ok, but humans also regenerate blood, very slowly but it does happen. So theoretically, you could contract your family members to draw blood to be used to make a longsword out of your family’s bloodline. And have it become an heirloom.
imagine, over the centuries of blood donation, the sword slowly grows from a knife, into an absolutely huge dragonslayer behemoth
the living sword
Is it slowly? I thought you replaced all the blood from a blood donation within a day or two
i don’t think it’s a day or two, the recommended regulation is i think a certain amount once per month? or so. You’d have to google it.
I think the body recovers from losing blood in about a day, but it doesn’t replenish it.
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Let’s do the math…
You can donate three times a year to the red cross (once every 112 days). According to some page, you donate around 10% of your blood volume each time.
That means, for a volume equivalent of 300 people, you’d need to donate 3000 times, which would take around 1000 years.
The vampire is going to need more people, or to keep a person alive 1000 years with vampire magic.
When you’re harvesting the blood iron of your enemies you don’t have time for ethics. A controlled study managed 4 weeks within ethical boundaries, maybe we can cut that in half unethically. So 14 days, 3000 . 14 = 115 years. So when you torture two people, you could manage to do 58 years. Better start early!
Orrrrrr capture the entire family of your foe and then you can name the sword something super cool about ending family lines
Maybe the sword is just the product of a small cult which drains blood to create it?
And then they do really cool cult stuff with the sword?
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The same blood bank? You sure that’s not plasma instead of blood? Plasma re-makes itself way faster than red blood cells.
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Oh. That explains it. Normally in the US a typical donation is a full pint. Not a half pint.
You’re off on blood production. “Safe” would be once every six to eight weeks for a pint. Plasma can be taken a lot more often. The red blood cells take a while to replenish.
But let’s get real. You’re not concerned about your enemy feeling well. Force them to take iron supplements and take a pint every other week. They’ll likely stay alive that way. Fuck em, right?
Or just mix in a few enemies with some normal iron.
But then you need to feed them iron-rich foods which could be used to make a vegan alternative instead, expanding your potential market.
Id love to see the math on the amount of iron in a person’s blood, because I find it HIGHLY questionable that there’s enough iron in only 300 people to make a full iron sword. I’m too lazy to do it myself though.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longsword
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body#Elemental_composition_list
The numbers roughly check out. Not sure how much one can extract by just draining the blood though.
You’re both in luck! Someone else linked to an article that breaks down how it could work in reality: https://startrek.website/comment/9430643
All three of you are in luck! Someone made a video attempting to actually forge a sword this way!: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
XcQ
Gotta hide it better than that chief
What an awful video! You should be ashamed! I should be ashamed just for watching it!
It’s a great video. My friends and I have watched it many times
Listen there’s definitely enough carbon in the body to boost that into a steel sword.
If we can make diamonds out of corpses, we can make steel.
Just toss your enemies into the recycler that extracts material for the replicator and replicate yourself a sword.
Hold up… Wouldn’t a diamond sword be better than a steel one?
Too brittle, I think.
For ceremony, though, perfect!
Way too brittle if it was the weight of a typical sword, and way too heavy otherwise.
On the other hand, the cutting edge of that sword would be pretty amazing while it lasted.
well what about just having the blade being diamond, like those diamond saws used for cutting rock.
Do you mean just the edge? Because with a sword basically the whole thing other than the handle is the blade.
But yeah, with a tiny diamond edge you’d probably have the best of both worlds, a light, flexible sword with an ultra-sharp cutting edge.
Still, the edge probably wouldn’t last for long. If the diamond was attached to a steel blade and the blade flexed, the diamond couldn’t flex and would probably snap.
In Minecraft, sure.
I was curious how long it would take to make a sword out of your own blood. If my math was correct(it probably isn’t lol) the human body contains around 4.7 to 5.5 liters. And then you can apparently donate like 470 millileters every 8 weeks.
So take 4.7(assuming the smallest people) X 300 = 1410 L total blood
1410(total needed) / 0.47(donation amount) = 3000 donations X 8 weeks = 24,000 / 52 = 461.54 years
New mythology curse just dropped.
And then you can apparently donate like 470 millileters every 8 weeks.
Safely. You could probably speed it up a bit if you have a higher risk tolerance.
Or if your enemy has been thoroughly dispatched
This estimate was for your own blood, not your enemy’s, so probably best not to thoroughly dispatch yourself.
My very rough calculations using 85kg as an average adult weight, results in 153gr of iron
My problem is, that i dont have any expectations as to how heavy a longsword is but i’d assume it to be a lot heavier!
After further research it looks like the more appropriate number of humans needed to make an average longsword would be closer to 25.000
Males of average height have about 4 grams of iron in their body, females about 3.5 grams; children will usually have 3 grams or less
300 * 3g = 900g.
300 * 4,5g = 1350g
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longsword
and weighing approximately 1 to 1.5 kg
It’s close enough, I’d say. OP’s maths that is.
These are the required elements for making steel:
- Iron
- Carbon
- Manganese
- Chromium
- Phosphorus
- Sulphur
- Nickel
- Molybdenum
- Titanium
- Copper
- Boron
Source: https://www.cliftonsteel.com/education/11elementsfoundinsteel
So, iron is only step 1. Humans are carbon based lifeforms, so I’m guessing that carbon is also sorted, that’s step 2.
There’s plenty of other elements in the human body, like phosphorus and sulphur, but I’m guessing that it’s going to take more than 300 adults.
Source: https://sciencenotes.org/elements-in-the-human-body-and-what-they-do/
Source: https://sciencenotes.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/PeriodicTableHumanBody.png
Steel requires only iron and up to about 2% carbon
Rest are minor alloying elements used mainly in modern steel alloys to improve the steel beyond what just carbon steel could do like for example stainless steels
Someone else did the math, accounting for waste made during forging. https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-gaming/blood-iron-sword-myth-explored/
Fucking awesome, exactly the comment I was looking for in this thread
- Your link says these are elements commonly found in steel, not that they are all required. In fact it says of phosphorus and sulphur that they are generally undesirable.
- We don’t need to make a steel sword, an iron sword could do.
Either way you would definitely need carbon, but as you say that’s pretty easy. I don’t think any of the other elements are absolutely required.
You only need iron and carbon the rest is already alloyed steel. You can definitely make a good blade out of only iron and carbon, it won’t be stainless, it might be difficult to harden just right, but it will be flexible and hold a keen edge if forged right. The smiths of ole dealt with nastier steels containing all kinds of things making it worse, not better (such as excessive amounts of sulphur and phosphorus) so I’d say they’d manage.
Those are all of them, but that’s for a lot of different types of steels. You don’t have to have all of those metals to make steel. You really just need iron and a tiny bit of carbon. A few of your ingredients help with purity, and the rest are additives for different steel properties you may want. Like a touch of nickel for stainless steel.
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Listen. If they used surplus blood to do this (blood that was expired) and then held a raffle at the end of each year where all blood donors were entered to win a knife or sword made from the expired human blood iron, I bet they’d see blood donations skyrocket.
Somebody call NileRed asap
After completing all these steps, the result was a little anticlimactic and disappointing. But still, I realized there was one thing left to do: taste it.
This is more of a NileBlue job though
I think we should keep this color coded. Nigel Blue can do the copper sword made from the blood of 30000 horseshoe crabs.
