Driver Coil Material Manufacture

            Unlike other components which are usually forged under high temperatures and pressed and bent into a mould, Driver Coil Material (DCM) is manufactured at temperatures close to absolute zero, and the slightest raise in temperature or pressure will damage the growing structure of a driver core component.

            All races in the federation discovered driver coil material through the same route, which demonstrates that certain technologies have to be developed before a civilization is able to make DCM. The revolution in all cases came after the understanding of superconducting crystals, DCM also sharing this property, It was found that at low temperatures atoms would spontaneously generate intricate crystal structures far more remarkable than the simple lattices in salts formed at boiling point.

            The first samples of DCM took the simple geometries of its lattice, forming blocks, and occasionally slender cylinders (the material grew into a helix that repeated on itself). This material sparked a lot of interest, for a start it always strived to be colder than the surroundings, endeavoring to remain at a temperature no greater than a few Kelvin, when the test finally showed that the energy was disappearing to generate spatial curvature with no mass at  its cuase this caused a sensation.

            DCM like massless neutronium (MN) is one of the wonder materials that the federation is literally built on, it is found at the heart of all starship drives, as either blocks (Driver Core Elements), or rotated shapes, usually toroidial which are called driver coils, it is also found in mass sensors which again are found on all nearly all spacecraft. It was an evolution of DCM generated fields that gave inertia damping, and inflexion which gave artificial gravity technologies, that allow for permanent g aboard spacecraft and also to cancel the acceleration of normal space maneuvers (as trans-c flight distorts space around the craft, the craft is not actually accelerated but the space around is modified and moves (not quite true but near enough)). DCM also is central to other field applications such as force-fields and mass suppression machinery.

            When the self structuring property of DCM was discovered the only way to manufacture it was if the a chamber was filled with the appropriate ions, chilled, and kept in zero-g, this meant initially that only orbital facilities could generate the material, which in itself led to a proliferation of asteroid colonies amongst the fledgling federation races. After many years it was found that more complex shapes could be grown by producing a tailored seed which was grown on in the ion chambers. Further research showed that with gentle applications of fields a precise shape could be manufactures, at this stage DCM took another leap, rather than having to craft and cut the slabs of material to produce crude DCM components precise high efficiency shapes could be manufactured. On earth this stage of manipulation caused tension among the collapsing countries as the world became globally governed, as this technology was so valuable, and would surely give ultimate power to its owners, fortunately the technology was discovered in parallel and one of the scientists leaked it into the public domain.

            Nowadays components are still manufactured in chilled chambers fed with the material gases, but the dependence on zero gravity has been broken. For the production of a large driver core element a simple scaffold of superconducting wires guides the growth of the DCM into the required shape with atomic precision, as soon as the seeds start to grow the chamber chills further as the material draws away the heat. The process is necessarily slow as the component grows by the addition of individual atoms to its surface, but if the temperature were to be increased imperfections in the lattice structure would appear, and this would negate the increased growth rate. With the precise tailoring of electric and magnetic fields the finished component in the chamber needs no further finishing as the dimensions desired are always precise.

            When a finished DCM component is exposed to high temperatures its perfect lattice begins to degrade, this is why engines can only provide so much power without damaging the coils. Though if the material is left to chill it will show the remarkable property to self heal, most spacecraft driver coils are ‘reconditioned’ in this way to return them to full efficiency. Rather than a spacecraft wait for its coils to heal, it will usually have them removed and replaced with a reconditioned set, the damaged set will then be left to recover and these will then be installed in another needing craft.

So efficient is the recycling of these cores that massless neutronium is beginning to become the limiting factor for the production of large ships again, which was originally overcome by Infinite Matter Devices and brought a brief period where DCM availability was the hold up in manufacture, until these cores were being recycled.

However the production rate of DCM components still underpins the rate at which spacecraft can be made. As the process can not be speeded up, huge manufactories exist on key federation worlds, most of these industries are Panatrak led, as they have become the masters of all things flight, though the humans run several successful plants on Mars, and in synergy with the Panatrak have developed some of the most recent advancements (for example Ferranti drive)