New metals for mechs, also some rambling

[Falamazeer]

Some interest was shown in new metals for a mech concept here:https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3966
As a well read and passionate metalurgist I'd be estatic to see new metals in spessman, as well as some metalurgical features, here is a short list of metals, ores and process's that might help some happy coder skip googling around too much,

Aluminum comes from bauxite, which has a very strange look to it in some mines, example here http://geology.com/minerals/bauxite.shtml
It's fairly common, but can be quite a bitch to process into useful metal, lots of heating, chemical reductions, washes, and then finally a smelting. You can get the gist of it from an episode of "how it's made" That's specific enough for spessmans, but there is no reason there isn't a better way in the future.
It's a little on the weak side, but it's tarnish resistance is good, It mixes with oxygen readily on the surface which slightly dulls it but doesn't make it weaker, Unlike steel (Iron oxide) Aluminum oxide doesn't significantly detract from the strength, and won't penetrate more than a few microns into the material. Add trace iron/copper/chromium and you change the grain structure of the metal lending it supreme increases in it's mechanical properties, doesn't take much to make it a "space age" metal surprisingly harder than it's pure form.

Copper is a decent passing conductor, it's not particularly hard, and not even the best conductor of heat, Where it truly shines is the availability, Our planet is literately riddled with the shit, the ore takes on a deep and distinct bluey green hue, very easily identified Type in Malachite into google images, and you'll see, it can also be found as native ore, meaning it requires no additional smelting, as it's just a lump of nearly pure metal, As far as oxides go, It can take a while for copper to form copper oxide, And sadly it makes it completely useless as a conductor, or as anything really, green mossy dust, but it can be used to make a variety of usefull alloys, Such as tin bronze, brass, and Aluminum bronze, Aluminum bronze is quite the material, If you were to make a sword of bearing bronze as it's also called, and send it back in time, it would be the mother fucking Excalibur of it's time, And it's resistance would sway future generations and the rise and fall of empires. Maybe I'm being a bit dramatic, but it'd be a hell of a sword compared to tin bronze, Matches decently with milder steels.

Zinc is commonly found with copper ore, but typically process out of sphalerite and can be processed out via heating and grinding the rock, then it's processed with "froth flotation" where basically it's stirred with an oil and the heavier bits sink, due to being richer, which is basically then fired to process the pure zinc, It's a bit more complicated than that, but you get the gist, It's not an altogether useful metal in an of itself, one of it's major uses though is as protection for steel, It can easily electroplated to the material to form "Galvanized Steel" which would most likely last your whole lifetime, it can also be hot dipped, but that's a whole other ball of wax. It can be alloyed with copper to make "Brass" Which shows better mechanical properties than either copper or zinc alone, and is a cheap abundant decently strong material


Titanium, Everything steel does, this does it better, if adamantium exists it's titanium. A titanium sword can chop straight though the hull of battleship, and still stay sharp enough to shave a spiders testicles. This is what titanium manufacturers would have you believe, and It's straight up bullshit, It's aluminum+ It's just got the highest density-strength ratio of our currently available metals, if you need something as hard as steel, but using steel would add too much weight, titanium, or more like an alloy therof is what you use, It's steel equivalent, but much lighter. And that's impressive enough for me. It's also naturally corrosion resistant, and can be annodized (Dipped in mild acid and electrocuted slightly) to make beautiful oilspill rainbow colors, It's also considered "Bio Compatible" meaning your crammy's hip ball replacement? titanium, And she won't need it fucked with for twenty+ years before problems are anticipated. Shit's great for augments.

More to come

[Miauw]

i have had an idea similar to this for quite a while.
RD would be made similar to the minecraft mod tinkers' construct, where you add in specific materials/parts for specific parts of a blueprint for a gun or a micro-laser (which you then put in something else) etc.
to be used in specific situations, metals would need to be enhanced with special properties, which would have to be induced in big multi-tile machines (by which i mean things like the whole of the singulo. emitters, collectors, shield gens, etc).
for example, some blueprint slots would require the "magnetized" property, for which you need to build a magnetizing machine thingie. however, for that slot a low "conductivity" value would also be ideal, and you need a bigger magnetizing machine thingie to magnetize low-conductivity materials.

this is just a short outline, really, but i hope it gets the point across.
its a shame i dont have the motivation to code it. (right now)

[MisterPerson]

That all sounds really clunky, to be honest.

