HOW I ARRIVED AT INGOT WEIGHTS




I might mention before I begin to explain it that I haven't simply plugged real world pound or kilogram values into Skyrim to reweigh items, which I believe other "reweigh Skyrim" types of mods in the past have done. Note also that it wasn't my ambition to go by hand and revalue every item in Skyrim. I simply came up with this formula for the sake of consistency in the value of gold, with the expectation that I could use it as a guideline toward the valuation of jewelry raw materials. Instead, I've treated the Skyrim unit, the feather, as its own unit which will be derived from the assignation of ONE arbitrary and given value : a weight of 0.01 feathers for a single septim coin.





Fortunately, by some extremely happy coincidence, when using the weight of 0.01 for a single septim, along with some other lore allowances and scrutinous volume considerations, the conversion ratio of kilograms to grams comes out extremely close, and also pleasantly comes out not too far from many of the pre-existing "vanilla" weight listings of many items in the game, leaving very few things to be re-weighted if one wanted to do so. As I said before, armor weights (with the exeption of elven armors) come out very realistic and consistent. The main class of items that have unrealistic and unimmersive weight values are weapons, which by default are about twelve times too heavy.





I spent some time thinking out how much I wanted a single sample of gold - "the goldsmith's ingot" - to weigh.





I thought something about this size would be the appropriate amount of gold with which to work in goldsmithing. For some reason the Nexus Forums won't let me cut and paste, so I will type out -





http://www.ockoreanmartialarts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/goldsmiths.jpg





It took me a while to determine how much I wanted it to be worth. I wanted the septim to be based on a gold standard, meaning that the value of the septim is based on its weight in precious metal and not on arbitrary factors like the Empire's credit or economic strength. So the question was how many coins ought to fit in a goldsmith's ingot, and then how many in turn would therefore fit in a full size imperial bullion. (definitely more than 100 of them)





This "good delivery" British gold ingot looks to be pretty much the size of a Skyrim gold ingot (the one I renamed "gold bullion"):





http://www.ockoreanmartialarts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/bullion.jpg





It's obviously very heavy, and come to find out, it's worth $432,000 in American dollars.





The image that helped me the most in visualizing how many gold coins would fit into a brick of gold was this one:





http://www.ockoreanmartialarts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/coinstacks.jpg





In this image, you can see that there are ten rows of $10 U.S. quarter stacks in length by 5 rows in width. The overall arrangement of all the stacks is roughly equivalent to the space taken up by a full gold bullion brick, as seen above, and more so if one imagines the gaps between the stacks of coins removed and all the substance condensed. The 5 rows of coins closest to us together could be considered to constitute what I am calling the "goldsmith's ingot" - the 1/10th bar used in practical crafting, somewhat like the sample of gold the gentleman is holding in his palm above. Of course, these being stacks of quarters, every $10 bundle certainly has 40 coins. 5 of those bundles therefore contain 200 coins, and all of them contain 2000 coins.





This much is certainly true if a septim is the size of a quarter, and if one assumes the septim to be pure gold. I didn't like the idea of the septim being pure gold, though. The biggest reason why is because of what it buys - if a full good delivery bar is worth $432,000, then something just isn't right about Black-briar mead costing 25 solid gold coins before the vendor markup (fbartermin/max), when there's only even 2000 of them in a full gold bullion. (How much more ridiculous 100 septims now seems).





I really liked the idea of 500 coins for the value of the 1/10 bar instead of 200, so I decided to debase the septim with copper. It entirely makes sense that this would be so - the Empire is on its last legs after having just fought a bitter war to a stalemate after having lost half its territory, and now contending with a civil war in Skyrim. The Empire would cut costs by keeping as much of its gold as it could and paying its troops with newly minted debased currency. This, in turn, would drive the inflation seen in Skyrim and help to partly explain the wonky prices. (One could still probably stand to revalue them, especially when food recipe ingredients cost more than the finished product). The final reason that this makes sense, of course, is that a Skyrim septim is visually larger than a quarter. In fact, it looks to be about 2.5 times as big.





