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Thread: Transparent Aluminum is a reality

  1. #1
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    Transparent Aluminum is a reality

    ...In the form of aluminium oxynitride, a crystalline transparent ceramic currently being tested out under the trade name of ALON as a possible armour plating.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride

  2. #2
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    Another, more expansive report. This stuff is really exciting.
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...ass-metal.html

  3. #3
    Neat. I should throw some stuff made out of it into my D&D game.
    Portfolio | Blog Currently Running: Call of Cthulhu, Star Trek GUMSHOE Currently Playing: DramaSystem, Swords & Wizardry

  4. #4
    There was also talk that NASA had invented the Warp Drive, but now that is being retracted:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansie...nt-warp-drive/

  5. #5
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    NASA is still researching warp drives (or other FTL drives)

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/scie...ce-travel.html

    one proposed drive is the Alcubierre drive (folded space drive, similar to the Coaxial drive in star trek), the designer got the idea from Star Trek.

    https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInte...cubierre-Drive

    http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclo...lcubdrive.html

  6. #6
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    Waveman, the first link you posted is to the claims by Harold "Sonny" White, which have just been discredited.

    The Alcubiere Drive, the subject of the other two links, seems to still have some potential, but relies on tech they have't developed yet.

  7. #7
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    sorry about the double up (first link), as you said the Alcubierre drive is still hypothetical, but it is a start and shows the current thinking and direction of FTL research.

    another interesting NFTL(not as fast as light) drive is the nuclear pulse engine, while still hypothetical it is with in the bounds of current technology to produce.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion

  8. #8
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    Since I'm currently running a time-travel campaign, I thought it might be interesting to generate DTI's files on the events of Star Trek IV. In part, they read:

    Nichols, Marcus PhD. Chem, UCLA 1969
    In 1985, Dr. Mark Nichols solved the issue of making aluminum oxynitride transparent while working as San Francisco branch manager of Plexicorp. AlNO had been developed a few years earlier in an opaque white form. Nichols credited his inspiration to a Dr. Scott from the University of Edinburgh, though nobody has been able to track down the mysterious Dr. Scott. In 2286, DTI was notified that during the Whalesong Crisis, when James T. Kirk and his comand crew went back in time to 1985, Captain Montgomery Scott gave Nichols the nudge that allowed him to make this breakthrough. As Capt. Scott testified that Nichols had actually been the one to make the breakthrough in the unaltered timeline, this is classed as a Predestination Paradox. AlNO is the basis for today's Transparent Aluminum.

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