Graydon wrote:Draken wrote:So there's no chance for rediscovery of modern alloys?
Aluminium, magnesium, and titanium are refined using electrochemistry; they're impossibly expensive to refine chemically. (The Emperor Napoleon had a set of 24 seatings of gold dinnerware and one aluminium seating for himself. There are some really gorgeous aluminium and gold parade helmets and such from that period, too; chemically refined aluminium is more expensive than gold.)
A whole lot of modern steels depends on having thermocouples (temperature sensors) and lasers (spectrographs) which depend on electricity and repeated iterations of pure materials for laser crystals, to provide process control. (Those cheap five dollar bread knives involve really consistent alloys.) Lots of modern steels pass through electric furnaces or are electrically impulse hardened in applications like saws, too.
Nickel-steel they've already got, it's being used for armor. Chromium uses electric furnaces for refining; don't know offhand about vanadium and molybdenum. But in general chemistry is all about electrons and benefits enormously from having electricity involved. No electricity will seriously matter to the progress of chemistry on Safehold.
Discovery is different from use of existing knowledge - the CoGA is in a hole because they don't have access to OWL and his online library and are therefore bumbling around in the dark. (You don't need to discover what you already know...)
Odd chemical pathways that where not exploited on Earth because either a marginally less efficient technology was already in widespread use (and thus had economies of scale) or didn't have an major application because the global technological path was different could be widely used on Safehold.
Composite structures are one example, why use titanium if you can use carbon fiber or Kevlar? (Or Steel Thistle reinforced plastics).
The plastics would be a little limited as the Polyolefines like high density polyethylene, polypropylene and their co-polymers use aluminium and titanium based catalysts (and tetra ethyl aluminum and titanium solutions are really fun to play with anyway). That said urethanes, phenolics and epoxies are possible in the thermosets and styrenes are relatively easy and the feed stocks will be coming out of the steel mills waste streams from the coke ovens and pickling baths.
