Category: [TECHNOLOGY]
Type: [Consumable, FTL Subsystem Material, Strategic Commodity]
Canon Tier: Tier 2 (proposed for Tier 1 on Council approval)
Tags: [NEW-TECH] [PLOT-DEVICE]
The slide catalyst (INC legal term; engineers say seedglass, pilots say glass) [NEW-TECH] is the scarce consumable of faster-than-light travel. It is a dark, diamond-silicate photonic glass doped with presolar nanocrystals, and every CID FTL Drive burns a little of it while charging, to template the false-vacuum droplets that the NECL Ring Stack then fills with energy. A courier at 12c burns about 0.45 kg per jump, worth about 18 kJC, or five months of a median Sol wage. The He-3 for the same hop costs about 1.5 kJC. The Terran Sphere’s rule of thumb: fuel is cheap, glass is dear. Dear, not ruinous: glass is the biggest bill of any jump, yet an owner-operator courier burns it every run, and its scarcity shows up as price swings, allocation and embargo risk rather than as a wall. Its supply chain, from stardust rock to Haystack furnace to L-point dark-shop to sealed cassette, shapes the politics of Sol c. 2460.
| Parameter | Meaning / Description | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Material | Diamond-silicate photonic glass, about 3.3 g/cm³ | About 10 wt% presolar nanocrystals |
| Dopant | Nanodiamond and SiC grains older than the Sun; their defect centres template droplet nucleation | Usable fraction: about 0.2 ppm in ordinary rock, 2-20 ppm in stardust rock |
| Seeding volley | Per-panel OPCPA pulse (the Tier 1 pump optics) | About 100 fs, 12 PW summed, about 1.2 kJ |
| Ablation per volley | Glass removed from the wafer in the panel feed | About 3.0 mg total (about 31 µg per panel) |
| Seeded charge per volley | Energy captured into droplets | About 2.0 GJ (gain about $1.7 \times 10^{6}$) |
| Courier charge cycle | 20 GW_e for 4.2 h | About $1.5 \times 10^{5}$ volleys, about 10 Hz, about 12 kW average optical power |
| $k_{cat}$ | Catalyst consumption coefficient | 0.15 kg per $10^{14}$ J (1.5 g/TJ) |
| Seed cassette | Standard unit: sealed, dark, serial-numbered, Lagrange seal | 0.50 kg, about 150 cm³ |
| Freight cassette | For freighters | 2.0 kg |
| Capital canister | For capitals | 12 kg |
| Shelf life | Shielded / unshielded | About 3 yr / months |
| Annealing limit | Above this the glass is ruined | About 420 K |
| Posted price | Set by the Posting House | About 40 JC/g (contract band 32-50); cassette about 20 kJC |
Relevant Equations:
\[m_{cat} = k_{cat}\, E_{jump}, \qquad k_{cat} = 0.15\ \text{kg per } 10^{14}\ \text{J}\]Because the jump energy is $E_{jump} = \max(E_{min},\, 3.6\times10^{14}\,\text{J}\cdot m_{kt}\,\bar v/10c)$ (Guide 5.2), glass consumption scales with ship mass and speed, and floors at $E_{min} \approx 2\times10^{14}$ J.
| Ship | $E_{jump}$ (J) | Glass per jump | Cost at 40 JC/g |
|---|---|---|---|
| Floor (courier up to 7.9c; bubble torpedo) | $2.0\times10^{14}$ | 0.30 kg | 12 kJC |
| Courier, 12c | $3.0\times10^{14}$ | 0.45 kg | 18 kJC |
| Courier, 20c | $5.0\times10^{14}$ | 0.76 kg | 30 kJC |
| Courier, 30c | $7.6\times10^{14}$ | 1.1 kg | 45 kJC |
| 3 kt freighter, 12c | $1.3\times10^{15}$ | 1.9 kg | 78 kJC |
| Atlas, 17c | $7.3\times10^{15}$ | 11 kg | 0.44 MJC |
One standard cassette covers a single courier jump up to about 13c. Since $E \propto v$, every extra c costs glass, and since range per charge also grows with speed ($v \cdot T_{coh}$), the cheapest way across a hop is to fly glass-slow: just fast enough to reach the far port on one charge (a 4.4 ly hop needs about 8.7c and 0.33 kg). Couriers on priority work fly at 12-20c and pay the difference; bulk haulers, thrifty captains and anyone buying grey glass fly glass-slow.
What it does. The slide catalyst is not a fuel and not an explosive; it is inert and the energy lives in the NECL, never in the glass. During charging, each panel’s pump chain fires its seeding volley through a thin seedglass wafer in the panel feed. Presolar defect centres give the vacuum droplets something to nucleate on; without them the pump light finds only noise. Each volley ablates a few milligrams of glass and seeds about 2 GJ of charge. A courier needs about 150,000 volleys across the 4.2-hour charge, and the feed uses 0.45 kg. The glass is consumed while charging, not when the bubble forms: the 100 PW, 3 ms nucleation pulse draws on stored charge and uses none. An aborted, spilled or quenched charge loses its glass all the same. The technology rides entirely on the existing CID/NECL leap, with no new physics.
