Crystal Technology

Properties

A leftover crystal flickered in a dark corner of my table drawer. Its song was dull and hollow. I took it in my hands, and moved it to the window. Under the stars something swelled in the tiny crystal. It pulled itself up towards the starlight. The pale light refracted into rainbows across the room. The song changed, it was clear and triumphant.

  Crystals absorb ambient energy, such as light and radiation, and emit the energy in new forms. Some crystals naturally glow, others hover by their own power. Current consensus is that all crystals naturally generate momentum, and that the crystals that do not hover simply don't generate enough to overcome their weight. All crystals can slowly regenerate power over time.   Sourcing the correct crystal for the job is important. To a certain extent, all crystals are "trainable". They are able to adapt to tasks over time and become more effective at them. While a crystal engineered for propulsion can never become a battery, it can be retrained to work better in bursts, or over extended use, or adapted to a new enviroment.   The brilliancy and potency of a crystal can be enhanced by the right cut, and master lapidarists can even bring out entirely new properties with circuits etched into the crystal lattice. Crystalline structures consist of geometric patterns all the way down to the molecular level. These lattices of perfectly flat facets serve as an ideal base for etching layers of electronic circuits. Advanced crystal technology like Gateway Portals and Gravity Plates is made with encoded crystal.   Fully enclosing crystals tends to degrade their effectiveness. Many engineers firmly believe that the crystals themselves operate better in beautiful contraptions of gold, silver, or other precious metals. The latter tendency has been explained by resonance between certain geometric patterns and fine metals, rather than any kind of aesthetic sense on the part of the crystals.

Harvest

The first crystals were harvested from metorites, but almost all crystals in use today are farmed. Farmed crystals are grown from a seed crystal, creating aurorite when placed in the auroral zone, and astrallite in outer space. The growing crystals capture solar winds to synthesize additional material.   Some crystals are grown entirely within laboratories. A seed crystal is placed in a mineral-rich solution and irradiated with a set of wavelengths that simulate the solar wind. Laboratory-grown crystals tend to be far more expensive, but take much less time and tend to be more uniform than astrallite and aurorite.   Crystals can also be found embedded in the crust of planets, moons and asteroids. These crystals are closest to astrallite in terms of properties, and grew in interstellar space before being accreted into the Solar System. With the expansion of mining in the Asteroid Belt, a growing percentage of new astrallite is mined rather than farmed.