Exotic Raw Materials

[Spinward Scout]

We've all focused on artifacts you can find at Ancient sites. But what are some of the new/old raw materials that you could find at an Ancient site? Or what some artifacts are made of? Or even find in your Travells?

Here's a few

Neutronium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutronium

Singularum - one step farther than Neutronium. Created with the gravity of a black hole.

For more ideas, here's a wiki page of Fictional Materials

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_materials

What materials have you come up with for your game?

 

[Icosahedron]

Personally, I try to avoid exotic materials as being 'un-Traveller'. However, some exotic materials are canon. Antimatter is the obvious one, I've seen Coherent Superdense armour somewhere, MT? TNE? which I think was TL16 or 17. Super-hard metal is a SF staple, as are transparent construction materials.

More effective drugs (such as anagathics) are a possibility, not sure whether you'd class room-temperature superconductors or nanomaterials as raw materials or artifacts (maybe they already power stuff behind the scenes, such as grav units).

Unfortunately, most of these are processed rather than 'raw', because if they were natural, we'd probably know about them now, even if we can't harness them (see antimatter).

 

[Spinward Scout]

It's ok if it's 'processed' I would think.

To get Neutronium, you'd either have to get it directly from a neutron star or create it by gravity compression. It's a theoretical material anyway.

And of course, Singlarum is something I made up to describe matter further compressed by gravity than what would be in a neutron star. In other words, what happens when you gravity compress a material to the point where quarks and the sub-elementary particles quarks are supposedly made from (called preons) no longer exist. Technically it's a theoretical 'material' that may never exist in real form in the universe. At least since the Big Bang. If then even. Unless it's the Higgs-Boson particle. Or the 'God particle'. Or whatever you want to call it.

But I'd say a created material would be ok. You're right, tho. It's almost like an artifact.

Anyway, it's all just to stimulate our creativity for the game.

 

[Icosahedron]

The problem with neutronium, if you're using real-world physics, is that it's only stable at immense temperatures and pressures. Bring the stuff out of the star, away from the gravity and it reverts to normal matter.