The production of

laminate diamond

Laminate diamond is one of the ubiquitous materials used throughout the federation it can quickly be remembered for its use as a envelope material in habitats, and its use to form durable transparent windows. But it is used far more often than this, monitor displays are coated with a thin laminate to render them scratch proof, and for the same purposes optical data storage units, it is also used for heat resistant sensor windows, thin film wavelength filters, surfacing on medical implants, and other diverse applications, in short it is used everywhere.

            Chemically speaking laminate diamond is very simple, it is made from just one element, carbon, and its bonding structure shares the same tetrahedral nature it exhibits in organic compounds, but it has been fiendishly hard to produce until the mid twenty first century on Earth where technology allowed its synthesis. Laminate diamond is also a pre-federation technology invented by all the races before federation contact, some speculate that this material is essential for advanced industry, and therefore spacefaring cultures.

            Production today can create continuous films of diamond of nearly any thickness, from only a few atoms thick, used for coatings, to sheets millimetres thick for structural components. The first stage is ‘spraying’ a carbon rich plasma onto a cooled sheet of massless neutronium, this creates a jumbled layer of carbon, in this part of the process the produced film is brittle and hardly perfectly transparent. The film is then reheated allowing the carbon atoms to recrystallise, and form large continuous crystal sheets, the sheet may be kept in this hot condition at temperatures exceeding 2000’K for many minutes, and is also aided in recrystallization by pressure from heated neutronium rollers (this is not done in very fine sheets). The sheets are then gradually cooled and their new continuous crystal structure is preserved, the product is a thin brittle but tough sheet of laminate diamond.

            The more familiar bendy laminate diamond sheets are actually fractured versions of the product above. The brittle sheet is first backed onto a flexible transparent polymer, and then the diamond layer is scored to form thousands of microscopic scales per square centimetre these scales are then secured with another face of transparent polymer. Though each scale is brittle like the original sheet, the cut between each scale allows the greater structure to be bent and flexed. Scale size can vary between scales micrometres across, which gives extremely flexible sheeting (‘silk’ grade), to larger and tougher plates used in engineering structures, often millimetre sized scales (‘engineering’ or ‘fish-scale’ grade).