To proceed with the derivation of the formula and its implications, then:





If 1 Skyrim septim = .01 feathers, then


500 septims = 5 feathers.





If 500 septims are 40% pure gold and 60% copper, and a "goldsmith's ingot" contains 500 septims worth of gold, then there is 1.5 times as much copper in the septims as gold. Since I already have the scheme wherein a "goldsmith's ingot" breaks into 4 gold rings, we can say that in 500 septims worth of gold there is exactly enough material for 4 gold rings and 6 copper rings.





Now to calculate how much of that 5 feathers of weight is from the gold and how much is from the copper, we just use some stoichiometry chemistry. Because I am calculating percent mass by volume of a fixed volume (ten plain rings) , I am going to use the specific gravity of each metal and not its molar mass. This is 4 rings of gold and 6 rings of copper of a fixed volume, not 4 and 6 mols, respectively.





Taking the real world densities of gold at 19.32g/cm3, and copper at 8.92g/cm3, we can plug in :





4 gold rings * (19.32g) + 6 copper rings (8.92g) =





77.28g + 53.52g = 130.8g total substance for ten "rings".





Taking 77.28/130.8, we get 59.08% gold, and 53.52g/130.8g = 40.9 % copper.





Taking our 5 feather total mass for our 500 septims, we have 5 feathers X .5908 (%) = 2.954 feathers of gold,


which means that there are 5-2.954= 2.045 feathers of copper.





Since there are four rings of gold, we divide 2.954 by four to reach .7385 feathers for each plain gold ring, and





since there are 6 rings of copper, we divide 2.054 by six to find that each copper ring weighs .3409 each. Multiplying a single copper ring by four means that a "coppersmith's ingot" weighs 1.36 feathers, and a full copper ingot as seen in the original vanilla would weigh 13.64 feathers.





Likewise a full gold bullion ingot would weigh 29.54 feathers. I find this very reasonable considering the weight of most sets of armors against the well known ponderous weight of gold.





I therefore made a smelting recipe of 500 septims to melt down into one goldsmith's bar, one coppersmith's bar, and two copper rings. (It needed a script for the extra copper items.)





Now, using the relationship of 29.54 feathers for a gold bullion ingot, and 13.64 for a full copper ingot compared with the real world relationship of 19.32 g/cc3 for gold and 8.92 g/cc3 for copper, I was able to arrive at proper weight relationships for all other types of ingot in Skyrim (except Ebony) by plugging in real world densities of other metals.





I decided to treat "quicksilver" like a cross between zinc and tin and not like mercury. The reason for this is that zinc and copper make brass in the real world, and tin and copper make bronze. Bronze is actually very excellent armor, and additionally hails from a time before the creation of iron. Since the elves hail from a time before the dominion of man, and since all the best mods consider elven to be part copper, I thought this worked out.





These are the weight values for full ingots as calculated by my gold and copper puzzle pieces:





Quicksilver (as Zinc/Tin) = 11.02 feathers


Copper= 13.64 feathers


Gold= 29.54 feathers


Silver=16.03 feathers


Iron=12.03 feathers


Steel=12.03 feathers


Feldspar (Orthoclase Moonstone)= 3.85 feathers. (It's still light!)


Moldavite (Glass)= 3.67 feathers





Of course, the jeweler's smithing varieties of these ingots would be 1/10th the weight. It's also worth noting that in an ideal "realistic" game, the above full ingots would be quite proper for armor, but the 1/10 variety ingots would be more accurate to use in recipes for weapons. In point of fact, an iron ingot closer to the size of the gold ingot seen above that fits in the man's palm would be all that is needed for a sword in real life... As I said, I wasn't planning on going crazy with weapon recipe replacements, but if you are talking about an automated script....