[John_Oxford]

Gunsmithing? Anyone?

EDIT:

I made sprites for machines that would do something similar to this.
Gunsmithing is essentially what this is
Taking raw materials, cutting/refining into the way you want it, then putting it together.
If someone codes this, i'l pull through and sprite it, if need be.

[Killbasa]

On a side note, this could also be incorporated with Kor's away mission idea. It only makes sense to have some new materials and processes that come with a completely new area.

[Falamazeer]

A few fun details on our current metals that may have elluded past coders.

Gold Everyone and their sister knows gold is one of the heavier metals, But in circuitry and wire, in the international space station we use it because It's lighter than copper While it's true that if you had two evenly sized cubes of copper and gold, the gold would be heavier, in circuitry and wiring, this couldn't be further than the truth, due to it's supreme ductility you can draw a thinner gold wire that can hold the same charge as a thicker copper wire without damage due to it's higher conductivity, That in and of itself would be excuse enough, but gold has another amazing feature, It's corrosion resistant, There are examples of gold jewelry in normal earth atmosphere from back when we as a species still thought it was a grand idea to poop in the village well, Due to this property, if you account for the copper loss in an oxygen rich enviroment, you wind up having to haul less weight overall by using gold wiring and connectors when measured over years of time.
Imagine being the material engineer trying to explain to the budget guy why it's a great idea for cost efficiency to pimp out the international space station like MTV cribs. Another fun fact about gold, Due to it's ductility and it's corrosion resistance, It can be pressure welded, meaning if you take one flat strip of gold, and put it on another flat strip of gold and whack it, it becomes one strip of gold, This is actually true of every metal, Normal earth conditions create layers over every metal you've ever seen to prevent this, Elsewise you'd be trying to remove a screw, and your screwdriver would fuze with the screw, In space, this can be a challenge for astronauts, but we've learned to be sure to make a coating to prevent such things. Think about it like this, you got two half empty cups of water and you pour one into the other, which is the first cup and which is the second? no way to know. Not saying it should be a game mechanic, just an interesting factoid.

Silver is the single most thermally conductive, electrically conductive and reflective element we know of.
It's truly a wonder metal, Your computer keyboard? printed with colloidal silver sandwiched between sheets of plastic. Unfortunately silver oxide, while slightly harder than base silver, is dull, thermally only average, and electrically weak, but it it's in a vacuum, or protected from oxygen it retains all those useful features.
Keep in mind that in circuitry, thermal conductivity can be a major factor for computing speed as well as electrical conductivity, as you can run more juice through it and manage over heating much easier with silver by moving the heat.


Diamonds, It's simple carbon, formed with intense heat and pressure. But did you know it's now common to use two chips of diamonds and then laser through them to hit a carbon load to make more diamonds? these synthetic diamonds can often be even purer than natural diamonds, with less chance of an impurity creating a fault that might lead to failures, And you know what crystallologists like to use? peanut butter, Poof, mind blown. Though any carbon would be fine.

More to come

[John_Oxford]

Putting together a list of all the new metals and ores together would be cool.
If you get a list together, i'l start spriting them.

[Falamazeer]

Aluminum Silver and lustrous metal, Bauxite ore is a orange splattered rock http://geology.com/minerals/photos/bauxite-14.jpg
Can not be found free of inclusion, ore only

Copper, a... coppery colored metal, comes from malachite among others looks like this http://nevada-outback-gems.com/copper-o ... hite01.jpg
Can also be found free in twisted lumps and veins as well as ore.