Lab-glass era (2320-2353). The first FTL ships used lab glass [NEW-TECH] (also “white glass”): synthetic nanocrystals with tailored isotopes. It works, with the same coherence time and range, but burns about ten times the mass per joule. A 12c courier takes about 4.5 kg per jump, and the residue fouls panel feeds quickly. The Brightwing Beta’s 3.5 ly hops of 2320 ran on lab glass. Every FTL hull flew this way until 2353. Today lab glass sells at about 25 JC/g, so a lab-glass jump costs about six times a seedglass one before the fouled feeds are counted.
The Ilunga seeding effect. In 2353, Dr. Mwamba Ilunga-Ferreira (2311-2389) at L4-Foundry-Three tested grains from a carbonaceous chondrite and found they seeded droplets an order of magnitude better than anything synthesized. The Ilunga seeding effect [NEW-EVENT] ended the lab-glass era, and made the Belt rocks richer than the labs. By c. 2360 the first Haystack furnaces opened at Ceres and Vesta and the first seedglass lines at L4. The 2371 Seedglass Standard (SCA Port Code Annex S) fixed the serialised cassette and the glass ledger, and the Long Expansion began.
From rock to cassette. Presolar grains survive only in primitive bodies: C-type Belt rocks, D/P-type Trojans, cometary nuclei. A Dragonfly drone (Dragonfly) flags promising rock by its isotopic “xenon sniff” (the Xe-HL signature). A stardust rock [NEW-WORLD] holds 2-20 ppm of usable fraction; ordinary rock holds about 0.2 ppm. The Haystack process (“burning the haystack to find the needle”) runs at Belt hubs (Ceres, Vesta, Callisto L-1): a furnace bank (see the Volatilisation Furnace Bank) plus acid leach removes everything but the refractory grains, recovering about 30%. The concentrate travels in dark, shielded seed flasks to L-point dark-shops (NECL Dark-Shop), where each line grows about 0.5 kg of seedglass per day, or 180 kg per year.
Sol’s budget, c. 2460. Sol’s shops need about 1.1 t/yr of presolar fraction (10 wt% of their 11 t of glass). At 5 ppm and 30% recovery, that is about $7.3\times10^{5}$ t/yr of rock, or 37 stardust rocks of 20 kt each, every year. Precursor comes from the Belt (about 55%, mostly through the Vesta Prime Consortium), the Jovian Trojans (about 25%) and the Rim (about 20%, cometary). Sol’s shops make about 11 t/yr; colonial shops add about 5 t/yr, for 16 t. Demand at the posted price is about 17 t/yr (about $1.1\times10^{19}$ J across about 11,300 jumps; months-long transits, not glass, set the number of jumps). The gap of about 6% is a mild, structural shortage, and it shows as volatility rather than as a wall: the posted price creeps up between quarterly postings, spot cassettes at busy ports trade near the top of the band, standing contracts (the Commonwealth’s first refusal, the Jovian quota) are filled first, and the rest closes through glass-slow running and the odd deferred jump. The shortage persists because the Moot adds lines slowly on purpose, every new L-point shop is a security question under the Strategic Foundries Act, and precursor arrives in 20 kt lumps. A single 20 kt stardust rock yields about 30 kg of seed grains, which sell as concentrate at about 140 JC per contained gram: about 4.2 MJC, some ninety years of a median wage, a prospector’s jackpot.
Three ratios worth memorising. Courier self-charge: 1.9 kg of He-3 (about 1.5 kJC) against about 18 kJC of glass, a ratio of roughly 12 to 1. Exchange: 50 kg of He-3 buys 1 kg of seedglass. Leverage: the Jovian Directorate’s He-3 trade (about 24 GJC/yr) is worth more than thirty times the whole Sphere’s glass (about 0.64 GJC/yr), yet the fuel is sold open-tank under the Helium-3 Accord and the glass under a security clause. Fuel is abundant, so it is sold under rules; glass is scarce, so it is sold under leverage. That is the politics of the whole Sol system in two sentences.
Handling. Cassettes open only inside the dark feed; light fogs the glass (UV worst). Radiation fogs it slowly, so crews stow it inside the water jacket (Water-Radfoam Shielding). Fire ruins it, so it is kept away from radiators and the heat battery (Molten-Salt Heat Battery). Ablation fines in the feed cause glass lung [NEW-TECH] in technicians; feed crews wear respirators and the Engineers’ Guild treats it as a recognised occupational disease.
The glow test. Every cassette has a test window. A low-dose probe light is passed through it: good glass answers with a single sharp fluorescence line; fogged glass answers dim and broad. Any pilot with a pencil torch and a calibration card can run it, and does, every time a cassette changes hands. Cassettes that fail are “fogged”; cassettes that pass but were never in the ledger are “grey”.
Bad glass. Cut or fogged glass seeds incoherent droplets: higher idle power, shorter coherence time, and at worst a partial quench mid-charge. The shutters save the ship and cost the panel. A 3 kt freighter that loses a panel loses a season of income.
Seen and felt. Seedglass is faintly cold to the touch, black as a pupil, and heavier than it looks. Cassettes ride in matte-black cases with a hexagon-in-ring seal and a serial scratched into the rim with a diamond. Veteran couriers speak of “burning glass” for charging and “glass-slow” for thrift; a captain who says she is “flying on lab glass” has just told you something frightening about her finances.
Story Seeds: