Hardlight

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The transparent material known colloquially as Hardlight, though more appropriately Rapid Adaptive Microbial Glass, or RAMG, is one of the great triumphs of human biotechnology and materials engineering. Hardlight almost universally possesses a slight light blue tinge visually due to the reflective properties of large amounts of bacteria analog (Machina stuttgart), with a slight crackling noise when assembling/disassembling. It was given the media appellation “hardlight” when first introduced, despite being an advanced silicate glass with no relation to light itself- it has often been compared to science fiction hard light, or a force field. Developed from 2089 to 2094, primarily by Stuttgart Materialentwicklung GmbH (SM GmbH) in the Federal Republic of Germany, a member of the modern European Union and United Nations, and now manufactured primarily by Hartlichtanwendungen GmbH (Hartlicht GmbH), the successor to SM GmbH, its creation and subsequent development earned SM GmbH’s research team a Nobel Prize in chemistry. The material is now used across many fields and many applications, most notably in the internal pressure sealing of most military and civilian spacecraft.

Rapid Adaptive Microbial Glass itself is on its fourth design iteration, and is chemically a soda-lime-silicate glass able to rapidly and near-instantaneously self-assemble, self-disassemble and self-reassemble through microbial construction of the bonds between individual particles of mixed hardlight dust. A type of highly engineered chemosynthetic silicon-based bacteria analog (Machina stuttgart) is introduced to hardlight dust in specially designed “hardlight projectors”- the bacteria analog, when activated, can rapidly and near-instantaneously create and dissolve hardlight’s glass structure, depending on the appropriate introduced chemical biosignals- structural growth or decay is contained and directed by the use of strong suspended electromagnets built into the hardlight projector.

Hardlight’s most visible application today is as an internal pressure vessel material for almost all civilian and military spacecraft- hardlight projector rings are placed on the interior of spacecraft airlock and blast doors, forming an extra layer of protection for blast doors and allowing the opening or malfunction of an external airlock door without compromising internal atmospheric integrity. This is especially useful in the case of a shuttlebay or cargo bay, where a sustainable atmosphere may be critical to effective operation, but objects must still be able to exit the the pressure vessel- here, hardlight rapidly disassembles and reassembles to form transient atmospheric seals on the hulls of transiting objects. Other uses include architecture, where it is sometimes used in place of windows and as decoration/structural guides, art installations, contact weaponry, refining processes, rapid construction and many others. The material has moderate tensile and compressive strength, able to quickly regenerate its structure when punctured or otherwise damaged, allowing the glass a very high (but not impenetrable) damage tolerance against both standard ballistics and explosives (of course, this depends on the integrity of the hardlight projector). Hardlight barriers are fail-secure, and do not disintegrate when power is lost to its projector- it simply remains static, effectively becoming a regular glass window when unpowered that cannot form transient seals. While Machina stuttgart self-replicates and thus only needs to be loaded into a hardlight projector once, hardlight dust degrades over very long periods of use and must be refilled periodically depending on the size of the hardlight created, usually varying between 2.5 and 4 years.

This page was contributed by user HikariGlace.