Zinc Silvery when fresh, oxides into a dull dark grey, Ore is Sphalerite Comes in odd crystalline form But not always this pretty https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... 221270.jpg Can not be found free in lumps

Titanium, Fresh silvery color, kinda muted compared to stainless steel, but lighter in color than mild steel, Ilmenite ore is kinda like a rusty black stone, as it's also got bonded iron within, it is the chief source of titanium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilmenite# ... 155036.jpg
Can not be found free of inclusion

Silver, Oxides a nearly black color, highly brilliant and reflective when polished, Argentite is primary ore, http://skywalker.cochise.edu/wellerr/mi ... m-2359.JPG Current sprite does the job well, Can also be found as veins AND lumps often with gold.

Gold, Lusterous gold, soft, heavy, beautiful. Not an ore, often found in flakes and veins among a variety of rocks, Surface quarts often has it within deep rock as well http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/archive_arti ... .jpg?hires
Most gold processing is not to extract from rock or sulfides, but smelting it to purity, which often isn't that much work as it's relatively even unworked.

[Falamazeer]

Can't talk about metal without talking about the wonder material, TUNGSTEN CARBIDE!
This shit is hard, Uber hard, It's used for percussive mining (Think jackhammer.) Coatings for drill bits, blades, lathes, the works, We use it in place of diamond to cut steel because while not as hard as diamond, it has the major benefit on not being carbon, and thus catching fire during intense work.

It's made of Tungsten, carbon, and cobalt, sometimes with added titanium to change the grain structure, but sadly this shit is HEAVY, but it's resistance is amazing, Plasma fire? Meh. Bomb? fuck it, Tungsten carbide is the bomb.

Tungsten comes chiefly from an ore called Wolframite https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... _Hunan.jpg
A yellowy rock found amongst quarts, it also contains iron, but through the wonders of modern metalurgy you can get tungsten from it.

Tungsten has the highest melting temperature of any metal known, it's very very hard, though it can be a bit brittle, it's oxydation resistance is great, but it's fuck all heavy.



Cobalt, Comes from Cobaltite, a sheeny semi shiny silverish rock ore, also contains iron and nickel, as well as arenic, smelting this proves difficult, as it doesn't cooperate with traditional methods or seperation, and the deadly arsenic fumes don't help either. Suffice to say, it's a lot of chemistry that's a bit beyond the scope of what I'd like to write or dumb down, as it's even beyond my understanding in many ways. But more by request if needed.
By the end of all that nonsense, you get cobalt, hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal, fairly heavy, very tough magnetic, and it can be work hardened to be even more so.

[Scones]

I like this ideas.

[Falamazeer]

Which idea? the one for Kor's away team? or just new ores? or the combination with the mech idea?

I'd just be stoked to have more metals, Away team, mining, I'm down with whatever.
Just throwing facts and interesting metals and ores at the wall to see what sticks.

[MisterPerson]

There's no ideas here, just a pointless dump of irrelevant properties of random metals and ores

[Falamazeer]

Awfully cunty of you.

What's wrong with wanting more metals to work with?
And if you want more direction, Tell me what you need, I got ores, pictures, and descriptions of properties.

Or is codebus to busy for new metals and their uses, due to all the work that must go into furry animal yiffing, and arguing a single pixel on a sprite that's already fucked up and ugly?

[Scones]

More metals, because Mining is fucking dull in it's current state

[MisterPerson]

If you want the added metals to be the same but in different colors, that's fine. Just ask.

If you want them to have some different gameplay effect, that's fine. Come up with one.

[lumipharon]

Iron augments poison you (or just don't work at all), gotta use titanium (or gold?) instead.
Mechs could require different metals (tungsten carbide armor plates etc etc).
Build borgs out of whatever metal you got. Gold borgs for MAXIMUM BLING.

No reason to make processing the metals complex though, no one will be fucked, and I don't really think it will add to the game.

[Falamazeer]

Yeah, I'm figuring the same system as now for ore processing, otherwise damn. ore names might be a bit much too but, I'm mathing out speed bonuses based on the weight of a cubic foot of a given metal, gonna be translating between brinell and rockwell hardness for health bonuses, etc etc to try and come up with something useable at the end with normal cold rolled steel as the "Normal"

It'll be a bit, but actually it'll be accurate metalurgically, and might be interesting for modifying base mechs and borgs with different metals as the base through percentage changes.

