I can't imagine how messy it was to kill someone in battle before shit was made from iron, just annihilating the other guy's exposed soft parts quickly and until they die.
>>64340464I don't think iron really makes that much of a difference, you're still hacking someone apart until they die
>>64340496Bronze is soft and will lose its edge of it hits bone or armor.
>>64340464I love bronze age weapons and armor
>>64340506Have you ever tried to cut through bone with steel? You won't have a very good time. Never mind striking armor.
>>64340464>Grug can't imagine how messy it was to kill someone in battle before shit was made from stone, just annihilating the other guy's exposed soft parts quickly and until they die.
>>64340509Bronze is considerably worse at holding an edge.
>>64340526yeah, that's not really going to change much. If I hack your shoulder with a bronze axe and an iron axe you won't be able to tell me the difference.
Since there was no widespread use of blunt weapons, swords and spears were probably powerful enough to kill.
>>64340529>miss>blade is now completely fucked>has to be melted down and recast>inb4 b-b-but that's not how it works Why do you think cultures around the world by and large dropped bronze weapons and tools for ferrous ones?
>>64340526bronze isn't quite as good at holding an edge, but bronze swords were essentially on par in terms of strength and quality as early iron swords were. You had the benefit that you could just recast or roll over edge damage
>>64340575the reason cultures around the world stopped using bronze weapons was the collapse of bronze age trade routes that kept tin from distant parts of the known world flowing into the foundries. Iron was adopted out of necessity and abundance.
>>64340575>miss>blade is now completely fuckedThat goes for iron too though. Go buy a sword, and smash an iron plate with it. See what happens. You are vastly underestimating bronze and vastly overestimating iron.>b-butYeah, that's not how it works.>has to be melted down and recastmeanwhile you can't even do that easily with iron. Your fucked up sword is permanently ruined.>Why do you think cultures around the world by and large dropped bronze weapons and tools for ferrous ones?Numerous reasons. The biggest however, is that iron is naturally abundant globally. Few regions have both tin and copper in supply. Tin was exported all the fuckin way from Britain to the middle east. Once you figure out iron, you don't have to be reliant on nations (if you can even call them that) beyond the edge of the known world for a crucial component of your military industrial complex.
Did the Hittites have iron-making technology? The beginning of the Iron Age marked the beginning of a long historical dark age, and it seems that it took quite some time before the use of iron was clearly confirmed.
>>64340526>>64340506>>64340464Bronze blades were work hardened at the edges. The hardened bronze used for weapons in this manner was much harder than the wrought iron that replaced it, and is of similar hardness for most battlefield uses to steel (steel varies in hardness a lot, and the bronze stuff sat somewhere in the middle of the range for the steel on weapons, samplea across a long period and at many points on weapons).The problem with bronze swords isn't that they couldn't be made with edges hard enough to hold, it's actually the opposite: Using them slowly continues to work harden the piece until it's too hard and embrittles, then breaks. To undo the progress of this effect, or to do any even minor repairs to any bronze arms or armor, you need to anneal them and then work harden them again, which is no shit an amount of skilled craftwork work that approaches what it took to originally make the piece from ingots to finished, and requires access to a forge.The thing that makes steel a god tier material is precisely that it doesn't work harden but still has fantastic hardness, fledibility and durability.
>>64340651>Did the Hittites have iron-making technology?Yes.>>64340663>The thing that makes steel a god tier material is precisely that it doesn't work hardenAre you high? Steel absolutely work hardens.
>>64340651>Did the Hittites have iron-making technology?Yes. Iron and steel existed in the Bronze Age, but it was called the Bronze Age because most (not all) metal objects were made of bronze. The Iron Age did not start with the discovery of iron but rather its popularization, making it super common.
>>64340651Hittites had fairly good iron making and working during the bronze ageThe main killer for Iron and Steel is just the sheer amount of heat people have to pump into things, its not too hard to get charcoal fires into 1000-1100C to make a good bronze alloy and it'll get it there relatively quickly so you can knock out a lot of stuff in a days work. Iron by comparison is a huge pain in everyone's arse t get temperatures of 1500-1600C and hold it there for quite a few hours to process it, requiring people to make small mountains of charcoal, dudes stamping on bellows to keep the air going, around the clock with other people chucking in the ore and fuel. A big bloom of iron might be taking tonnes of fuel, people who aren't halfwits and that's even before a carburisation process to make steel.Which isn't much fun eitherOnce you batter and beat the shit out of the iron into a wrought form to get most of the slag out of it, then you're back in there baking the shit overnight at fairly high temperatures to get the necessary carbon into the iron to make steel.Its a really intensive process that practically requires some degree of industrialistion, forestry, fuel making, ore gathering and somewhere down the line with be dudes bonking hot metal with hammers
>>64340683>Are you high? Steel absolutely work hardens.I mean it has a fatigue limit high enough that you can do useful work, all of your work in most applications, underneath it.Pretty much everything you do with a bronze sword will be above its fatigue limit and a lot of it will be in the low cycle limit region - it will harden and lose ductility through normal use and eventually catastrophically fail. This is particularly severe because the process of work hardening is necessary for bronze to have a hard enough edge for cutting, but is also necessarily a fatigue inducing process that must occur in low or finite cycle region to function, thus eating into that fatigue limit before use even starts.Iron, despite being softer, has roughly double the fatigue limit and usually about two orders of magnitude for cycles before failure at a given stress in most cases. Steel, even pretty mediocre quality steel like was used very early on, would have a fatigue limit 50% higher than the low cycle regime for bronze alloys. We're talking literally 100 cycles at about 200MPa for bronze to fail (maybe 1000 at 140), while wrought iron will do about 1000 or 10000 cycles at the stresses of a 100 cycle regime for tin bronze (and fatigue limits of something like 60-110MPa for the bronze and maybe 80-170MPa for the wrought iron). Conversely, even something like 1060 steel has a fatigue limit of 320MPa and a modern spring steel like 5160 might have a fatigue limit anywhere from 750-800MPa (for a 1 billion cycle failure) depending on tempering.
