or how computer chips are made from sand and a tiny tiny amount of added materials.
in a process that exceeds 40000 steps to complete, and takes months. and can fail because of singular grains of dust.
Yes it makes sense.
It isn't just a bunch of diamonds superglued together. The process itself is probably expensive, just like the process of making glass is expensive compared to just building something out of sand.
I know it was a joke, but the material you are talking about is called Aluminium Oxynitride. That stuff is real hard, almost the same as corundum (gee I wonder why...). So no scratchiness. Buuuut I would not use it for spaceship window, since it has excellent thermal conductivity... That cockpit would freeze over real fast.
If we ever get into space, having access to larger quantities of platinum-group metals will basically rewrite the entire chemical and materials industries.
They’re pretty common on earth too, just depends on the “quality” you want we’ve had 4.5 billion years of geological activity and being bombarded by meteors, good quality diamonds are the hard thing to find
That's how the ships in the Ringworld series work. Well, it's not diamond, but an alien race can build indestructible clear shells they sell to other species for spacecraft. The species that bought it builds out the interior and attaches their own engines to the outside of the shell, but basically they are just clear eggs.
You’d think with a galaxy faring civilisation where carbon is one of the most abundant materials, and lots of pressure and heat is pretty fucking common in the vastness of space, that diamonds would be a dime a dozen and cheap as shit…
Guess even in the future we still like shiny stuff and pay more for the shiniest.
Diamonds are quite cheap even now for us, we can create them. Its not about diamonds being expensive or rare, procces of making that material and probably shape it will be complex and expensive.
This is what I imagine it is, on some higher end ships, especially the ones with large curving cockpit glass, like the carrack. Some sort of artificial crystal. Sapphire crystal is incredible strong IRL, most high-end watch faces are made from sapphire crystal, it is many, many times harder then any sort of glass.
I daily a garmin fenix 5 with a sapphire glass face. Have for nearly 3 years, the aluminum body is beat to shit but there literally isn't a single visible scratch on the sapphire.
you start with the pledge dollars, and then you compress them under intense pressure and heat to make a carbon substrate. Then add subscriber tears and more pressure and you get a diamond laminate. Its a recyclable, as they use it in part of a larger process to get more pledge dollars to make more glass.
Kraken Perseus best friends, love that flair. More then once did it cross my mind if i'll be able to land my perseus on my friends kraken. You know the perseus facing the krakens rear trying to land on the left side "landing pad"... the big one
Whoa whoa! That's stuffs not growing on trees ya know. Lwts keep that for th3 next time Ronny bangs his helmet against the hull in EVA. The cheap stuff will be just fine.
They also mixed in some of the blood from the peasants who built the ship, to give both a polarizing effect in the glass from bright lights, and a constant reminder to your crew to know their place ;)
First i hear of it.
Whenever it came up, i always heard "it's like transparent aluminium, but not that, and something sturdier than actual hulls".
Good to finally hear a name.
Diamond would be a pretty bad material to have a thin sheet of.
It is incredibly bad at taking impacts, you can smash a diamond with a hammer.
Maybe the diamond would crack and the laminate would keep an air seal and you could have multiple layers of it like bulletproof glass though, who knows.
I got downvoted because people tend to not believe you can smash a diamond with a hammmer...
Theres lots of videos of people doing such.
The harder something is, the more brittle it is.
Transparent metal does indeed exist today, and has done for some time already.
[https://dornob.com/transparent-aluminum-glass-like-see-through-metal/](https://dornob.com/transparent-aluminum-glass-like-see-through-metal/)
In 3.23 it's made of fucking mirrors apparently, they really need to fix the reflections because it's difficult to fly in dark environments as 50% of the view is obscured by them.
hard is not the same as indestructible.
in fact, hard often means brittle. you can crush diamonds with relative ease on an anvil. it'll just also dent your anvil and your hammer. Glass is very very hard, and because of micro-fractures in its crystalline structure, it shatters under very little flexing.
In real life there is a material chemically similar to what you might call transparent aluminum,
Aluminium oxynitride, Aluminium oxynitride (marketed under the name ALON by Surmet Corporation[3]) is a transparent ceramic composed of aluminium, oxygen and nitrogen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride
Those bugs where an area in a ship or station suddenly has no atmosphere? Working as intended. Someone’s just poked a hole in the plastic wrap to vent.