I'll have a good laugh if I see a blinged out ripley getting torn the fuck up with a fire axe.
When I'm done with the final numbers i'll work it through with whoever becomes interested for game balance.

[Falamazeer]

Finally here we go. Reduce the metal costs for all the mech parts from the lathe to account for more reliance on new metals.
Rename metal to steel and normal wire to copper wire


Make an adjuster on speed based on wire type added
Copper wire standard
Silver wire +15% speed
gold wire +10%speed



Then for the sheet metals, these numbers were arrived at through conversion to brinell hardness through a variety of means depending on the situation. It wasn't fun.
My suggestion for this is ditch armor plates for the heavy mechs and move their necesarry researches over to the chips
Then you can competely customize your buffs based on material, have each mech require ten sheets of metal, and the last one added determines the color of the mech, I'm happy to aid with recoloring sprites if this gets picked up. Values are adjustments made per sheet in construction.

If you wanted to know how much the value would be if all ten sheets were one material, simply move the decimal one space to the right.
In example You are building a ripley You use 10 diamond sheets because you are pure badass, Your stats over a standard ripley is +300%, and your speed increases by 123.3%

You may notice aluminum/diamond is highly broken for balancing speed, but I cannot make heads or tales based on the github code how speed even works,
All I can do is tell you that's the percentage of weight difference that would occur if the materials were swapped from steel to those.
With a margin of error depending on the base steel, and the loss of numbers from converting hardness's, but I first determined the qualities, converted them to the same measurement if needed, then calculated the difference into a percentage

Any insight would be appreciated into speed mechanics though. and of course it's all adjustable with the logic of alloys, and less weight doesn't necessitate direct speed bonus's proportional to the reduction. I just left it where it was because it doesn't make sense to me code wise, meanwhile health is something I can grasp

[Stan_Studnick]

Iron augments poison you (or just don't work at all), gotta use titanium (or gold?) instead.
Mechs could require different metals (tungsten carbide armor plates etc etc).
Build borgs out of whatever metal you got. Gold borgs for MAXIMUM BLING.

No reason to make processing the metals complex though, no one will be fucked, and I don't really think it will add to the game.

No tungsten armor plates please, that's a terrible idea. Steel armor is called Rolled Homogeneous Armor becaused it's rolled so the grain structure becomes elongated and uniform, and every vehicle armor system in the world is measured by it's RHA equivalency. As for carbide plates, tungsten is a no-go, most modern vehicle armor is boron carbide which is unbelievably tough, but it shatters easily. That's actually how it defeats rounds, it shatters and absorbs kinetic energy doing so, and then finishes it's job by basically slowing it down using friction, it's like trying to force a file through a tube made out of sandpaper.

[Falamazeer]

Tungsten carbide would never be a suitable defense here due to weight and cost, if that's out of the equation it's surface hardness and wearibility would prove more than adequate for turning bullets, even high carbon steel tipped ones, and it's toughness means it wouldn't need to shatter to soak the kinetic energy, and it isn't prone to such anyways, Again, this shit is used for percussive mining, Slamming into rock and mulching it numerous times per second. So fracturing isn't all that likely short of a weapon designed specifically for such a task. Which none come to mind.

And besides that, while dark enough to soak plenty of energy from a hypothetical laser attack, that much density combined with that high of a melting temp made it a beastly choice for one of the top dogs in a spessman simulator like ours.

It'd never be considered with todays tech, it's overkill for one, it's weight is appreciably more, and it's fuckall hard to make, but in a world with nuclear reactor powered mechs, it's a different story. they can carry that, so it makes it a possible material for armor.


Edit: Found this, which might help

As you see, Tungsten carbide isn't all that far behind in general hardness, and toughness, Yeah, boron carbide might be superior mechanically, in the way that you describe, I couldn't say, It's slightly beyond my scope of expertise, But even if so, the case could easily be made that both would be fine armor.

