Solid Air Generator

MarcusIII

MarcusIII

Cosmic Mongoose
This is a piece of equipment found on many exploratory ships.

Solid Air Generator
TL 15
500 cubic centimeters and larger
1Kg (not including frame), and larger
Cr250 and up

The Solid Air Generator comes from a further development of the technology that produced bonded superdense armor. The generator connects to a continuous frame laying on the ground and is about 3 cm in diameter.

It can operate in atmospheres containing at least 20% oxygen or nitrogen and a pressure of Very Thin and above. When activated it causes the air between the emitter frame to compress into a solid ionic lattice, 2cm thick. The frame can be any shape but must have no gaps. After about 1 minute the air has become solid yet retains its transparency. It is about as hard as steel and if shaped as a flat plane can bear 1,000 kg per square meter of surface area. If the frame is curved to make an arch shape the weight borne increases. The power required is 1Kw per square meter of surface area. Creating an enclosed hemisphere requires a circular frame the size of the circumference on the ground. The power cost is 1.5Kw for this type of configuration. A “door” may be incorporated by tying more frame into the ground frame and creating the shape desired. One can then “open” and “close” the door using a controller that comes with the unit. Portable enclosures can be instantly created using this. Most often powered by a portable fusion generator. The frame becomes embedded within the solid air and cannot be touched.

Suspended walkways can be made with this device. Often rare paintings in museums will be protected by such a powered frame. Allowing viewing but not the stealing or damaging of the work.

The solid air is impervious to gas, water, etc. Solid air is almost frictionless. If one were to throw paint on it, the paint would immediately run off leaving nothing behind.

Price ranges from Cr250 for a device that can create a surface up to 10 square meters to one costing Cr5,000 that can create a 10 meter diameter hemisphere. The size of the latter generator being ½ meter on a side and massing 10kg. Larger generators are available at a correspondingly higher price and size.
 
MarcusIII said:
This is a piece of equipment found on many exploratory ships.

Solid Air Generator
TL 15
500 cubic centimeters and larger
1Kg (not including frame), and larger
Cr250 and up

The Solid Air Generator comes from a further development of the technology that produced bonded superdense armor. The generator connects to a continuous frame laying on the ground and is about 3 cm in diameter.

It can operate in atmospheres containing at least 20% oxygen or nitrogen and a pressure of Very Thin and above. When activated it causes the air between the emitter frame to compress into a solid ionic lattice, 2cm thick. The frame can be any shape but must have no gaps. After about 1 minute the air has become solid yet retains its transparency. It is about as hard as steel and if shaped as a flat plane can bear 1,000 kg per square meter of surface area. If the frame is curved to make an arch shape the weight borne increases. The power required is 1Kw per square meter of surface area. Creating an enclosed hemisphere requires a circular frame the size of the circumference on the ground. The power cost is 1.5Kw for this type of configuration. A “door” may be incorporated by tying more frame into the ground frame and creating the shape desired. One can then “open” and “close” the door using a controller that comes with the unit. Portable enclosures can be instantly created using this. Most often powered by a portable fusion generator. The frame becomes embedded within the solid air and cannot be touched.

Suspended walkways can be made with this device. Often rare paintings in museums will be protected by such a powered frame. Allowing viewing but not the stealing or damaging of the work.

The solid air is impervious to gas, water, etc. Solid air is almost frictionless. If one were to throw paint on it, the paint would immediately run off leaving nothing behind.

Price ranges from Cr250 for a device that can create a surface up to 10 square meters to one costing Cr5,000 that can create a 10 meter diameter hemisphere. The size of the latter generator being ½ meter on a side and massing 10kg. Larger generators are available at a correspondingly higher price and size.
Click to expand...
Force fields are not generally considered a part of the game especially at that low of tech level. Since oxygen is a gas at most temperatures this just doesn’t make sense. How is it solid? What keeps it solid? I’m sorry but this one just doesn’t make any sense
 
You'd be on (literally) firmer ground if it were extracting water and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make a useful plastic. Maybe polystyrene... with oxygen as a useful waste product?

Or carbon dioxide -> carbon fibre?

CO2 is usually much more available than free oxygen, or nitrogen.
 
rinku said:
You'd be on (literally) firmer ground if it were extracting water and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make a useful plastic. Maybe polystyrene... with oxygen as a useful waste product?

Or carbon dioxide -> carbon fibre?

CO2 is usually much more available than free oxygen, or nitrogen.
Click to expand...
to what end? This isn't a chemical factory
 
MarcusIII said:
to what end? This isn't a chemical factory
Click to expand...
It's all chemistry, man.

