LOL Videos of awesome

Watch this one even if you don't like cat videos normally. The soloist starts to play at 1:04.

Surprisingly nice music.

 

Hollywood remake of the BBCs 'Hawking', looks interesting...

 

Now that's rather cool...



Sweet...

 

The very best bit is from 2:10.

Sam

 

Hmm, I thought Katanas were made by folding & hammering a piece of steel hundreds of time, not bashing a solid lump into shape...

 

Cool, love the graphics style.

 

They were [traditionally] folded several times, and that was mainly so they could create something servicable out of the woefully bad ore they had to work with...

Despite the rabid fanboyism surrounding them, Katana are not magic super godly swords, they're just swords...

 

^ related

 

Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't believe Katana to be magical weapons either, would much rather have a European Long sword or Broad sword any day ( one day... ), it's more the traditional process that was missing really, regardless of the quality of the raw metal- they folded the steel to make Damascus blades on the old the original version of Man at Arms sometimes and the result was beautiful, showing the hundreds or thousands of layers ( not folded hundreds of times, my bad )...

 

Right. i'm only going to say this once, and i'm not looking for an argument.

The reason that Japanese swords were made the way they were (folding several billion times, them laminating high carbon and low carbon steel together) is because in medieval Japan, when they were making the swords that everyone is going FanBoi about, THEY HAD REALLY POOR IRON ORE.

Most of the iron deposits in japan are shot through with silica (sand) and Quartz. AND they have no coal mines worth speaking of, and so had to use Charcoal (which burns about 2/3rds as hot as coal).

AND they used something called a Tatara furnace. This works by forcing air though a mix of powdered iron ore and powdered charcoal. , and it was continually fed until it was full. then alowed to cool and broken open.

There was NO SLAG REMOVAL PROCESS.. which means that all of the slag that was contained with in.
(in a European style process, or one using coal, most of the smaller slag deposits were burned out, and the larger ones floated to the top, and the pool of steel was larger, due to being hotter)

So what you've got is a lump of badly made steel which is full of impurities.

To get this to a workable state, you have to heat it up, then hammer it out, to break up the impurities . After a while you HAVE to fold the piece, otherwise it gets too thin, and too wide.

after you repeat this process a few dozen times, any impurities have worked their way to the top, and been hammered out, or have been broken up and dispersed throughout the work piece.

The problem is, you now have a pure piece of metal.. but it's been worked so much it's useless as a sword.. hence they add a high carbon steel piece.

European blacksmiths were doing this for ploughs around the same time Japanese sword masters were doing this for Swords.

By Comparison, the steel used in Middle European swords of the time was Mild steel (so half way between the high carbon hard steel used for the cutting edge, and the low carbon harder steel used for the center) .. AND it was heat treated and tempered to an extent the Japanese sword masters never even knew was possible..


Ok. i'll give you the fact that Japanese sword masters worked out the best shape for a (mostly) horse mounted slashing weapon a long time before any one else.. however this was necessary, due to the fact that if you didn't work this out, you ended up with a lot of broken swords...

 

Thank you for unnecessarily repeating the exact same thing Redflames already said, only in more detail; I do understand the reasons for the process and already researched why it was done that way. But thanks anyway....

 

Really busy at work this afternoon

 

So sick...


This game looks so good, so terrifying...