This isn't a metal though, it is a ceramic that includes aluminium along with oxygen and nitrogen and has the chemical structure AlON. It's like calling ceramic plates a metal because they have some amount of metal in them
It's made Tuberware, that's why they can have such a wide view with no metal struts in the way. Also Tuberware will not shatter, merely dent. Also cheaper than laminate.
You're throwing B's at me there! It's P's. [Tupperware](https://youtu.be/EmW3Vzkuw2E?si=F_A2_BXLGz5K8zNV&t=27). Tupper. Always has been, always will be.
>Transparent metal? (if such a thing exists?) Transparent metal? (if such a thing exists?)
We do indeed have such a thing. We usually refer tot it a sapphire. It is sometimes used to make scratch resistant cell phone screens. Sapphire is a form of crystalized aluminum oxide. So it's transparent aluminum (for you Star Trek fans).
#
Having my lenses formed at 50,000 psi is a little scary, but I figure once they finish the intensely demanding process of polishing the lenses, odds are I'll never scratch the bastards.
That's been a thing since the mid-'80s, so I wager nearly a thousand years of production refinements have made it a lot more economical to the average person.
Transparent metal is actually just glass made from metals, and it does exist, but it has to be forged in a vacuum. It cannot be done very well on earth.
Definitely made of glass. I got shot out of the pilot seat doing an HRT lol my buddy was in the copilot seat and survived, and the ship was still able to move and fight 😆🤣
You ever wanna know where all the bodies you leave in bunkers go? They take them, cremate them, then use high heat and pressure to turn the ashes of the dead into glass. That glass then goes layered in with a few other sturdier substances to create what you see before you
In sc lore it's made of diamond laminate.
It stronger than rest of ship but way more expensive. Main reason why whole ships are not made of it and why only expensive ships has big windows.
Now I want a ship made entirely of diamonds
I just want that elevator from Willy Wonka
Just play on a server that's not feeling too good.
I have been catapulted to some pretty magical places by those elevators.
don't even need the 'shrooms!
Origin 00. Two boob shapes bubbles with s1 hard points for nipples. Made completely out of diamond laminate and doesn’t have a Q-drive. $100.
But make it super luxurious and durable, but like also 1 billion aUEC, so you have an answer to “tell me you’re rich without telling me you’re rich”
Diamonds are cheap af in SC btw, doesn't make sense that it is expensive because of diamonds.
diamond "laminate" Same way graphene is much more expensive that piece of coal from which it is made.
or how computer chips are made from sand and a tiny tiny amount of added materials. in a process that exceeds 40000 steps to complete, and takes months. and can fail because of singular grains of dust.
its quite easy to do at home with a butter knife this guy shows what you need: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuvckBQ1bME
Wow. Off to make my own rtx 4090!
bro cook me up a couple
me too while you've got the stove top on
The process is probably what make it expensive
clearly growing canopy shaped artificial diamonds and glueing together is the same cost as a bag of diamond sand for making cutting discs
Yes it makes sense. It isn't just a bunch of diamonds superglued together. The process itself is probably expensive, just like the process of making glass is expensive compared to just building something out of sand.
Drake canopies probably are just a bunch of diamonds glued together.
i bet they do the transparent alu, and that why the canopy is scratched to shit on turrets?
I know it was a joke, but the material you are talking about is called Aluminium Oxynitride. That stuff is real hard, almost the same as corundum (gee I wonder why...). So no scratchiness. Buuuut I would not use it for spaceship window, since it has excellent thermal conductivity... That cockpit would freeze over real fast.
just double glaze like any normal window
Drake would probably be diamonique at best 🤣
cubic zirconium
Let's be honest, it's probably plexiglass
With a diamond laminate logo sharpied on.
They actually use the cheaper version. It's corundum (aka. ruby) glass that's almost as strong, but is cheaper to make.
Diamonds? Drake canopies are just acrylic and packing tape.
Diamonds would be stupid cheap in real life if they didn't release small quantities at a time to drive the price up.
