cogman

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

Ever wonder why it goes bronze age and then iron age? It's because it's a minor miracle humanity discovered how to smelt iron. Iron requires temperatures higher than you can achieve with just wood. Iron absorbs carbon and sulfur making it worthless (in the wrong mixtures).

The process is complex and resource intensive.

Assuming a bronze age civilization, copper or tin is the best you can hope for. Finding a magnet is going to be difficult because there's not really ferromagnetic materials available. In the modern era the most common material is iron.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Copper is the easy part. Get it hot enough and you'll end up with high quality copper.. Sourcing the copper is much more difficult.

Finding magnets is somewhat simple, you just need some iron... That's a lot more difficult. Iron smelting is way harder than copper smelting (especially without electricity).

Making bearings is also difficult. It requires not only iron smelting but also high precision machining.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Voltage * Amps tells you how fast the water will boil. So lower voltage can be fixed with higher amps.

The UK runs at 230V and 13A, ~3kW max. The US is typically at 120V and 15A, 1.8kW max. Though 20A circuits exist, 2.4kW.

view more: ‹ prev next ›