06-09-2020, 10:02 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-10-2020, 05:20 PM by Marcus DuBois.)
Sweat beaded his forehead. It had been a long night. His day mercifully ended, he'd skipped dinner and the gym, walked past people who wanted to flag him down to bend his ear or make a request with only the barest of acknowledgement, and went to his apartments. His study bore the signs of his experiments. His brushed steel workbench was scarred with burn marks and melted flecks of various metals. Not that he wasn't organized during most of his experiments. But this one had consumed him.
The plasma had formed but had no real shape to it, no internal structure. After all, it had lost all its electrons and was a collection of ions. He was using iron as the element, as pure as he could find it. That made things so much easier. An alloy increased the amount of molecular complexity and he was feeling his way at this point. He kept looking back at his tau equations for the doped metals that had let him create the bearings and then the tau gates. They were not identical, of course. The fractal shape of the spirit thread, its negative line integral describing latices of "holes" were unique to each type of gate he'd been making, which power element it would pull in.
They were progressive steps up from the bearing, which drew in the power unfiltered, to those that pulled unique flavors of power. There was a pattern there, one that he'd finally hit upon using Fourier's discovery- a complex wave, or thread, being the sum of many much simpler ones. Finding the Fourier coefficients had been the hard part, but approaching it from the angle of vector analysis, using the dot-product of the collection of the vectors that described his wave, had yielded the results. It had been discovered 200 hundred years ago that they both were two different ways of describing the exact same thing.
Between the calculations and adjustments, he began to see results. The plasma "blob" extended into something more rigid. Further refinement gave it a cleaner shape until it held its own as a rod a little more than a meter long. Now came the hard part. He had a simple cylindrical shape and wanted something finer and more blade like, especially at the edges- almost infinitely thin, though as a sabre, not an épée or foil. He increased the number of simpler waves into his calculations and adjusted the lattice of spirit accordingly, and the blade took shape.
It was past 2am when he was finished. He shut the lights off and beheld the purple plasma that burst to life from his hand. The weave was complex to maintain but still he moved it about, lavender and plum lights glinting off walls and shiny surfaces. His heart raced as he looked at what he had wrought.
His weave complete, tau equations saved safely in his private files in the cloud, he let the weave go and the purple light went out. He had another long day tomorrow. As he readied for bed, his eyes dropped to the metal housing he had ordered to hold the cylinder made to hold the matrix. A saber grip. It had personality with its angles and finger holds. He'd had an artist add some flourish to it, a hint of Sith symbology.
Tomorrow he would build the matrix and align the gates in the housing and set it in the grip. He could almost imagine pressing the button and seeing his blade spring to life.
Darth Malik would have a lightsaber.
The plasma had formed but had no real shape to it, no internal structure. After all, it had lost all its electrons and was a collection of ions. He was using iron as the element, as pure as he could find it. That made things so much easier. An alloy increased the amount of molecular complexity and he was feeling his way at this point. He kept looking back at his tau equations for the doped metals that had let him create the bearings and then the tau gates. They were not identical, of course. The fractal shape of the spirit thread, its negative line integral describing latices of "holes" were unique to each type of gate he'd been making, which power element it would pull in.
They were progressive steps up from the bearing, which drew in the power unfiltered, to those that pulled unique flavors of power. There was a pattern there, one that he'd finally hit upon using Fourier's discovery- a complex wave, or thread, being the sum of many much simpler ones. Finding the Fourier coefficients had been the hard part, but approaching it from the angle of vector analysis, using the dot-product of the collection of the vectors that described his wave, had yielded the results. It had been discovered 200 hundred years ago that they both were two different ways of describing the exact same thing.
Between the calculations and adjustments, he began to see results. The plasma "blob" extended into something more rigid. Further refinement gave it a cleaner shape until it held its own as a rod a little more than a meter long. Now came the hard part. He had a simple cylindrical shape and wanted something finer and more blade like, especially at the edges- almost infinitely thin, though as a sabre, not an épée or foil. He increased the number of simpler waves into his calculations and adjusted the lattice of spirit accordingly, and the blade took shape.
It was past 2am when he was finished. He shut the lights off and beheld the purple plasma that burst to life from his hand. The weave was complex to maintain but still he moved it about, lavender and plum lights glinting off walls and shiny surfaces. His heart raced as he looked at what he had wrought.
His weave complete, tau equations saved safely in his private files in the cloud, he let the weave go and the purple light went out. He had another long day tomorrow. As he readied for bed, his eyes dropped to the metal housing he had ordered to hold the cylinder made to hold the matrix. A saber grip. It had personality with its angles and finger holds. He'd had an artist add some flourish to it, a hint of Sith symbology.
Tomorrow he would build the matrix and align the gates in the housing and set it in the grip. He could almost imagine pressing the button and seeing his blade spring to life.
Darth Malik would have a lightsaber.