Why steel and not tungsten???

[Craigjw]

Why are the bulkhead tiles made of steel and not tungsten?

Isn't tungsten one of them super rare earth metals, that is super strong, super conductive and super heavy. 

If Tungsten was made into an alloy, it would be harder than diamond!

I think Tungsten should be given the credit it deserves, rather than demoted to a lesser rank than steel, which is an amateur metal at best.

[Carnis]

Do you build bridges out of tungsten or steel? Do you build x-ray lamps out of tungsten or steel?

Tungsten is hard & heat resistant, but steel is the better building material.

[Craigjw]

Tungsten is very transparent to X-rays, which makes it great for research into High energy physics involving X-rays.

Tungsten isn't just hard, it's super hard.  Steel is like putty compared to Tungsten and if it weren't as rare as, it would make bridges much better than iron does.

Iron/steel is cheap and common.

[Christophlette]

1 minute ago, Craigjw said:

Steel is like putty compared to Tungsten and if it weren't as rare as, it would make bridges much better than iron does.

You may be missing the flexibility. Constructions need flexibility to survive the decades. I'm not sure if it would matter or not but if a material is not flexible enough, it may break way faster than a flexible one.

[Sevio]

What baffles me is that among the raw metals, gold amalgam of all things gets the +50 C overheat temperature and not tungsten or iron.

[Craigjw]

27 minutes ago, Christophlette said:

You may be missing the flexibility. Constructions need flexibility to survive the decades. I'm not sure if it would matter or not but if a material is not flexible enough, it may break way faster than a flexible one.

An alloy of Tungsten is High speed steel, which uses 18% Tungsten, this is super springy, so springy, they make high grade springs out of it.

25 minutes ago, Sevio said:

What baffles me is that among the raw metals, gold amalgam of all things gets the +50 C overheat temperature and not tungsten or iron.

Agreed, gold has a really low melting point.

Approximate melting temperatures of real materials

Gold 1000 C

Iron 1400 C

Steel 1500 C

Tungsten 3400 C

Btw, Tungsten has THE highest melting point of any of the pure metals, it's the Daddy of melting points.

[Christophlette]

1 hour ago, Craigjw said:

An alloy of Tungsten is High speed steel, which uses 18% Tungsten, this is super springy, so springy, they make high grade springs out of it.

Like I said, you "may". And you didn't miss that. I didn't know the properties of this alloy so I made a hypothesis ^^

 

Tungsten also conducts less heat than gold in reality. I think it's the opposite in the game.

[Carnis]

1 hour ago, Christophlette said:

Tungsten also conducts less heat than gold in reality. I think it's the opposite in the game.

Common misconception, gold conducts More, but melts at lower temp.

[nvzboy]

I took a quick look at some material properties like tensile strength, young's modulus and thermal expansion and you are indeed right that tungsten is superior in every one of those categories that matter when building something like say a pump.

I guess this is video game logic at it's finest. Steel takes the most effort to get in this game so it makes sense for it to have the best properties. Not saying it is right, but then again, it is sort of a trope of fiction that gold or diamond are perfectly suitable materials for a legendary weapon though anyone with a bit of science knowlegde will point out those are terrible choices.

Tropes before truths

[Craigjw]

I would like to see Tungsten have some fame, rather than boring old iron and steel take all the glory, Tungsten is after all an awesome material.

[Nativel]

Because you can dig wolframite and make tungsten on cycle 20 or so, and steel is much harder to gain. If you like to use Tungsten instead of Steel, then developers have to make it fabrication in same hard way as a steel, so Tungsten need some Lime and so on for fabrication then ok.

[Sevio]

No one here is expecting tungsten to be so easy to refine as it is now, if it were to become something more valuable than steel for high heat applications.

I'd certainly be happy with an update about crafting and producing refined things for the more advanced tools in the game instead of making nearly everything in the game out of the same raw materials that were dug up from the asteroid.

[Sasza22]

Maybe we will get more alloys in the future. If so i expect a tungsten alloy to be one of them. But as for now we need things to be simple. Bunker tiles are unbreakable. You don`t get harder than that. They need steel for construction. But i think in the future thy might need concrete as well. If they add more reqirements and make steel eaier to make then there`s time to add more alloys to the game.

7 hours ago, Craigjw said:

Iron 1400 C

Steel 1500 C

Fun fact. Pure iron has a higher melting point than steel at 1535^oC. The addition of carbon to the mix lowers the overall melting point.

[psusi]

9 hours ago, Sevio said:

What baffles me is that among the raw metals, gold amalgam of all things gets the +50 C overheat temperature and not tungsten or iron.

Indeed.  And why can't you make machines like pumps out of steel to get the really high overheat temperature steel gives?  Though yea, tungsten should be higher.

[ImpalerWrG]

I would rename/recolor Gold in the game to Platinum, Asteroids are rich in Platinum (lots of ideas about mining them for it). 

And Platinum has a melting point of 1700 so the current behavior would actually makes sense, Platinum is also a great chemical catalyst so many chemical processing buildings being built specifically out of it would make sense.

Agree that Tungsten needs way higher melting point, but don't think it needs to be the bunker material.

Steel is certainly stronger then iron alone, but modern super alloys are a mixture of several metals not just iron+carbon

I also find it odd that were in need of lime to make steel but not to make iron, that makes no sense, lime is a flux used to remove the impurities of raw ore.  Steel can then be made by simply combining pure iron and carbon without any Flux.

[Sevio]

On 8/18/2018 at 11:55 PM, ImpalerWrG said:

I also find it odd that were in need of lime to make steel but not to make iron, that makes no sense, lime is a flux used to remove the impurities of raw ore.  Steel can then be made by simply combining pure iron and carbon without any Flux.

You see, there's a reason that refined iron looks red in the game. That's because all the iron you refine immediately gets a layer of rust overtop of it! So those impurities have to be removed again when you make steel!

And the iron ore is... native unrusted iron buried in rock. Yes, that's it.

Spoiler

Of course we know why - steel is a late-game material that needs to be more difficult to make than just refining iron a second time, and a reason was needed to get players into ranching.