No worries, I can clarify my point, although I feel I've browbeated it a bit. (Edit: see my last paragraph. Do you think I'm complaining that TC itself needs to provide advancement options?)
My point is that technology...of all kinds...does change over time. You can argue that we wear the exact essential type of technology on our feet that we did three thousand years ago, and we can argue semantics about what constitutes substantial change, but at the end of the day ALL things evolve over time. We don't wear the exact same types of shoes, and we don't procure metalworks in the exact same way.
What I would like to see for my personal playing experience is a bit of game design streamlining: if other things are progressing with technological advancements, so should metalworking. I quarry differently. I produce power differently. I process ores differently. I farm differently. And yet I metalwork the exact same way.
Someone can argue till they're blue in the face that metalworking doesn't need to change, and that's fine. It doesn't. But it can, and its an objectively positive step forward in terms of game design.
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_casting#History
But of course its less relevant if you want to use coin casting as your example of die casting.
I wonder if some people are making the mistake of thinking I'm suggesting changes for TC. I'm not. If you read my posts in their entirety you'll see I'm talking about modpacks. TC is fine as is (in either version presumably.) Its a bit OP for my tastes but that's a totally different discussion. I'm talking specifically about making things like "gears" never have a technologically upgraded production source.
Ummm... TiC is the only mod which DOES casting. Every other mod hand-waves the casting process in favor of crafting ingots into finished product. You are saying you're wanting improved casting, it's going to be assumed that you're referring to the only mod currently in use which actually HAS a casting process in the first place. If you're talking about a totally new mod... that I can get behind.
Start off with TFC's method of smelting initially... Plaster Mold casting (well, we'll use clay molds, but they're still expendable-mold) where you heat your metal elsewhere and pour the molten metal into the cast. Let it cool, crack the mold, and you've got a shiny... something.
From there, you can make a casting box, and make a couple of different types of sands for Sand Casting. The advantage here is that the sand used in the sand casting is largely reusable (maybe a durability with a number of uses). Sand + Clay for your basic types of sand for casting. Make stone patterns to form the sand around, fill with molten metal. Rinse, wash, repeat. Lower resource cost per casting than the Plaster Mold method.
Once you get some beekeeping going, you can do a Lost Wax, or Investment, casting. You can automate the production of the wax molds, the wax is a renewable resource, so your costs become trivial at this point.
Once you get industrial machinery, you can get into die casting and injection molding, maybe have some continuous casting process for wire and plate to produce it in bulk faster than something like a drawing machine could.
But then you'd have to have the other side of the coin, so to speak, and have stamping, drawing, and other types of metal forming automation.
All of this, of course, pre-supposes that you'd have something they would be used for. Particularly when you get into industrial uses, you're talking about machines that will crank out hundreds to thousands of pieces, and work best when constantly in use. There's just not that much demand for gears or plates or wires in Steve's life. Certainly not on that scale. And building in that much sub-combine is going to make people facepalm and refuse to install the mod. It would be orders of magnitude worse than IC2-ex and Gregtech's level of subcombines.
In other words, why did Steve never develop such processes? He never needed them. No machine shop is ever going to need that much capacity by itself. With the lack of demand, there's no reason to have that capacity in the first place. For the quantities he is working in, the same processes that have been used for thousands of years will work perfectly well, and will be just as efficient and economical, as having access to other methods of casting that never actually get used.
