Arkonite

Humanity always needs a fuel to fight over

Arkonite is an Artificial alloy created some time before mankind's exodus and arrival in the Alpha Centauri star system; it is often argued that the Material is one of the most important ever discovered in human history, due to its variety of uses as a fuel for the space-warping Glide Drive.

Properties

Material Characteristics

The alloy, when originally discovered, was initially believed to be a grey, dull colour. However, after the first samples were taken from Crash Site Apollyon, it was quickly discovered that the dull grey colour had come from millennia of dust build-up across the material. In actuality, the material has a physical similarity to Bismuth - which is why bismuth is at least believed to be a component of the alloy - such that a cross-section of a piece of Arkonite appears chromatic (rainbow) coloured.

Physical & Chemical Properties

It is remarkably cool to the touch, and it has been agreed upon that even at room temperatures, the core of a chunk of Arkonite remains cold for an exceptionally long time. Even after using short-wavelength EM radiation in an attempt to increase the core temperature, it can take several hours or days to do so. This lends the material an incredible amount of durability against cutting lasers and other heat-based damage.
The most important property of Arkonite, however, is only uncovered when it is bombarded by super-accelerated particles. When collisions occur with hydrogen atoms that are accelerated to high subliminal speeds, the Arkonite produces a directional field - similar to that of a magnetic field - around itself. The size of this field depends on the size of the chunk of Arkonite, whilst the strength of the field depends on the number of collisions per second. Then, the field can be directed by supplying a magnetic charge across the Arkonite chunk.
This field is why Arkonite is so important to modern civilization - field warps the dimensions of the space around it. The Space Scale Factor (ς, sometimes called Sigma) is calculated by the following formula;

Where V is the Volume of the Arkonite piece, and Z is the collision frequency.
This property means that dimensions nearest the North pole of the material are contracted by the Space Scale factor, which can dramatically contract local space, whilst the further an object travels from the North pole, the close the dimensions return to an unwarped space (where ς = 1). This property has a variety of uses, but most notably the property - if used on a large enough scale - is used in Glide Drive technology to contract space before a spacecraft before rarefactoring space back to its natural dimensions behind it. This contraction property means that a spacecraft using a Glide Drive doesn't need to accelerate faster to increase its speed - instead, the distance between the origin of the object and the destination of the object is decreased.

Compounds

Artificial Arkonite, officially known as Arkite and colloquially referred to as Impulse, is an artificial compound that is used as a substitute for the real thing. The necessity for such a compound became apparent quickly, as the only source of Real Arkonite was Crash Site Apollyon; this meant that supplies were limited in both the amount collectible and the speed of collection. As such, under funding from vast research grants awarded by the Commonwealth, researchers from the up-and-coming Eden Corporation were able to develop a cheaper but much weaker alternative to Arkonite, which they named Arkite. However, when pitching their idea back to the Commonwealth government, the name was decided to not represent humanity's achievements well enough; Arkite, whilst utilising Arkonite in its creation, was a human development. As such, although the material is officially still called Arkite, the Eden Corporation renamed the material in marketing to Impulse.
The compound's volume is anywhere from a quarter to a sixteenth Arkonite, whilst the rest of its mass is composed of various metals and alloys. Although the exact composition of Arkite is a closely guarded secret within the Commonwealth, the general consensus by the civilian science community is that a large proportion of the alloy is steel and bismuth, owing to the weak magnetic fields that Arkite creates but Arkonite does not.

Origin & Source

Due to the certainty that Arkonite is not a naturally occurring material, it is assumed that the only source that current levels of technology can extract is from the wreckage at Crash Site Apollyon on Centaurus. The site is home to the only known vessel of the Arkons - a mysterious species that was responsible for the Gates - and has been systematically reversed engineered and scrapped over the past 150 years. Due to the size of the vessel, this means that only an estimated 50% of the vessel has, as of yet, been disassembled, and the entire remains have not been fully explored as of yet due to a massive amount of locked rooms.
Due to Crash Site Apollyon being the only known source of Arkonite, and that Arkonite is used up during usage within a Glide Drive, various recycling and material saving techniques have been implemented in order to maintain Humanity's Arkonite supply for at least the next 200 years.

History & Usage

Discovery

Arkonite was first discovered within Crash Site Apollyon during the first ground surveys dispatched from the Ark upon its arrival above Centaurus (then Proxima Centauri III) in 2198. The research teams sent to the Ark were incredibly cautious due to humanity's encounter and subsequent enslavement by the hostile alien Tarrasque only a century before; however, within only a year, they had made great strides towards the collection and understanding of the properties of Arkonite. By 2210, the first Glide Drives - which heavily relied on Arkonite or an alloy of it - were created.

Cultural Significance and Usage

In the Periphery, due to the rarity of Arkonite, the few scraps that the Periphery Marine have either stolen or won in combat are kept as prized possessions, either displayed proudly or crushed down to produce very weak, but easily producible, Impulse. This Impulse is not nearly as potent as that which the Commonwealth Naval Command utilises, but it serves the purposes of the Periphery's way of life incredibly well.

Arkonite Image; https://prochemonline.com/featured-element-bismuth

Type

Composite

Rarity

Extremely rare

Color

Chromatic/Rainbow coloured, although it often forms crusts which take on the colour of collected dust.

Common State

Solid

Related Technologies

• Glide Drive