Anyway, to calculate further and arrive at a universal Kilograms to Feathers conversion ratio :





Going back to the real world US. quarter dollar. We know that they have a volume of 808.93 mm3. We are still assuming that this is the size of a PURE gold septim (which is 2.5 x smaller than our 60% copper variety that weighs .01 feather.) As mentioned before in the photo of the quarter rolls arranged like a brick, we can fit 200 quarter sized objects in one rectangular piece of gold we are considering to be about the size of a "goldsmith's ingot".





Converting 808.93 mm3 into cm3, which is .80893 cm3, we multiply by 200 coins, and





.80893 cm3 x 200 = 161.786 cm3.





This is the volume of our hypothetical "goldsmiths' ingot", and since all of our meshes are the same size, it's the volume for all of our other 1/10 size metal ingots as well.





If we multiply the real world "goldsmith's ingot" which is 161.786 cm3 by the density of gold at 19.32 g/cc3, then we discover that a real world goldsmith's ingot made of 200 U.S. quarter sized coins weighs 3.125 kg.





Since we just computed that in Skyrim, a goldsmith's ingot weighs 2.95415 feathers, we simply make a ratio of the two.





2.954 feathers/ 3.125 kg =.94511 feathers/kg





Since this was derived by elemental density, it should theoretically hold as a useful conversion for the weight of ANY object in Skyrim with its real world counterpart, consistent as long as 1 septim is .01 feathers and is 60% copper in the game world.





The feather therefore becomes a realistic unit just like the pound.





So, let's check this with a completely different metal in Skyrim. The medieval historian Ewart Oakeshott claimed in his expert opinion, after handling 100s of antique swords, that a one handed medieval sword ought never to weight more than 1.5 kg. If we assume that a steel or iron sword in Skyrim is a practical weapon and therefore weighs the same amount, then we can compute the volume of a sword of that mass by using the density of iron. (This isn't accounting for any leather or wood handle, but hey, the vanilla mesh for an iron sworn looks like even the handle is iron.)





The density of iron is 7.87g/cm3





1500 g X (1 cm3/ 7.87 g) = 190.59 cm3 (this is therefore the volume of our reasonable one handed sword)





Let's convert it into feathers, but let's not use the derived ratio that we got from comparing the real world gold ingot with the ingame goldsmith's ingot yet. Let's take the standard volume of the 1/10 metal ingots we arrived at by multiplying 200 quarters, which is 161.786 cm3, and use it for a 1/10 ingot of iron, which we weighed at 1.203 feathers using density relationships.





A 190.59cm3 volume of our hypothetical sword X ( 1.203 feathers / 161.786 cm3) = 1.4171 feathers. This is interesting because it suggests a sane in-game weight for a one handed iron sword.





Now to check that feather weight we arrived at using iron calculations against the universal ratio for kilograms to feathers which we used gold to compute, in order to test the validity of that universal ratio:





1.41718 feathers x ( 1 kg / .94511 feathers) = 1.499 kilograms.





And that is a beautiful thing.





I like to use the "antique septim" retexture found on the Nexus. It makes it look like there's really some copper in there. :-) I didn't have to debase the septim - I could have done all these calculations with a 200 coin ingot. Again, I didn't think a 200 septim value was enough for even a 1/10 size ingot, and the ingame septim mesh is quite large. I ultimately really liked the lore notion of a debased currency and an economically viable as possible 500 septim value ingot.




I'll also have to mention that in addition to the quality, flawed, and flawless scheme seen in Jewelcraft, I have also implemented a fourth, smaller gem cut to make sense of the very small carat gem seen on the vanilla rings versus the very large carat gems seen as the centerpiece of the vanilla circlets. Considering the existence of the "exquisite sapphire" added by Dragonborn which is worth 5000 septims, and considering that I have also made the large gold bullion ( the game's original mesh) worth 5000 septims, I've revalued flawless gems to between 1 and 3000 septims, and have reduced their odds in the leveled lists. For the sake of visual jewelry consistency, I've decided to consider flawless gems as 30 carat gemstones ( diam ~ 25 mm), and these are any in size comparable to the vanilla circlet centerstones. There are almost no ring recipes, therefore, that call for a "flawless" gemstone.