Discovery in the Dying Light

KrankysFirebrand48

Union research station DS-12, E.Q-3

Specimen A-3, the centermost anomaly in the system in the centre of the Acari constellation. This black hole had the remains of a star in its orbit. The star had been ripped apart by the black holes in the system to be devoured. A-3, as a supermassive black hole had gotten most of its prey. It still held the guts of the star close to it. Stellar matter was rotating around the vantablack anomaly forming an extremely bright accretion disk that outshined galaxies. It was distorted around the black hole due to extreme gravity. This accretion disk reached close to a million degrees kelvin. In hopes of finding materials that would have useful applications to ship construction, the physicists cooperated with the engineering sector of the GBE and VWP to construct a vessel that could take itself close enough to the black hole to see its effect on matter. The AI-controlled vessel went on a one-way trip to orbit A-5. From the footage and recordings, they could indeed make out an object. A type of solid crystal large in size among the swirling gas, plasma, dust and particles in the inner part of the accretion ring. They theorized that this may be a remnant of the star or that it was formed by the extreme heat and gravity of A-3. Either way, the conditions for this crystal to form would require extreme gravity. Materials formed by the gravity of stellar bodies has been something that British engineers have successfully tried to recreate though with concerningly high costs. Designing a vessel capable of lifting out one of the crystalline objects was in progress, but current synthetic ceramics wouldn’t cut it, even if they removed all oxygen and edited the molecular structure down to particles. The accretion ring was simply too hot. Even future innovations were expected to only produce one-time use systems at high costs.

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Part 2
The engineering team created a temporary solution. Not a sustainable one, but it would allow them to study the material that had formed in the accretion disk by extracting it. They would electromagnetically accelerate an ultradense rod of carbon 3D lattice and ceramics to fire into the accretion disk quick enough to not entirely be vaporized before reaching the object. It would graze the object and then project a somewhat weak hardlight shield. The shield would not be strong enough the destroy the object supposedly and the shield would shatter, but the force put into the object would push it far enough vertically to the disk to make extraction possible by a hardlight net with ceramic casing and carbon structural support.
After calculations and simulations by AI the carbon rod needed to be 6 meters wide and over 30 meters long to survive the heat and keep the hardlight projector intact. It was outfitted with its own fusion reactor which would generate a plasma shield that would mirror the polarity of the plasma cloud, allowing it to not only not harm the shell, but also provide the shield with additional plasma. The railgun craft had to be very large as a result. They sent a request via qcomms back to Anrillia, which managed to find an old turret from a retired GBE battlecruiser and bought it from a salvage company. It was refitted with electromagnetic rails and transported to DS-12. The turret and its massive platform was hauled into far orbit of A-3. It was attached to 8 or so fusion reactor orbs that powered the gun. As the projectile was fired it pierced the stars remains and started to burn away. The ceramics and aerogel were struck at and burned away by objects that had passed through the shield and been turned into plasma. The shells size rapidly decreased and eventually reached the object. The projector threw out photinos that impacted the object and destabilized the shield, destroying it. The object was hit and set of course. going higher into its orbit, leaving the accretion disk. The extraction ship lowered its ceramic “fishing net” far below its position to catch the object and reel it in. The ships proceeded to push itself of out of orbit and return to the station.

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Part 3
After intensely studying the properties of the object the scientists were quite surprised. It was not ultradense iron as they had expected, instead it was a crystalline form with incredible energy-storing capabilities. After identifying the material as the supposedly unharvestable material known as stellarite, many smaller pieces were identified at DS-12. The engineers immediately started working on applications. It was immediately calculated to be compatible for a large number of complex GBE materials for ideal properties. They sent a report to the department of naval weapons development, saying they now had an integral part of the ideal capabilities of gen VI war material.

Clearly a new type of vehicle was required to harvest the stellarite. It took an enormous amount of fuel and thrust to escape the black holes gravity well and the ship needed to be able to withstand the heat. The craft would essentially be delving right into a star to retrieve the stellarite. A 'fishing' line harvesting ship was proposed. They'd drop down a particle 'basket' with an extremely long cable and tow up the object. The cable would have to be extremely heat resistant. The solution would be to connect nodes onto various points of the cable and project a plasma shield through them. The cable would then have to be of incredible length and durability. The first vessel, RH-37r Nyx was run through a simulation in which it failed. After more considerations were made, in which the concept of ease of production was removed entirely, the ship was fitted with a warp drive to escape the gravity well and more heat shielding, protecting the whole underside of the ship from the heat. A second whipple layer was attached to protect from high-speed objects in the accretion disk. research vessel RH-38x was successful in 80% of simulations. The cable and basket were the main issues. Other than that the vessel had to replace the cable and whipple shield every time after retrieving stellarite. Considering the length of the cable it would be very unpractical to replace it so often. The basket needed to swoop through the accretion disk quickly if stellarite was to ever be harvested in decent amounts.

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Part 4

Vessel RH-40x was fitted with an Alcubierre drive at the basket. While It was costly, it would not be as troublesome as replacing the cable and basket. However, the basket could not be attached to the ship by cable if it was to warp space around it, as the cable being both inside the bubble, being warped and being outside while the basket would have to be moving inside its own warp bubble. Another issue would be that an object collected by the basket in the warp bubble would just accumulate at the event horizon, thus the warp bubble would have to be broken and activated again. However the fundamental idea wasn't unpractical. A simpler use of FTL would eliminate the logistical issues. Vessel RH-54x was the first effective vehicle to use a release of tachyons to steer the basket. The basket itself was an armoured tachyon sail doped in FTL fuel. A local internal interdiction field caused tachyons to accumulate which were directed at the basket. It launched at the target stellarite cluster. The basket accelerated quickly and narrowly passed the crystal while reversing the polarity of the tachyon charge. This caused the basket to reverse direction completely, picking up the stellarite cluster. The basket folded in like a net and slowed it down before it could impact the vessel. The experiment was a success and vessel RH-54x was to be used as the base for a production-ready variant.

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part 5

Stellarite production was in order in accretion disks all over GBE territory. There were a total of three black hole systems in which the harvesting was taking place. The state issued a patent for the harvesting methods and the harvesting itself was classified. However, three mining giants were allowed to sign contracts to be able to build stellarite harvesting ships and harvest it themselves for the sole purpose of creating competition for the state. Vessel RH-54 was the initial and base model for stellarite harvesting in the GBE but soon there would be at least 4 active models including Mesino Enterprise’s SHP-12 variant that was especially reliable. With this highly lucrative new recourse, a load of new infrastructure within these black hole systems were built including high power laser lines, gateways and quantum jump nodes. Even though only the oligopoly had access to the stellarite harvesting, there was a large influx of ships and construction efforts making the systems high with activity. During the schism, these companies had lost most of their wealth and economic weight. However, Stellarite was now highly demanded for military applications, one of the only markets that had strongly increased in value.

KrankysFirebrand48

Journals done, TL;DR: GBE has started harvesting Stellarite from black holes