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Madbunny: frigidium
08-08-2012, 07:03 AM
Ladions and Gentoids, I present to you a new solid material, Frigidium. It can be moved or broken by sustained force, but absorbs all vibration and impacts, rendering it effectively 0 degrees k, a perfect sonic insulator, and making it possible to produce photon liquid but rather hard to get an image of. So, what do you think it's good for, practically speaking?
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The way you present it it has no context, no story and no quirks... and has the potential to become something between a perpetual motion machine and an indestructible armor.
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Sounds like a great way of neutralising the Panzer Kunst' vibration-based attacks.
Dok!
Oh shi-
That said, what does touching this stuff do? Or for that matter, heating it up?
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Is it an electrical insulator? Superconductor? Is it transparent or opaque? If opaque, what's its colour? (By photon liquid I assume you mean that it treats photons intersecting with it as particles, not waves.)
What is its specific gravity (density compared to water; iron=8)? How is it made, or, where do you find it? Is it some sort of relative of a Bose-Einstein condensate? Where does the energy go that it absorbs?
Just curious... [grin]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fi ... _particles
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Ace Dreamer Wrote:Where does the energy go that it absorbs? "Somebody sent us a sample of Frigidium once. Anonymously, which isn't unusual when it comes to Handwavium strains, but this was a finished product. As soon as I read the overview on the spec sheet that was included, I couldn't help but think of one of the stories in Arthur C. Clarke's Tales of the White Hart, so I gave the sample to Kohran. Three days later, we had to repair her lab ship again."
- Noah Scott, in an interview with Maico Tange
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If Frigidium can absorb an unlimited amount of heat, dropping a single batch of it into Earth would doom the planet... because it would begin to freeze the planet.
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A number of very good questions... I can't tell you what color it is because light that hits it condenses instead of reflecting. Touching something at 0k seems like it might be a bad idea. Its physical properties are somewhere between ceramic and a transition element crystal, so electrically probably a semiconductor at best. Maybe absorbed energy gets dumped into wherever 'waved "free energy" devices pull it from? The 3 samples are discs about 5 in. dia. and 1/2 in. thick, like thick slices off an
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@ClassicDrogn: I think this stuff definitely needs some limits and quirks.
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artificially grown silicon cylinder for the microchip industry. Isn't absorbing vibration to that degree (and what it does to LIGHT!) pretty damn quirky already? Freezing an entire planet might be possible if its heatsink capacity really is unlimited, but it would take a VERY long time... heat doesn't transfer between things instantly, and there's a maximum rate it can be absorbed before the frigidium's structure gets disrupted, as Kohran discovered. I assume that's what you mean by heating it up... while
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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I think, if it's actually at 0k.... it will be far more dangerous than you can possibly understand. And probably coated in a layer of insulating ice condensed from the atmosphere.
Might be better as a perfect insulator. The molecular structure is so rigid it can't vibrate at all and get warm. It can't absorb heat energy at all. Electrons can't move. It's truly and completely inert.
Eventually, of course, it has to break down at some point. But would make for an interesting heat shield.....
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'waved stuff doesn't usually boom too badly, it shouldn't be a shock for it to jump straight to vapor or gas from solid.
@HRogge, do recall that this is a material, not a device, it doesn't do anything per se except sit there and BE. Its quirks are its nature, while limits and applications are the topic for discussion. (I presented the preceeding bit like the narrator of an rp mainly out of whimsey)
Dartz, why more dangerous than any other cryogenic solid?
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Because it keeps absorbing heat.... without getting warmer.
It has it's uses in cryogenics, or computing... but that energy has to go somewhere. And if it gets out by suddenly and explosively self-destructing once it's full or past breaking point.
But I wouldn't want a chunk of it to get loose in the general evironment. As it will instantly bring anything in contact with it down to 0k. Which will bring anything in contact with it down to a temperature just above 0k, depending on how good an insulator that material is.
Then, after condensing tons of solid frozen gas from the atmosphere, it violently explodes as all that energy gets out
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Dartz's varient would probably be better leaving the F off the name, or perhaps going straight for the mythology references and call it Adamant.
I suppose if nothing else, frigidium heatsinks could let the Senshi put an ice palace on Mercury... And if you put some on one end of a thermocouple and the other in the sun it would provide power to run the lights and life support.