[MisterPerson]

Stop with the realism arguments holy fuck. Focus on the game

The game
The game
The fucking game
Not real properties of metals, not comparisons of different metals in the real world, focus on the game

What differences -in game- will these metals have? That chart you posted above is a good start, but obviously it's going to need some tweaks. Round the values off and not just to the nearest whole number. Use easy-to-remember numbers like 10% or 15%. Anything close to 0 should be 0 so as to not give the illusion of difference where none exists. Don't show melting point differences unless you want one or more of them to be really high (ie using it as armor makes the mech fireproof). If you're trying to make a system where people customize their mech, you have to give them a real decision to make. What advantages does metal a have over metal b and vice versa? In what cases would metal a be better than metal b? "This metal melts at a slightly higher temp" is not a meaningful difference. "This metal will give me -0.8% health" is not a meaningful difference.

The way I'd do the metals, steel would be the worst and every other metal would have its own advantage over steel. So tungsten would be stronger, aluminum would be lighter, diamonds would be ablative, etc. I like this because it's really simple both for the player but also for designing, and also it gives a very obvious reason to actually do any of this instead of just using steel. The other possibility is to try to balance it so steel is also a viable option; that requires giving everything a disadvantage too. So aluminum would have less health, diamonds would have less resist vs non-lasters, tungsten is slower, etc. The problem is that making every metal balanced, useful, and interesting is way harder than when it's just advantages simply because there's two factors to worry about instead of just one, but it's just as doable if you want to go that road.

Another obvious issue is that you have diamond as the objectively best material, which destroys any real possibility of choice. If you WANT diamond to be the only material actually used by anyone if available, then sure, that's fine. A tiering system could work out. The actual mining process would need to be changed a bit but that's ok, I'm just not sure if it's supposed to be tiered or every material is supposed to be equally viable with different tradeoffs for different situations or what. Unless told otherwise I'm going to assume mining is going to work as-is, which means some materials are abundant and others less so but all are available from the start.

I'm pretty confident mech speed %'s will be exactly how you want them. How that relates to the other proposal about mechs linked in the OP, I'm not 100% sure. That's an issue to be hashed out later.

Obviously I'm ignoring people who just want a gold mech because it's gold. Those people are going to pick gold no matter what, so there's no reason to even consider or talk about them.

[lumipharon]

Don't make any 'objective best' shit. Unless it's some rare, not usually obtainable stuff, like ground up wizard bones or something.
Jut make it different trade offs. Speed, HP , resists etc.

Nothing wrong with armors that are straight out mechanically inferior, if they have gimmick bonuses like BLING/radioactive/reactive corgi meat armor etc.

[Falamazeer]

Fair point, diamonds are OP, but to be fair I didn't envision that large of a difference when I set out, and that's at ten full sheets, I'd say it needs to be reasonably good for people who just use a few sheets to boost over-all performance, and wouldn't be expecting a full diamond mech in the game without the crusher being insane.


And of course game mechanics come before realism, I just mapped the realism to give a starting point, and objectively bad materials were singled out already.
Any adjustments after the fact to speed and or health are fully justifiable due to this just being an armor system change, not a change to the hydraulics or the arms and legs and what not.

I'll work up a rounded out more polished list some time soon. and we'll go from there.

[ThanatosRa]

... But but, Gold Borgs.

[Falamazeer]

Well I had an idea for that actually, once I get further into the chart, balancing for bots in a different way as speed bonuses would obviously hit an upper limit.

But yeah, progress still being made, and of course further polish will no doubt be needed by more experienced hands than I

[Falamazeer]

My new adjustments, seems fairly reasonable, diamond speed was reduced, And I figure borgs could use these values too but at five sheet values.
Edit, i also had the idea that if a stat falls below 0% it's not do-able, so if health were to reach negative numbers you'd get a prompt that the mech cannot support the weight of this metal.

And if they were too slow such as golds -150% at ten sheets they'd be unable to move