Armageddon???? (Part Fifty Up)

[Darth Raptor]

How do demons know how and where to hit unprotected shopping malls? How do succubi know where to find Bill Clinton's favorite late night McDonald's? How then, is it such a problem for Belial to find his bombing targets?

[Starglider]

How do succubi know where to find Bill Clinton's favorite late night McDonald's?

The demons used to be able to read human's minds, directly from hell. They can't really do that any more, thanks to shielded headwear. Furthermore, succubi were specifically created for intelligence work and individuals often have several thousand years of practice at locating, manipulating and assassinating important mortals.

How do demons know how and where to hit unprotected shopping malls?

They don't, really. They just latch onto an unshielded nephilim and wait for them to enter a crowded area.

How then, is it such a problem for Belial to find his bombing targets?

If it isn't already obvious; Belial's motley crew are a bunch of amateurs with little in the way of intelligence assets or experience. However they do have some unusual capabilities, plus the high stakes and time pressure are causing them to think outside the (demonic) box.

[Typhonis 1]

Damn why do I have the feeling my hometown would have a nice big bullseye on it? We have a pop of 30,000 at best and over 15 factories though some are shut down.

[KlavoHunter]

How do succubi know where to find Bill Clinton's favorite late night McDonald's?

The demons used to be able to read human's minds, directly from hell. They can't really do that any more, thanks to shielded headwear. Furthermore, succubi were specifically created for intelligence work and individuals often have several thousand years of practice at locating, manipulating and assassinating important mortals.

... Which means jack and shit, in the scheme of things, as Clinton and his Secret Service bodyguards wasted the Succubus after him, as a Succubus' means of seduction are hilariously over the top.

Edit: Not to mention that a succubus can no longer so much as walk around in a human city and expect to go unnoticed, as their "appear to be a good-looking woman" entanglement abilities are ruined the moment a SINGLE person with a tinfoil hat on sees them.

[fusion]

Technical question; does anyone have a good idea of the effect that interposing a ~5mm bronze plate between a demon and an incoming round will have? Basically everything I know about small-calibre penetration comes from here.

Shouldn't do much for stopping a .388 mag round. After all a 7.62 X 51 almost penetrated 1.25 inches (31.75 mm) of bullet proof plastic.link
A .338 Lupua round, however, has twice the kinetic energy which is bound to be powerful enough to pass through the heavy plastic and still be able to kill some one.
Lupua round
7.62 Nato

Luckily 5 mm of bronze is no where as strong as 32 mm of bullet proof plastic, so there so be no problem in kill the baldrick.

[Junghalli]

... Which means jack and shit, in the scheme of things, as Clinton and his Secret Service bodyguards wasted the Succubus after him, as a Succubus' means of seduction are hilariously over the top.

Of course, if they can read peoples minds they would have had excellent intelligence on humanity going in if they'd put even the slightest effort into it.

[Enforcer Talen]

By the time they had realized intel was important, we had already set up passive CI

[Chris OFarrell]

I wonder what China is doing in all of this, we've heard almost nothing at all about the PRC really. I'm sure they're not going to have many people 'falling' because of the message and they have a huge manpower pool to draw on when you include all the reserves, paramilitaries and auxiliaries.

Plus while they may not be able to churn out uber high tech gear, they are plenty well set up to mass produce quite decent armored cars, APC's and IFV's for the various paramilitary organizations worldwide being formed to deal with Demon raiding.

And they probably have an absurd amount of Tube and Rocket arty they can loan to the allies in the Middle East or something...

[KlavoHunter]

I wonder what China is doing in all of this, we've heard almost nothing at all about the PRC really.

China has problems with power projection; and thus getting supplies and military units flowing into the Iraq area will be slow going for them.

[Darth Wong]

I went to look up the physical properties of bronze, but unfortunately (and not surprisingly) my textbooks contain only information on modern heat-treated solution-strengthened bronze alloys, which are vastly stronger than an actual Bronze Age bronze would have been.

Having said that, a high-strength cold-rolled phosphor bronze has a UTS of roughly 560 MPa, while a good-quality cold-rolled steel will have a UTS of roughly 860 MPa.

I think one might be surprised by how strong a modern high-quality bronze would be, particularly something like manganese bronze after heat treat. But this really doesn't tell us anything about the kind of shitty bronze that Belial would have available to him.

[Academia Nut]

Well, the reason we had to wait for the iron age to build longswords was because a sword with a blade longer than say three or four feet (call it a metre) exceeded the tensile strength of the bronze they had available at the time, so it was physically impossible to build a combat worthy sword significantly larger than say a gladius. Might tell you something about the sorts of bronze Hell has to work with.

[Darth Wong]

Yeah; you could actually make a passable sword out of modern high-quality bronze. You could have probably kicked ass in the ancient era with it too. Unfortunately for the purposes of this discussion, the thermophysical characteristics of ancient bronze have absolutely no relevance whatsoever to modern engineering work, so I'm not going to be able to find anything about the subject in my texts.

