Roll the phrase around your tongue with me: Starmetal sword. Starmetal sword. The lost secret to Damascus steel could totally have been meteorites! Attila the Hun had a sword like this, right? Or Excalibur was one, yeah? Tutankhamun was definitely buried with one. Blue Eye Samurai’s heroine has a starmetal sword, and so does Sokka in Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the Redwall series practically revolves around whoever’s got the meteorite-forged sword of Martin the Warrior in their paws.
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Man, starmetal swords are cool. Until you actually look them up in real life.
Would it surprise you to know that there’s no material advantage you can forge into a sword using metal from a meteorite? Eh, probably not, you’re smart and skeptical, so you know that while the iron-nickel alloys in meteorites have distinctively different traces of other elements than those found in Earth’s own iron ore, none of those meteorite elements are regularly found in any quantities that would affect the properties of a forged object.
Tutankhamun’s meteorite dagger was exceptional in materials, not in capabilities. Excalibur isn’t real. Attila’s “sword of Mars” was folklore. Also, we’ve developed some really solid ideas of how Damascus steel was made, and none of them involve metal from space.
Starmetal swords are just normal swords.
Of course not. They’re made with metal from space! And every list of starmetal swords that were no sharper, harder, or hardier than their earthly counterparts is also a list of human yearning — yearning to connect an earthly tool, and therefore its wielder, to the celestial realm.
And you don’t even have to go as far afield as heaven. The earliest known prehistoric iron objects are made from meteoric iron. Before we developed the techniques that could refine iron ore into usable metal, we made things out of iron from space. A starmetal sword doesn’t have to connect you to the sky when it can connect you to the origins
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