A quick note on high tech bearings:
A few years back, I was working at the Naval Research Lab in DC in diamond
thin film coatings. This technology has a lot of applications in future
technology.
For one, diamond has a very low co-efficient of friction. Diamond coated
bearings will not only be extremely durable, but have very low friction.
Diamond is also a very good heat conductor. Therefore cooling these bearings
will be a lot easier.
Durable,
Low friction,
Good Heat conductivity,
Good optical qualities,
Good semiconductor.
Sounds pretty good don't it? Problem is that right now, we can't grow single
crystal diamond films. Not yet, but pretty soon. They are studying a lotta
techniques to get these things working. Just before I left I heard about a
new idea that was producing good results. (They were going after the patent
so I'm not sure if I can say much. Ask me in a couple years...)
But basically growing diamond films is very easy. Polycrystalline films are
dead simple. You can grow them with an acetylene welding torch. The trick is
getting the right temperature in the flame and the correct temperature on the
substrate. You also have to worry about the purity of your acetylene and
oxygen in your welding torch.
If you've got the right conditions, you will grow a diamond coating. The
rate of growth is currently very slow, but that's one of the things they are
working on. One of they guys at the lab wanted to grow a diamond about a
kilgram in mass to give to Cher (Don't ask!) However, I did a little back of
the envelope calculations and found that it would take 300 years or so to
grow at current rates. (Cher won't be looking so great in 300 years...)
However, even these dirty polycrystalline films could be polished down to a
smooth surface for use in bearings. Then the problem of adhearance to the
substate comes in. The polycrystalline lattice has weak points in it and these
can lead to failure.
Other uses of diamond:
Diamond doped with boron makes an excellent semiconductor. It is much faster,
more durable, and radiation hard than silicon, gallium arsinide, and silicon
carbide. With the added heat conductivity of diamond it will be a LOT easier
to pack a lotta circuits into a diamond computer chip and your diamond
supercomputer won't have to be cooled with liquid nitrogen.
Diamond also has some very nice optical properties. It is much more
transparant in certain frequency ranges than glass or quartz. So your TL 13+
x-ray lasers may be using diamond optics for their lenses and mirrors.
At the current rate of R&D, I'd guess that diamond thin films,
semiconductors and optics will be available at TL9. But Diamond computers
will hold off till TL 10. (They'll have to redevelop a lot of circuitry
etching techniques which are currently geared toward silicon)
For those of you who were there and remember, This is what Tweel and 'Vouf
were arguing about (and annoying everyone :-) for weeks in the PBEM. (I think
that discussion was the spark that demanded that the PBEMCHAT line be set
up! :-) Diamond films for use in cooling and monotoring Jump drives. If you
coated a starship with a diamond thin film coating doped with boron, you could
then cool the grid more efficiently, and monitor the grid by etching circuitry
into that film you can install sensors to monitor the grid.
Tweel originally suggested that the grid could be reduced to an evaporated
thin coating of lanathaum and coat that with a thin film of diamond to
protect it. 'Vouf then quashed that one by bringing up the possibility of
battle damage. In the end the proposal was to coat the grid with diamond
thereby helping the cooling which would decrease the mass of the needed
lanthanum and thereby decreasing the cost of the drive. OF course all of this
is arguing about non-existant jump technolgy, but I'm sure that you get the
point that diamond could be VERY useful for trav technology.
Scott Kellogg
PS. Catie, *I'd* like to hear more about the magnetic frictionless bearings.
It's always useful to know what technolgy can *REALLY* do *NOW* when your
trying to work in a setting that tells you what technolgy will be doing
several hundred years from now! Thanks!