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Dartz 2nd, its not that it reaches a certain quantity of heat per ounce and then kapowie, more like heat per ounce per unit of time, and that limit is pretty high, as in cutting torch at minimum. A chunk that gets loose will make a big cryogenic ice ball but isn't a bomb unless you drop it in a volcano, and uncontrolled atmospheric entry would do as well.
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But.... where does all of that energy go?
You're introducing a massive amount of entropy into the universe. It's got to get out somewhere?
(Then again, I assume that handwavium doesn't violate the principle of conservation of energy, it just uses more advanced physics than we currently know to do things at lower energy levels)
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You know, this kinda reminds me of a blue haired thought I'd had starting from a wireless service commercial, filtered though ... through. Oh gods, I cant remember the name of the webcomic now. the one with the 'mads' squirrel Girls.
Boskone Terror weapon: the Slanky. A waved coil of spring steel that exhibits perpetual motion charecterisitcs. Why a terror weapon? because once you put it in motion, it stays in motion untill you try and stop it. At which point its pent up motion is released catostrophicly as heat energy....
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
ClassicDrogn Wrote:'@HRogge, do recall that this is a material, not a device, it doesn't do anything per se except sit there and BE. Its quirks are its nature, while limits and applications are the topic for discussion. (I presented the preceeding bit like the narrator of an rp mainly out of whimsey)
You state the material can absorb any amount of vibrations and impact... oh, and it always is at 0 Kelvin, so it either absorbs or reflects incoming electromagnetic radiation too.
First problem I see is that it doesn't seem to have a limit how much it absorbs per second... which means nobody should be able to penetrate it with laser or kinetic force.
The second problem I see is that it can absorb an infinite amount of heat... without doing anything.
Any material in contact with it will go down to nearly zero Kelvin too... the speed of cooling of more distant material is just limited by the thermal conductivity. Throw it into the atmosphere or ocean of a planet and we can all bet on how large the "iceberg" will become... meters, kilometers, thousands of kilometers?
Both "no limits" have awful consequences... so I see no reason why the material should exist in Fenspace.
If you need a Senshi ice palace on Mercury, wave the heatsinks... this gives the devices a purpose, a story and some fitting quirks (because of the story). Building a material like Frigium just sounds wrong.
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I don't have any use to put it to per se, it's just a bunny. If no one else gets an idea too cool to pass up using it, it'll stay in the hutch. Limit per second, what I just said it would have. Where the heat goes is a better question, I'd forgotten that the 'wave doesn't do dimensional hijinx so there's no dithing it in hyperspace or an outerverse. Tesla's scalar waves maybe? Or it's just a superefficint transducer to hypergreen? Lasers and bullets, yes, no effect, but grapple, pry, or crushing work well.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Star Ranger4 Wrote:You know, this kinda reminds me of a blue haired thought I'd had starting from a wireless service commercial, filtered though ... through. Oh gods, I cant remember the name of the webcomic now. the one with the 'mads' squirrel Girls.
Boskone Terror weapon: the Slanky. A waved coil of spring steel that exhibits perpetual motion charecterisitcs. Why a terror weapon? because once you put it in motion, it stays in motion untill you try and stop it. At which point its pent up motion is released catostrophicly as heat energy....
http://www.collectedcurios.com/sequentialart.php?s=671
And the following ones. 
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Thats the one!
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
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There is another potential serious downside... if it's that efficient at absorbing energy, imagine trying to MOVE it. Movement is accomplished by adding energy to an object in the momentum category... if you try to move it, you're trying to add energy... which it absorbs. Yes, you can get it started, but it's acting like it's got lots more mass than the weight would indicate. Practically the classic "immovable object". Given enough, you can probably convert it to almost the classic "irresistible force".
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So it's that friken load stone from net hack?
The more I hear, the more dangerous this stuff sounds o.o
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It would absorb the force of the leading edge if you were looking at the momentum applied on a graph, but it would then smoothly icrease with sustained force... which suddenly, almost all on its own makes a spacefighter that handles like an aircraft possible, if you mount a block of the stuff as a heatsink. Of course, there's already nearly as many ways to do that as there are spacecraft in the sky, but it at least suggests how it's related to the known capabilities of 'waved stuff. Instead of being 'space
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woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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opera in a can' it's an ice cream bar of space opera.
When you input enough heat to make it destabilize, are you left with a silicon wafer, a cloud of vaporized dairy product, sweetener, and flavoring, and an explosion that sounds like a John Williams medley? Possibly a fireworks display of pew-pew lasers as well...
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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