After leaving the naval architects to do what they did best, it took me only a moment to decide to work on the harvester Michael had wanted.
Yes, I did not yet have a solution for the problem of identifying what was alive and what was not, though that did not prevent me from working on the rest of the ship.
As it would be another fully automated ship, I decided to start with the Constructor. In hindsight not the best decision but it did not hurt that much.
I loaded up the design in my mostly empty viron, and as a first step, I deleted the hull, the bulkheads, and whatever else structural elements were present, displaying the ship as a collection of systems connected by superconductors for the energy.
That of course necessitated the next step of deleting the superconductors as well so that I had just the various devices.
The next step was to delete the big NADA as well. The Harvester simply did not need it.
While I was looking at the remaining systems, I sighed and reduced the number of fusactors by one. Without the big NADA, one of the 572GW fusactors was more than enough to power it.
I then looked at what remained, and frankly… barely anything was suited for a Harvester. Way too many big tractor beams, a big bot-storage, the work platforms… nothing of it was necessary.
The molecular foundry on the other hand was way too small to be of use here, and the primary and secondary drive coils were equally underdimensioned.
The material storage was laughably small.
In the end, what remained of the Constructor design was the single fusactor, the computer system, at least for the moment, as well as a couple of tractor beams and disruptors. The rest… well, it would have been easier to simply start from scratch.
It got even worse when I decided that the tractors and disruptors were a bit premature. As long as I had not yet worked out how to discern between biomatter and other materials there was no point in placing the actual mining equipment yet.
Which left me with a single fusactor being left from the Constructor. A fusactor that was more or less standard for all of my projects of that magnitude. Yeah, really similar ships I had to say.
Well, there was nothing to it, I had to move forward. The core of the project was simple, really. For the Constructor that was the NADA, for the Harvester that was the molecular forge.
The one in the Constructor was just there to supplement the NADA, which resulted in it being on the smaller side. This one on the other hand would have to separate and purify all the harvested materials. And as quickly as possible at that.
I could not help but feel a bit… complicated right then, so that was what I designed. The molecular forge was not one but an interlocking combination of four. Interlocking in that each stage could feed the next stage of every forge. That should reduce the downtime to almost nothing.
Oh sure, the disruptor stage was only one stage, even though a big one, that fed into the four gravitic separators. The rest though was divided into four different molecular forges, so that if one was busy refining some ores, the next one could recycle some plastic, while the next could separate some alloys.
In the end, this molecular forge was almost a third of the size of the NADA in the constructor. The second most important part was the cargo handling. I decided that we would need a standard freighter to get the materials off the Harvester, simply to not have it fly back to base every so often.
For that, it needed the facilities to unload what it had harvested. That meant that the Harvester would need to fill containers with what it had harvested. That alone was not the problem though.
After it had filled the containers, it needed to load the containers onto a freighter that was flying nearby, which was a significantly more complicated process. Mostly because nobody had yet developed any way to load containers from one grav ship directly to another without the help of stationary facilities.
Stolen novel; please report.
Yes, it was done in low numbers by smugglers now and then when they wanted to hide the origin of some container. It was always done with single containers, two or maybe three on the extreme end.
And more importantly, it was always done in freefall. I am sure I don’t have to elaborate on how there is a difference between a single container in zero gravity and dozens in full earth gravity.
To make it work, I had to figure out how to squeeze a container loading system into the Harvester. Fortunately, I had the option to use tractor beams to get it done. And conveyors instead of carts or other container movement systems ports used to do the job.
That essentially made it possible in the first place, though it was still a challenge.
While I was pushing the various blocks around, I let the problem of the identification of biomass simmer in the back of my head, and while I was working on the container handling system, I had my eureka moment.
It was actually so simple that I needed to stop myself from slapping myself for overlooking it for so long. The technology was already several decades old and quite mature. Sure, until recently it had been rather expensive, but that was a thing of the past by now.
I was, naturally, talking about the gravity resonance tomograph, or GRT.
While it was true that it was normally used to observe things on a molecular level in a small capsule, that was because, with only the old Kobashigawa coils available to generate the needed gravity flux, anything more than the absolute minimum was way too expensive.
It was still ingrained into the minds of engineers that anything gravitic was insanely expensive and only used when absolutely necessary, but that fact had changed with the new coils.
My elation about this elegant solution lasted all of 10 virtual seconds before I remembered how the GRT worked in the first place.
It used gravitic waves to excite molecules, which in turn emitted a tiny electromagnetic impulse which in turn was recorded by a sensor. The frequency pattern of the impulse was specific to each molecule, which allowed for identification.
The problem came from the fact that it took three gravitic waves that were perpendicular to each other to achieve the excitement.
Now, while I would have no problem getting two waves perpendicular to each other, producing the third at any distance from the Harvester would be in one word impossible.
And even if that were not an insurmountable problem, it would be equally impossible to record the EMP.
To make things short, using a GRT was sadly not an option, and I was back to square one.
But… the problem only consisted of the inability to generate and record the EMP. Even a single wave would excite the molecules it encountered. Just not enough to make it shed that excitement by emitting an electromagnetic pulse.
It should be possible to sense the gravitic resonance directly. With some work that is. It was, obviously, not an option to put the conventional devices used to identify gravitic waves into anything deserving the description ‘mobile’.
Even the large interplanetary superfreighters were significantly smaller than the on-average five-kilometer-long and wide sensors.
And even if it were possible to squeeze those laser interferometers into a ship, they lacked a certain resolution. As in, they showed whether there is a gravity wave, or not.
Fortunately, I had a somewhat larger physics toybox than the scientists from the early 21st century.
And frankly, the problem intrigued me. I was sure that somewhere in the Seeberger equation a more elegant way to detect gravity waves was hidden. I had ‘just’ to find it.
So… another deep dive into the equation… how fun. Well, it would allow me to fit out my physics lab.
Now I only had to figure out how exactly gravity influenced matter, and how to measure that effect in minute details.
Child’s play! Yeah, I did not believe that either, but it was an interesting puzzle. By now I had given Warden orders to inform me when Nibbles wanted attention, and that… limited how long I could do a deep dive.
Yes, I could easily have set myself a time limit. And equally easily I would ignore it when I was deep in the bowels of the universe, but it was a lot harder for me to ignore my cat. And unlike Ben, Nibbles had absolutely no patience when I was creating new magic. If she wanted to be petted, she wanted to be petted now!
That stretched the theoretical work to a bit over a week, and I spare you the detailed math, and sum it up with ‘urks’. It was easily the hardest math I had ever done, and the worst part, unlike many other aspects of the Seeberger equation, this time I could only get a vague idea of how the new sensor had to be constructed.
What I had gleaned was that it would most likely be the best if it was a hexagonal crystal structure.
In the fifth dimension that is. Now… it was just a matter of figuring out what materials made those five-dimensional hexagonal crystals, and then begin testing them.
Oh, and of course, I had to test if I could excite the scanned matter without the third grav wave in the first place.
Fortunately, the first part was something that Warden was exceptionally good at. And the rest… I had minions, so it was time to use them. Well, technically, Maynard had the minions. But he would loan them to me, I was sure.
And wade into the thick of it himself. The tests would keep most of the physics department occupied for quite some time.