[Surlethe]

Would the characteristics of copper be close enough to get working estimates with?

[Chris OFarrell]

I wonder what China is doing in all of this, we've heard almost nothing at all about the PRC really.

China has problems with power projection; and thus getting supplies and military units flowing into the Iraq area will be slow going for them.

They have problems when fighting against other powers, making hostile attacks over long distances.

The logistics of getting to Iraq are greatly simplified with the fact that the supply line is friendly and they don't have to make a forced entry assault. I mean they could just load up vehicles, munitions and supplies onto civilian superfreighters if they really wanted to. Otherwise, if they go overland, its going to be a hell of a trip, across and down through Iran like Russia is doing.

[Darth Wong]

Would the characteristics of copper be close enough to get working estimates with?

I don't see why it would be. The whole point of bronze was to create the first widely used alloy, in order to produce something better than either component metal.

[Academia Nut]

Yeah, copper is a great deal softer than bronze, which is actually harder than iron (but not steel) and its resistance to corrosion makes it really useful. In fact, there are really only three reasons for the switch from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age (only really two outside of Europe). The first is that while bronze tools are mostly superior, they can't be sharpened like iron so you have to reforge the whole damn thing, which is rather uneconomical. The second is that while iron is inferior to bronze, steel is not. It's harder to make, but beats the shit out of bronze any day in terms of strength. The third reason was mostly economic though, in that supplies of tin in Europe were disrupted, making bronze manufacture difficult and forcing people to switch over to the softer and harder to make iron.

Anyway, I did some Googling and Wiki-ing and found that the Greeks used a 65cm long bronze sword called a xiphon. It was leaf shaped, so something like a constant width of 3-5cm with a thickness of say 1mm could be used to get an approximate idea of the volume of the blade (if anyone has better dimension please step up), and then use a modern bronze's density to figure out the mass. We could then take the typical swing speeds and figure out the momentum imparted by an impact and try to work out a crude lower limit on the tensile strength of the bronze. We could then up the length to 100cm, say that it would break, and get an upper limit, and compare the range to modern values.

I have no idea how to work the math and physics on the impact part though, but if anyone does and actually cares, that would be how I would make a guess as to the sort of stuff the baldricks would probably have.

[Sidewinder]

problem is bronze is a soft metal much softer than steel which is why ancient warriors that were equipped with steel swords had an advantage over the bronze guy. Considering medium caliber bullets can punch through a few millimeters of steel, bronze should pose little problem.

Of course, with their strength, a demon could wear a much thicker plate than a human could. That should be considered.

If medium caliber bullets aren't powerful enough, the humans can increase production of .50 BMG ammo and rifles chambered for it. I know there's a limit to what a normal human can handle regarding a weapon's weight and recoil, but demons also have a limit regarding the weight of their armor, and I suspect demons will hit the limitations of their armor BEFORE humans hit the limitations of their weapons.

[Firethorn]

The first is that while bronze tools are mostly superior, they can't be sharpened like iron so you have to reforge the whole damn thing, which is rather uneconomical.

You sure about that? I did some checking on the internet, definitely not a 100% reliable source, but I did find a number of references to sharpening bronze blades, and they didn't say that it took reforging.

Given the way a stone works, it should work as long as it's harder than the bronze.

Looking stuff up, iron < bronze < steel. In some cases good quality bronze was better than poor quality steel, so the age of iron didn't instantly replace bronze by any means.

[Sidewinder]

I wonder what China is doing in all of this, we've heard almost nothing at all about the PRC really. I'm sure they're not going to have many people 'falling' because of the message and they have a huge manpower pool to draw on when you include all the reserves, paramilitaries and auxiliaries.

Mao no longer rules China, and the idea of making every Chinese man a member of the militia died with him. That means access to firearms is restricted, so the Chinese will suffer greater casualties during demonic raids.

At least until the gun controls are lifted. There should be MULTIMILLIONS of rifles in storage from Mao's era, assuming they weren't scrapped or transferred to Chinese allies after his death. A man armed with a 7.62 x 54 mm R or 7.62 x 39 mm rifle may be unable to kill a demon with one shot, but a platoon of militiamen aiming at the same target...

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Would the characteristics of copper be close enough to get working estimates with?

For early bronze weapons? Definitely. The tin content was rarely controlled very well, and the process involved simply 80 - 90 Cu and 10 - 20 Sn with no other components to the alloy.

[Darth Wong]

Would the characteristics of copper be close enough to get working estimates with?

For early bronze weapons? Definitely. The tin content was rarely controlled very well, and the process involved simply 80 - 90 Cu and 10 - 20 Sn with no other components to the alloy.

Marina, modern phosphor bronze has only 10% tin (or less). You seem to be assuming that if bronze has 80-90% copper, then its mechanical characteristics should be very close to pure copper. This is not the case; with proper processing, solid solution strengthening can produce dramatic increases in strength and 10% of the impurity is quite adequate.

