I started doing google searches about this and writing down numbers, then I realized I don't actually care. Protest retracted.
The reality of the situation is that this particular king has deployed us to scout, sabotage and assasinate behind enemy lines multiple time to great effect, and during the reclamation campaign us assasinating enemy leadership was critical to sucess of several operations.
Dwarves average out around 4'8" IIRC. But plate armour comes with a lot more metal than most weapons, especially if you're talking axes, which require far less metal than swords or flails.
Alternately, if you want Undumgi cavalry we probably do have enough money to pay a dwarf in Barak Varr to import some Brettonian chargers? Those are expensive but still probably less than a mastercrafted dwarven revolver each; we could import somewhere in the 20-50 range before running out of cash. Shadowsteed spurs would be cool but also cost Mathilde at least one action each to enchant and having one rider is no way to have a military unit. That would be more a curiosity than anything else; shadowsteeds have some disadvantages over flesh and blood mounts in combat, too; they're better for messengers or other long-distance transit than fighting.
So I have to ask, why vote to make the best possible sword but not for a shot at the metal for the truly best possible sword ?
Indid you do, sadly so often I don't.
Thing is there is no queue and no spare gromril anywhere, just situations like this were luck finds and hastly put to use one way or another, is to rare and precious for anything else.
Ah, but it's nowhere near as simple as "wait a turn or two for it to turn up". In fact, getting gromril in a timely manner was a very faint hope. It was always about finding some ourselves.
Unless you're talking extremely thin/low coverage breastplates and oversized swords at the same time, you can get multiple swords from just the breastplate of a suit of plate armour alone.
I think we just need to agree to disagree, here.
I was under the impression Brettonians don't sell their horse stock, because they're well aware it's one of the few adavntages they have over the surrounding military powers, and they don't feel like being absorbed into someone else's polity.
~40 pounds for armor, and even heavy greatswords only go up to ~7 pounds. Combined with using wooden hafts for axes... yeah, I could see a set of armor being forged into eight weapons.
The explicit intention when I wrote the vote was for the Brettonian and Tilean romance novels to be
No we don't, Bretonian knights are almost as protective of their horse stock ass dwarves are of their runework.
My hope is that if reforging does win, which it might not to be fair, that he takes some of those re-forgings and like a sensible king gifts them to Karak Izor, Karak Azul, Karak Norn and all the other Karak's that helped him out and saves the last one for Mathilde.
I mean, that's kind of one and the same when the current resident threat is Skaven underneath us that could launch an assault at pretty much anytime if they weren't so distracted. Being able to say 'The Skaven are moving in large amounts of Warpstone' or 'There's a Grey Seer* trying to get the three clans here to set aside their fighting and fuck up the Dwarfs' or that they do in fact have a Screaming Bell before they show up to the battlefield with it is a huge advantage. Being able to be informed ahead of time of what the issues we're facing and how to resolve them is at least as useful in a magical context when it involves Skaven as it is in a normal context.
