cases, but Mithril does the opposite apparently).

Chemistry is a weird beast though, and even today we still don't understand some of the mysteries ancient smiths used to craft certain objects. Not to mention we're still discovering different metals/alloys with strange properties from ones that melt in your hand to ones that literally burn almost forever. These things are either super rare in the environment, or only obtained by refinement. Of course, a world with different history from ours would have different elements in different quantities also.


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## Malik (Sep 30, 2017)

The problem is that titanium is light. Mail absorbs blunt force trauma. This sounds counterintuitive, but it does. When you drive a blow into a shirt of mail, the interlocked links transfer the force outward from the point of impact like ripples in a pond, and rob the blow of its momentum. 

Mail is good enough at absorbing impacts that, at least back when I was in the SCA, a shirt of mail was considered "hard" protection, equivalent to plate or stiff leather. I can tell you that 10mm mail over an arming jack is sufficient against someone swinging a heavy oil-soaked rattan sword, or a wooden-headed poleaxe, or bashing you with the edge of a shield (which they weren't supposed to do, but _c'est la guerre_). Mail works really well. A big factor in that is the weight of the links, because the weight is what absorbs impact.

This is my problem with mithril: it's light. You can give the metal any characteristics you want for toughness or hardness or whatever, but the selling point is its weight, and you can't change the physics of how mail works. Lightweight mail will get you killed. (Now, give a shirt of lightweight mail some magical quality that makes it behave like heavier mail, and you're in business.)

Titanium mail will stop a blade from penetrating -- I've done destructive testing with titanium mail, and it's super tough -- but it doesn't stop the impact. Warswords and impact weapons were designed to maul the wearer of armor even if they couldn't get through it. Hit someone wearing what amounts to a shirt of butcher's mail with a warsword or an axe and it's going to leave one hell of a dent. (Frodo also wasn't wearing an arming jack, but let's just leave that out of it.) Fractures, bruised organs, concussion, whiplash. Wearing a shirt of lightweight mail into an axe fight is an elaborate form of suicide.

The mithril thing is right up there with Ted falling out of his armor when he falls down the stairs in _Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure._ It's critical to the scene, but it fails every possible reality check.


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## psychotick (Sep 30, 2017)

Hi Malik,

I don't think you're right. Mail does not absorb blunt force trauma. That's what the rest of the outfit does - eg the gambeson. Mail stops edged weapons, slashing weapons etc. The soft armour underneath absorbs the impact.

Of course modern technology can change things a bit. New weaves with locking rings may stop the mail from flexing in any directions not wanted - ie inward.

Cheers, Greg.

Cheers, Greg.


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## Demesnedenoir (Sep 30, 2017)

Frodo would be toast in my world, but that also goes into bigger issues with tactics against 1 ton creatures. But Mithril could have purely magic properties of absorption, and well, fate. As a “real” material Frodo is dead, and Tolkien was probably aware of that, but this is more heroic saga in a world where magic can do whatever it needs to do, LOL.

Now tactics... In a world full of 1 ton, semi-intelligent trolls wielding spears and clubs, EVERY warrior would be well-versed in pole-arms with squads trained to keep them on point while ranged does the damage... but of course trolls being intelligent, would counter... heh heh. It’s hard to imagine how hard a troll would hit, the combination of power and leverage. It’d make a lance look wussey.


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## Dark Squiggle (Nov 21, 2017)

If Frodo weighed little enough, he could simply have been thrown by the blow, resulting in an elastic collision, with the momentum eaten up by him rolling across the ground.
A troll may very well fall apart of its own accord - the humanoid frame has its limits, and there is a reason why elephants don't throw punches.
Once you start getting into the long term effects of magic, you have created a monster. Where do steam engines and bicycles come in? You know the reason why neither of those took off before 1800 was due to a lack of suitable materials, not a lack of understanding of their underlying concepts? At some point, you will have to fall back onto suspension of disbelief, so just pick a cozy spot.
I don't know enough about armour, swords or metals to be able to hold my own here, so go easy on me


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## Steerpike (Nov 21, 2017)

Malik said:


> If it was so light, how did it stop the cave troll's spear? A thrust from a 400-500 lb. combatant into a shirt of what amounts to butcher's mail on what's essentially a small child -- one-fifth his mass, and with no gambeson or padding -- would have shattered Frodo's ribs, torn his sternum, collapsed a lung, bruised or ruptured major internal organs, broken his neck, or all of the above. They'd be carrying his furry ass out of there, "mithril" or no, and he'd spend the rest of his life drooling in a bed in Rivendell. Tolkien was a brilliant linguist, but he didn't know shit about armor.



This isn't canon, just a random thought (obviously): suppose mithril wasn't just hard, but was more non-Newtonian in character. Suppose it was workable under the right conditions, so that highly skilled armorers could make beautiful pieces of armor from it, but upon impact by something like the cave-troll's spear it not only became harder than other known materials but was also able to absorb and dissipate kinetic energy upon impact and in that instant transition from softer to harder material. If you went down that path (which would still require some hand-having) could you reach a point where Frodo's mithril shirt plausibly protects him from the vast majority of the force behind the spear thrust, but is still made of a material that armorer's can work with to make delicate works of art?


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## psychotick (Nov 21, 2017)

Hi,

Oddly Frodo wouldn't have to be dead (except in the movie where he clearly would have to be since you saw the sword seem to punch right into him!). But this is the old matter of force applied over area. This is why you can sleep on a bed of nails, but your weight on a single nail will get you skewered. So say your one ton troll smashes him with either a sword or a blunt hammer. The force of the impact is the same. But what sort of area is it spread over? Rigid armour - plate - protects because the impact is absorbed across the entire piece of plate. So say it's a breast plate you've got say a square foot of body to take the blow. Mail doesn't do that, which is why Frodo would be dead.

But as I said previously, modern tech materials allow flexible materials to be completely rigid in certain dimensions. For mail this could be achieved by using the right weave. So Frodo gets smashed by a club or a sword, and the mail is rigid with respect to being pushed inwards. Modern body armour does this against bullets.

Of course he'd still be thrown across the room!

Cheers, Greg.


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## bestellen (Nov 27, 2017)

If you have an abundance of steel armor, you have a huge worldbuilding hurdle.


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## Dark Squiggle (Nov 27, 2017)

In truth, if hobbits are built at all like humans, the g-force from being thrown might have been enough to twist his internal organs and leave  lasting damage or kill him.


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## psychotick (Nov 27, 2017)

Hi Bestellen,

What's the hurdle?

Cheers, Greg.


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## kjbartolotta (Nov 27, 2017)

Malik, since there's enough high-quality steel in my own setting it merits a fair degree of research, finding out about your blog is both a huge boon and a research rabbit hole that's probably gonna throttle my word count a bit. Either way, thank you for such a wonderful resource!


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