Engineer mental exercise

I just re-read the first five books of Leo Frankowski's Cross-time Knight series.  I first ran across the books when I was in high school, and didn't think much of them.  But I tried them again after graduating college, and found them much more interesting.

It's really a more modern take on 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court', with an engineer from Iron Curtain Poland (in the late 80s) transplanted into 13th Century Poland, ten years before the Mongols arrived.

It's a very fun read, although not very deep.  Essentially, think of it as industrialization of a medieval land where Murphy's law doesn't apply.  And the hero spends a lot of time bedding very young girls (this part makes total sense in context, but I could still do without it.  Thankfully, he does not go into great detail of how this happens, just notes that it does.  Often).

I haven't read Twain's original, but this version probably makes a lot more sense in at least one respect.  Polish hasn't been through the enormous linguistic shifts over the last six hundred years as English had in the 1200 years prior to Twain's book.  A Connecticut Yankee, unless an Old English scholar, would  find it just about impossible to converse with someone in Arthur's time.  Actually, depending on exactly where they were, they might find it impossible even if they were an Old English scholar (English was remarkably fragmented not long after that.  I don't know, but it's possible it was fragmented back then as well.  If so, going fifty miles could be enough to make the language unintelligible).

Anyway, Frankowski's series is very fun for an engineer to read.  A world of difficult issues were glossed over or ignored, but lots of cool stuff happened and it was neat to see how it was done in a low-tech world.

One thing I do wonder about, though.  Conrad (the hero) is transported back by a time machine, and the relative who transported him managed to provide him with a sword that is ridiculously sharp and flexible.  The explanation for the sharpness is that is has a layer of diamond a couple of atoms thick in the middle (created with the time machine).

Anyway, I wonder what would happen.  My initial thought on reading the books (this is not the first time I've read them.  In fact, it isn't the first time since starting this blog, so I was surprised to find I haven't reviewed them before.  I could have sworn that I had) was that the diamond is not ductile, so his first attempt to test the flexibility of the blade would have destroyed the diamond.  But this time through, it occurred to me that this isn't all that different from graphene (which had not been discovered when the book was written), and it might instead be the case that the sword would just have been completely inflexible.

I do realize now that I knew people in college who would have been completely over the moon about these books.  One of them got me to read Dan Simmons' Hyperion books for very strange reasons (I was in a weird mood when I sought them out.  His descriptions would not normally have done anything for me).