Plzen wrote:Joohan wrote:Who produces steel in Hibernia? Who is it distributed to? Could it be sold to Icedonian merchants in exchange for tamed horses?
The Commonwealth would by this point have fairly sophisticated iron- and steelworking techniques, courtesy of technology exchange with the Imperium.
The Bessemer process can be summarised in one sentence if you know high school chemistry. Blast furnaces are more complex, but still one-paragraph material. They’re difficult technologies, but they’re not particularly complex in principle.
Not very widespread yet, but there’ll be enough to sell over the North Sea market.
I'm going to have to run some skepticism on this. High carbon iron isn't the same thing as steel, and Imperial steel is made via a rather complicated series of reduction, oxidation, and alloying processes. Without, at a minimum, knowledge of the composition of the refractory lining of a converter, you'll only put out diffidently dosed iron. Then, of course, there are matters such as the temperature of the blast, the time to hold individual batches to, how to adjust the air mixture of the process for different ore inclusions, and so on. I seriously doubt any engineer or whatever passes for them in the Commonwealth will hit upon that in five years of trial and error. I only know such matters on account of an education that took nearly that long of constant work, and my degree was focused into exactly that - ferrous metallurgy.
Granted, that iron will be superior to the hammering and bloom-making process currently in use in the Commonwealth. But the design of a converter and her operation are exactly the sort of things that won't be part of any sort of technology exchange, certainly.