[Darth Wong]

Here's a supplier page for C51000 bronze:

http://www.atlasbronze.com/C51000_properties.html

UTS of nearly 500 MPa, yield strength of 400 MPa, Rockwell B hardness of 78. Ancient metallurgists would have killed for this stuff, and it's 95% copper.

Here's a source for the properties of pure copper: Link

In its cold-rolled state, it is surprisingly strong, although a ~140 MPa yield strength is nothing to get excited about compared to bronze or steel.

A mere 5% tin can triple the strength of the stuff, so you really can't judge ancient bronze just by the fact that it has only 10-20% tin. However, it's also true that ancient metallurgy was obviously quite inferior to modern metallurgy, and metallurgy in Hell would probably be worse still, because of the foul atmosphere. Unless Belial's metal castings are airtight for maximum process control (something I consider rather unlikely), he would have all kinds of sulphur and other bits of unwanted material in his castings. He'd probably have bad porosity, uneven distributions of the tin impurity, etc. Some parts of the metal would have so much tin that it can't go into solution, while other parts would be almost devoid of it. The resulting material with inconsistent microstructure and composition would probably be rather prone to early fracture.

Given all of that, on second thought I suppose it wouldn't be such a bad idea to use the properties of modern cold-rolled copper as a template, although not for the reasons given earlier. If we use the properties of hardened cold-rolled copper (since soft copper has almost no measurable yield strength and would be absolutely terrible for any kind of armour or weapons), then we'd be talking about UTS and yield strength of roughly 200 MPa and 150 MPa respectively. Compare this to thin-plate Armox 370T Class 1, which has a tensile strength of roughly 1250 MPa and yield strength of 1000 MPa. So if we run with this assumption of Bronze Age bronze being roughly equivalent to modern cold-rolled copper, then it's got roughly 15% of the strength of modern steel plate armour, and its impact resistance is probably significantly worse. You could probably assume that it's maybe a tenth as good as modern steel plate armour, at best.

If, on the other hand, Belial miraculously has bronze which is as good as modern C51000, then it's got maybe 30-40% of the strength of modern steel plate armour, although it probably still has significantly less impact resistance.

I would expect 5mm of Belial's bronze armour to offer almost no resistance against bullets, being equivalent to less than a mm of steel plate.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Would the characteristics of copper be close enough to get working estimates with?

For early bronze weapons? Definitely. The tin content was rarely controlled very well, and the process involved simply 80 - 90 Cu and 10 - 20 Sn with no other components to the alloy.

Marina, modern phosphor bronze has only 10% tin (or less). You seem to be assuming that if bronze has 80-90% copper, then its mechanical characteristics should be very close to pure copper. This is not the case; with proper processing, solid solution strengthening can produce dramatic increases in strength and 10% of the impurity is quite adequate.

Sorry, I'm aware of that; I just figured we could fudge by using the figures for copper in the short term. I do know that if you put to much tin into it you get "bell bronze", which is so brittle that it easily fractures. The point I was badly trying to get across is that they have no quality control, so the likelihood of shattering, as Nathan Okun would put it, is very high under a high-velocity impact. Therefore, I strongly suspect a lot of the time the bronze will simply shatter, and the best they'll do is induce some tumble into the bullet--which might make it more destructive, since it will cut up a larger entry wound and cause more bleed-out. Unfortunately, the armour tables that Okun has online only go from the 1800s forward.

[Darth Wong]

Sorry, I'm aware of that; I just figured we could fudge by using the figures for copper in the short term. I do know that if you put to much tin into it you get "bell bronze", which is so brittle that it easily fractures. The point I was badly trying to get across is that they have no quality control, so the likelihood of shattering, as Nathan Okun would put it, is very high under a high-velocity impact. Therefore, I strongly suspect a lot of the time the bronze will simply shatter, and the best they'll do is induce some tumble into the bullet--which might make it more destructive, since it will cut up a larger entry wound and cause more bleed-out. Unfortunately, the armour tables that Okun has online only go from the 1800s forward.

I suppose this would all depend on the kind of heat treatment that Belial's metalworkers understand. It's tempting to say they probably know nothing at all of heat treatment, but I believe there are some indications that even the primitive Bronze Age metalworkers knew about heat treatment on some level, albeit not as sophisticated as what we do today. If they did, then they could theoretically keep the bronze from becoming too brittle, although that again depends on how much crap gets into the bronze. Considering the fact that a few hours of exposure can apparently produce permanent lung damage, I have to imagine that the air is unbelievably bad, which can't be good for the work they're doing unless they can isolate it from the environment with their primitive tools. Again, not likely given their apparent contempt for people who rely on tools rather than brawn and balls to achieve victory.

[Shroom Man 777]

Then again, Belial is pretty smart for an average demon. And he was able to manufacture superior tridents. How does that work, anyway? Tridents that conduct bio-electricity to become... goa'uld staff weapons?