The Archangel Syndrome v1/v2 (Page 13 of 25)

Also, because I like to give you headaches...

if a precious resource is plenteous in one area and scarce in the others (eg the neutral zone) you end up with either

(a) a "neutral" owner (such as OPEC) or

(b) the slow realization from the neutrals that they are dependent on a non-neutral power. Then you get lots of Sweden / Finland cases.

Imagine, should you, a world with no OPEC where the A was militarily successful but oil poor while B was oil-rich. Now you'd have neutral C charging the A out the nose because A can't exactly make its enemy sell, right? And if A doesn't pay ruinous prices, all its cars (ships) go still. So over 1000 years neutral C drains all the wealth out of A.

So then A should attack neutral C and take its resources. So C better align with B because this attack is inevitable

OK, how about Deu-Tritium Crystals? Or Deutrit Crystals (DTC)?

Much as I like the idea of crystals, I want to avoid the inevitable comparison to Star Trek.

Although I had hoped to use iridium for both the outer "shell" of the segments that make up the portal and for fuel, iridium is too common in the Solar System. Osmium is a good alternative for both uses given how rare it is. I may use it in gas form for the stardrives.

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate the suggestions.
Dirk

Wasn't Deu a prefix that Mendeleev used as a placeholder for elements his early periodic tables predicted but which had yet to be found? So, deu-uranium (a made up example) would have been the element above uranium in the table that had yet to be found and given its own name.

Another one I considered was Newtonium, but that name was used temporarily by scientists long ago when they thought they had found a new element, which turned out to be an existing element in an alternate form. I forget the details.

Or I could just go for plain old diamonds. The only problem with osmium is the name doesn't sound particularly sexy.

Turns out this is easier than I thought. There are countless minerals to choose from to serve as "fuel":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minerals
I didn't realize there were so many. I'll use either atradite or atreidite. I'd prefer that at least some readers get the connection to Dune, which suggests atreidite as the better pick, but it looks weird as a name.
There's really no end of mineral names one could make up for a sci-fi story. Asimite. Clarkite. Herberite. Lucaite or Lukite. I got the idea for those Galactipedia entries from Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica excerpts and Wikipedia. The long epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter were inspired by Dune.

Any preferences?

EDIT: atredite won, without the first i.

Had a look. Apparently, math's gotten even more complex than when I went to university. :-)  I do recall thinking after I graduated that I should have done a math minor. Would have been more interesting/useful than all the courses I took to satisfy my required "general" credits, most of which were so boring they dragged down my GPA.

I deleted a bit of crap from the writeup, reducing it to 4.5 pages. That's as short as I can make it. Please let me know if it drags.

Starfish kill bivalves by wrapping around them, prying them open just a crack, and everting their stomachs into that crack, eating the poor shellion alive from within.  Maybe that's your metaphor?

Oh, and starfish belong to the grouping Asteroidia.

I'm amazed how complex starfish are given they have no brains.

That's a cool article. Cars will last much longer and are unlikely to be competitive against TAAS pricewise. And if you produce fewer cars, you get less economies of scale, driving car prices even higher. They're already obscenely expensive. Interestingly, the scarcity of atreidite for teleportation is similar to today's oil production.