Republic of Luna

Conquest of Space:

Even without considering its titillating future, a strong case can be made supporting Calconn as the most influential material of the 21^st century. The change in technology was so dramatic, so complete, that historians use the notation preCal to separate everything that predated the use of Calconn. Many have started to present the current era as the Calconn Age. This fact may be best known by the technical people who keep the electricity flowing and industries humming, but as of this writing virtually every citizen on Earth and Luna knows what Calconn is. It touches everyone every day in ways they may not even be aware. Calconn based electromagnetism and magnetic field generators retooled human technology, just as steam and copper-based electricity did in their time. Everything electric became smaller yet faster, stronger, more efficient, when using Calconn in place of copper, aluminum, or gold conductors, from the largest power cables all the way down to the micro circuitry found inside a computer chip. Practically from the start, every major industry clamored for Calconn based electronics and machinery. After that first decade, the demand far exceeded the supply and has for half a century, spawning an endless number of industries aimed at scratching that itch.

Once the public got over their fear of Calconn, it required less than twelve years to replace the copper-based electrical power grid that had built up over the previous 150 years. Transmission line losses dropped to zero and power generation efficiency, along with the items that used the power, jumped many orders of magnitude. Overnight the global power system went from barely sustaining growth to having a tremendous overcapacity simply by redesigning with Calconn. Smaller and more powerful electro-magnets gave maglev trains enormous load carrying ability. Electric motors gained efficiency and power while shrinking tenfold in size and weight allowing the dependence on oil to plummet. Calconn made it possible to create biotronic implants with such high efficiency and low power requirements they operate on the micro-voltage available within the human body. By every measure Calconn revolutionized human technology. It provided the means to shape our environment like few other materials have.

But it is the impact on the aerospace community that many point to as the most revolutionary aspect of Calconn. Immediately following the discovery of Type 3 superconductors, Pratt and Whitney and General Electric collaborated in a crash engineering program to design the first magnetoplasma thruster using Calconn. To say that they were successful is like saying the sun is hot or the cosmos is large, but in all fairness, their job was relatively easy. The idea of a magnetoplasma rocket has been around since the middle of the 20^th century, but it was not practical because of the massive weight of the cryogenic support equipment necessary when using Type 1 or Type 2 materials. That mass disappeared when they designed the same nozzle using Type 3 superconductors. However, that is only part of the picture. The magnetic fields produced within the first prototype were much stronger than expected, far exceeding the sum of the individual contributions from each coil. They learned that by clever design of the superconductive coils they could create feedback resonance that greatly amplified the strength of the resulting magnetic field. Even in the first full scale thruster, they strove to ensure that the physical geometry of the coils were in harmony with the frequency of the electrical energy coursing through its Calconn veins. In doing so, they created a magnetic field more powerful than anything before, succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

It was the spectacular results of their endeavor, not the ease with which it was achieved, that sparked the aerospace community in particular, and all of humanity to one extent or another. Indeed, the reported specific impulse of the new thruster caused many scientists and engineers to declare that it must be a misprint, a mistake in reporting the data. Specific Impulse, or I_SP as it’s known in the mathematical equations of spaceflight, is simply the rocket’s exhaust velocity. Multiplying I_SP by mass flow rate calculates the rocket’s thrust. The Space Shuttle’s main rocket engines had an I_SP of about 450 m/s and achieved high thrust, over a half million pounds at peak, by having enormous flow rates over a very short period of time. The pumps that supplied fuel to the shuttle’s hungry motors could empty an Olympic sized swimming pool in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, ion electrostatic thrusters are just the opposite, low thrust over a long time. Designed for deep space missions where it did not matter if it took years to get there, ion thrusters had I_SP of 30,000 m/s but with fuel flow rates so low that the thrust this produced was less than 1/50th of a pound of force. An ion thruster could run continuously for months or even years on just a few pounds of fuel thus making it much more efficient than any chemical rocket motor, as long as time was not a factor.

The newly designed Calconn-based thrusters jumped far beyond anything ever attained in a laboratory or in a computer simulation, easily obtaining an I_SP of 11.5 million m/s, or 3.8% the speed of light. Combined with a mass flow rate of just over 5 grams per second, these first generation magnetoplasma thrusters produced almost 14,000 pounds force.

Less than two years after the start of the program, the first Type 3 magnetoplasma prototype was completed and installed on a military fighter airframe. The pilot took his aircraft to 132,000 feet and Mach 15 before he stopped accelerating. He flew at the boundary between Earth and space for one complete orbit. The achievement roared through the aerospace community like a raging wild fire. Humanity suddenly had one of its hallowed dreams in hand, easy access to space.

For more than a half century, engineers have been refining that first magnetoplasma thruster design. The latest generation is a solid-state electromagnetic nozzle culminating almost sixty years of research and experience. The heart of these devices is a million degree ball of plasma, its electrons stripped away in the intense heat of radio-frequency excitation and ion-cyclotron resonance, producing massive amounts of electricity that feeds the Calconn coils of the thruster, thereby creating the strongest electromagnetic field ever measured. Small quantities of plasma ions are striped away and accelerated inducing velocities approaching half the speed of light while producing thrusts upwards of 180,000 pounds force.

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