HarryRocks101
| Permission... Granted. Keep note of all that you detect, it is our reward to you for your compliance. |
Once no longer blocking the line of sight, the contraption begins steadily increasing in energy signature once more. Scans show that the stored energy is only at approximately half capacity, as the Collector seemed to expect more generation than what it is currently gaining from pointing whatever array of electronics at the hypergiant.
In fact, scans of the energy flow within the Collector are indeed inverse of normal ship energy systems - instead of energy coming from within the ship's reactor and going into the array of electronics, it is actually the other way around, energy is coming from the array and feeding into capacitors located around the installation.
| Normally, a station with solar energy panels or something of similar build would want to be as close as possible to the stellar mass of the object for maximum efficiency... but in most scenarios, the star has a radius in which objects within will be pulled in and disintegrated with no hope of ever acheiving an escape velocity. Not to mention the extreme temperatures in close proximity. Then there are... extra complications, like rambunctious asteroids and debris fields causing tears in the energy cells on collision, and the stellar radiation from the central solar mass makes it difficult to defend the station from marauding spacefarers without retrofitting defense ships to have heightened thermal shielding. Through a creative application of lensing, we found a solution to all these problems at once. |
The Science Corvette receives a partial blueprint of the pylon located at the top of the Collector installation - it is in a machine code that is very hard to understand, but the diagram seems descriptive enough. A series of lenses, from the front to near-front, seem to decrease in size until it appears as though the next set of lenses is aligned in a different manner, and begins increasing until near the very end, where the rungs for lenses instead have a ring of... whatever this race uses as a Solar Panel analogue.
| The first array of lenses were made in a telescopic fashion, magnifying the far-away star to a size where the light can easily reach the primary lens, the midpoint of this array that manages to focus the light from the stellar body into a very small area. That area is then refracted through another set of lenses which dilutes the area of light to an acceptable radius that touches all of the collector cells in the back two rungs of the array, which converts the heat and light forces into usable electric energy. One factor to keep in mind, however, is the melting point of the lenses AND the collector cells, you need to maintain a certain temperature so that the sun does not fry the electronics. On this Solar Collector we have built in a cryofluid tank to disperse coolant across the collection array. |
Another blueprint is shown, this time focusing on the support structure of the Solar Collector, where an armored liquid tank is stored in the center of the installation. The liquid infrastructure connections mainly disperse whatever "cryofluid" is inside the tank to just about every surface of the lensing contraption, and even the exterior of the pylon. There are also emergency valves meant for remote initiation that would cool the rest of the installation, preventing capacitor malfunction and, theoretically, mitigating damage from thermal weaponry.
Current scans of the Solar Collector say that the liquid storage is at approximately 80%, so it seems the coolant systems are seeing some usage. Although it is also hard to tell what solution the liquid is, or what materials the Solar Collector is made of. These materials do not seem to conform to scientific standards set by the Mantle.
| We hope this information is sufficient for your curiosity. We do not yet wish to provide you with the materials to make your own Solar Collector - I'm sure you understand - but perhaps the principles we've explained can lead to scientific advancements in your federation's energy production systems. |