I still think carbon is a better bet. Even in oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres you usually have significant amounts of carbon dioxide, and definitely if there's a carbon based biosphere.

Look, I'm certainly not dismissing it totally. You need to keep the juice flowing, right? Fine. Solid oxygen under enough pressure does form at room temperature. So if this is some use of a gravitics field, it doesn't seem impossible. Oxygen or Nitrogen just seem like unlikely candidates for the idea. And it's out of my area, but I'm not sure Oxygen and Nitrogen can form an ionic lattice. Still, a lot of odd stuff can happen under high pressures, which we can assume are being created and maintained here.
 
Solidified oxygen is not really a suitable material for this sort of thing. Assuming you could get around the temperature and pressure requirements to keep oxygen in a solid phase (not likely, since it needs cryogenic temperatures, 60+ atmospheres of pressure, or some combination of somewhat less stringent requirements), solid oxygen possesses a blue tinge (not great for displaying artwork), ranges from translucent to opaque depending on thickness (again, not great for displaying artwork), has a hardness comparable to talc or gypsum (can be scratched and/or eroded by fingernails!), and has a somewhat fragile crystalline structure.

Rinku is probably on a much more useful track here. Many classes of polymer would be much more suitable for various purposes, and to be honest, they'd probably be easier (less of an opportunity cost) to extract from most atmospheres - not that it would be a simple task from our technological point of view. But it would seem to be a much more likely fruitful line of endeavor.
 
That's for a stable product, but I realised that what he's proposing is an unstable one. You switch on the device and it makes a solid out of collapsed air until you switch it off. At which point I assume it sublimates back to gasses at room temperature.

There's an opaque red to black form of oxygen that's solid under pressure at room temperature that has an 8 molecule lattice. I have no idea what its mechanical properties are, but it was an unexpected form when it was discovered a while back.

Is the idea of a stable ionic lattice formed from ambient gasses when a future tech field is deployed impossible? No. Could it be as strong as he posits? Because more than just the solid is involved... perhaps? Potentially you can walk on a cloud of iron cubes that are suspended by a strong enough magnetic field.
 
Ionic lattices formed from oxygen and nitrogen molecules - good luck with that.

O₂ and N₂ are homonuclear diatomic molecules, this means that they consist of two identical atoms, they are both nonpolar covalent, so no charge separation, no ion formation.

Sometimes it is best to avoid technobabble when it has real meaning.
 
Instead of storing the ship’s hydrogen fuel in liquid form at extremely low temperatures with a high risk of explosion if a leak occurs into the inhabited spaces of the ship, it is possible to store hydrogen at room temperature using a non-flammable metal hydride matrix. This takes up more space but is safer.

Metal hydride storage replaces a ship’s normal fuel tankage but consumes twice as much space and costs MCr0.2 per ton.
 
Metal hydrides are NOT the same as metallic Hydrogen. The former is a chemical compound, the latter is a state of matter.

That's like saying sodium chloride is the same as metallic sodium.
 
rinku said:
Metal hydrides are NOT the same as metallic Hydrogen. The former is a chemical compound, the latter is a state of matter.

That's like saying sodium chloride is the same as metallic sodium.
Click to expand...
Except wouldn't the analogy be sodium chloride is not the same as metallic chlorine? Since sodium is a metal and chlorine is not? Or am I just really confused by the analogy?
 
@MarcusIII in the end what you seem to be making is some short of force field just fancied up to make it sound like it’s not. It just doesn’t feel like it belongs in most Traveller settings.
 
MasterGwydion said:
Except wouldn't the analogy be sodium chloride is not the same as metallic chlorine? Since sodium is a metal and chlorine is not? Or am I just really confused by the analogy?
Click to expand...
The analogy was just to point out that a compound is not an element, regardless of labels. But as chlorine is not, as you say, a metal (it's a halogen), metallic chlorine doesn't exist. Solid chlorine forms below 171.6 K.

Sodium and Hydrogen are metals.

And... if you just want to solidify a gas within a field under pressure... carbon dioxide STILL makes the most sense, since it becomes solid at a much higher temperature than oxygen or nitrogen.
 
Last edited:
rinku said:
The analogy was just to point out that a compound is not an element, regardless of labels. But as chlorine is not, as you say, a metal (it's a halogen), metallic chlorine doesn't exist. Solid chlorine forms below 171.6 K.

Sodium and Hydrogen are metals.

And... if you just want to solidify a gas within a field under pressure... carbon dioxide STILL makes the most sense, since it becomes solid at a much higher temperature than oxygen or nitrogen.
Click to expand...
I agree with your original point. I was just looking for clarification on the analogy. :)
 
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