One unexpected side-effect of all this incursion hunting I'm doing is that I'm acquiring a fair few scraps of Sansha armour plating to do... pretty much whatever I like with. Mostly, it's become my material of choice for sculpting. Cia's flowers were just the start...
The joy of it is just how much of a challenge the stuff is to work with. Those supercarriers are so easy to bring down once the shields have dropped that it seems unintuitive that the armour they're layered with should be so difficult to cut, drill, melt and shape.
That's comparatively easy of course. "Easy" in that we only have to fling enough firepower at them to devastate a small continent.
Get it down on the scale of laser-sculpting tools, abrading drill heads and human hands, and you realise that it is in fact a non-uniformly crystalline metallo-ceramic material with some remarkable properties. It bends and flexes like metal - you could build a spring out of it - and it's tough, so compression shockwaves and kinetic impacts just transmit through without fracturing it. Its melting point appears to be somewhere in the order of 5500 Kelvin, but considering that it vaporises at about the same temperature. It's a semiconductor with a similar electrical resistance to a Silicone crystal.
Interestingly enough, the easiest way to cut and shape it I've yet found has been a simple piezoelectric vibroscalpel. I guess if you're designing starship armour, the possibility that somebody might take a surgical tool to it isn't ranked high on the list of eventualities to cover.
...I wonder how we can exploit that?
Save. End.
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