Wouldn’t electricity require you to have metal smeltable only at “high” temperatures anyway?
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Did NOBODY read the OR, I am editing it.
You can carve pottery out of stone. But subsequently using the Potash to make Paper-Clay Pottery would be an upgrade.
Tin. Requires 231 C. It may not be conductive enough for the alternatively suggested (and now scratched out) method (i am not sure), but it is conductive enough to be used as wiring in children’s toys.
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Q, is the purpose of pottery here to create vessels that’d allow the smelting of higher-temperature-meltable metals like iron?
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How would having Ceramics allow for higher smelting temperatures? If there is a way to use Clay Pottery/Ceramics to increase 500 C Fire to 1000 C+ Fire, I am really curious to know how that would work. It would help an argument I was working on and am planing to return to at some point.
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I suppose these ceramics could be used to make primitive smelter furnaces like the ones once used irl to smelt iron in some places a long time ago?
I think this one explains it
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No, the smelting furnaces weren’t made of ceramics; they were made of clay. It’s just that smelting copper requires the same temperature as roasting ceramics.
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Does copper help with smelting iron?
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Could above sea-level volcanoes be used a source of fire?
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Is there a historical precedent for them being used this way?
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(Replying to ahh about “higher temperature meltables like iron”) You don’t usually melt pure iron until industrial.
You have the choice of:
The bloomery process, you smelt the ore in a bloomery with charcoal or coal coke so that Carbon Monoxide strips iron of its oxygen, which leaves small nodules called prills. These would be heated red hot and forge welded (hit with a hammer) into metal pieces. Used throughout medieval europe until superceeded by fineries
In the finery process, you smelt the ore, a flux, and charcoal or coal coke, together; like a bloomery, this strips the iron of oxygen, it mixes with molten flux to lower the melting point to make molten Cast Iron (technically Pig Iron, which has the maximum carbon content of a little over 4 percent).
Cast Iron is too brittle for tools, but can be melted back with more charcoal to reduce the excess carbon in it to make steel or wrought iron which would then solidify and could then be forged. This was used in medieval china.
Truly molten steel didn’t come until the end of the renaissance, with the invention of the puddling furnace, where molten pig iron was blasted with the preheated exhaust of a seperate furnace; allowing precise control of the temperature. These consumed a lot of coal, and contributed to the start of the industrial revolution.
Coal coke is to raw coal, as charcoal is to wood. You cook the raw product without oxygen to remove the wood gas/coal gas, and get nearly pure carbon. Coke has more mineral impurites in it, like lead and uranium, so makes toxic fly ash when burned, as opposed to regular ash.
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The problem is if these can be substituted by something else from such a no-wood-world. Oil seems like the closest to the coal and the grass/fat the closest to the wood. I suppose we’d need to have those also be refined into near-pure-carbon forms?
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Well you don’t need any technology besides fire and mud to make a charcoal mound.
Non-wood char has had pretty niche use on earth, but biochar might work. It’s just that nobody has used it as a major furnace fuel to my knowledge, because why would you[1]? It’s main use is fertilizer and a byproduct of gasifiers. But it does tick the boxes. It’s even been produced by pre-colonial tribes in the amazon from agriculture waste.
In an economy where the preservation of natural resources over immediate gain is actively disincentivized. ↩︎
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So with this link established properly to acquire iron metallurgy, do we have any other problems with such a woodless world besides the (now solved) smeltaling?
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The problem is Wood is easier to work with and more sustainable than most substitutes for many of it’s uses. It’s not that anything in particular can’t be achieved, but . . . how mass producible/sustainable are those things?
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Grass grows fairly fast while to harvest an animal’s fat might take a few years, which is not too bad when compared with trees.
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True, but I don’t think you can make support beams out of grass and fat, nor would it be likely you could make grass and fat model trains. You could weave grass furniture though.
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I suppose such structural stuff would be mostly made from inorganics on such worlds
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So basically such civs would use rocks for making structures?
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Indeed, and later on also metal.
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