Lock S-foils in attack position!

Oh no, another rabbit hole.

Well, down I go!

There are examples of lost metals in real life. Damascus/wootz steel (the actual historical metal, not the pattern welding technique often marketed as Damascus steel) was produced for multiple millennia and was prized for its ability to hold a sharp edge and resist shattering, before the technique to make it was lost in the early 1900s.

Modern material analysis has identified some of how and why it was so resilient and metallurgists have come up with reproductions that achieve most of its qualities, but the exact technique and circumstances behind it remain lost to time even though it only stopped being produced a mere century ago.

I second the request for a link if you can remember it. Raising stacks of lead from the seafloor sounds like an interesting (and expensive!) engineering challenge, especially if they aren’t bound together.

So this is probably a dumb question, but why would “new” lead be any more radioactive than ancient ingots? Wouldn’t it be the same age (whenever the deposit was formed) and have decayed the same amount while still in the ground?

How is Solus these days? It was my daily driver a few years ago and I loved how simple and performant it was, but I moved away from it after the second time project leadership crashed out and had to be replaced.

Wouldn’t all but the largest RTGs struggle to power more than a few incandescent light bulbs, though? Looking at the table on Wikipedia, their output is usually only from a few dozen to a few hundred watts.

So was the popular conception back then that power was somehow magically transferred directly from uranium to the power grid?

Don’t forget the heavy metals!

It’s psychosomatic. MSG is also in tomatoes, mushrooms, and tons of savory salted snacks such as Doritos. None of those tend to trigger the symptoms people claim to have after eating Chinese food.