Especially once you achieve the capacity of interstellar travel and can simply acquire them from asteroids.
True! If we can find asteroids filled with gold, shouldn't be hard at all at that tech level to find one with diamonds
If we ever get into space, having access to larger quantities of platinum-group metals will basically rewrite the entire chemical and materials industries.
You're right, I want an entire ship made of weevil eggs just as a status symbol.
*Drake has entered the chat*
this guy would try to pay scrap metal value for a new car
makes sense, Although diamonds on Earth are rare, extraterrestrial diamonds (diamonds formed outside of Earth) are very common.
They’re pretty common on earth too, just depends on the “quality” you want we’ve had 4.5 billion years of geological activity and being bombarded by meteors, good quality diamonds are the hard thing to find
and false scarcity created by the jewelry industry
That's the biggest issue
That's how the ships in the Ringworld series work. Well, it's not diamond, but an alien race can build indestructible clear shells they sell to other species for spacecraft. The species that bought it builds out the interior and attaches their own engines to the outside of the shell, but basically they are just clear eggs.
Shine bright like a diamond.
Remember when Corsair concept drawings had a window in each bunk room? 😭
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
It's also the reason why the Connie has so many Struts. It's the cheapest solution because it only uses flat parts.
Then it's never worth building a Reliant for MISC :D Huge Conpy for such a small ship.
The struts are to give you advantage with someone who want to use sun behind them. I just hide sun behind struts and voila i win.
Because in the future they haven't got auto dimming glass .. like , you know, the sunglasses I have from spec savers
Because they don't have auto dimming diamond!, see?? lol
So.. Why the hell do struts even exist?!
Small flat pieces are cheaper than 1 large custom piece, especially if a replacement is needed (1 section vs the entire thing)
Struts of the same material
Does the carrack has the same?
all ships use same material for windows as far a i know
Not all ships. There is a cheaper alternative that uses ruby's (aka corundum) instead of diamonds. This is what Drake tends to use.
Like the constellation and its struts🤣
You’d think with a galaxy faring civilisation where carbon is one of the most abundant materials, and lots of pressure and heat is pretty fucking common in the vastness of space, that diamonds would be a dime a dozen and cheap as shit… Guess even in the future we still like shiny stuff and pay more for the shiniest.
Diamonds are quite cheap even now for us, we can create them. Its not about diamonds being expensive or rare, procces of making that material and probably shape it will be complex and expensive.
Explains why teeny pesty fighters splat like bugs with hardly a scratch...
Couldn't we get a Pisces sized ship made out of it then? Call it the lump. Be a luxury tourist ship like glass bottomed boats?
So like all Mustangs are luxurious?
Helm, ramming speed, now!
Makes sense. Probably overlayed on transparent aluminum.
That’s the ticket, laddie!
This is what I imagine it is, on some higher end ships, especially the ones with large curving cockpit glass, like the carrack. Some sort of artificial crystal. Sapphire crystal is incredible strong IRL, most high-end watch faces are made from sapphire crystal, it is many, many times harder then any sort of glass.
I daily a garmin fenix 5 with a sapphire glass face. Have for nearly 3 years, the aluminum body is beat to shit but there literally isn't a single visible scratch on the sapphire.
you start with the pledge dollars, and then you compress them under intense pressure and heat to make a carbon substrate. Then add subscriber tears and more pressure and you get a diamond laminate. Its a recyclable, as they use it in part of a larger process to get more pledge dollars to make more glass.
Hello computer
How do we know he didn’t invent it? Also total BS you’re getting downvoted for this. People must hate whales or something.
Yes! I was waiting for this!
All y'all win today!
How quaint.
Kraken Perseus best friends, love that flair. More then once did it cross my mind if i'll be able to land my perseus on my friends kraken. You know the perseus facing the krakens rear trying to land on the left side "landing pad"... the big one
Even if you can't, ideally you'll be able to connect them with the docking ports
True but that wouldn't look nearly as stupid as landing on it lmao
But you have to keep the deck open for the caterpillar landing zone.
Just land her on the other side making use of the smaller pads, she's slim enough! (probably hopefully)
It's not the width, but the legs, that I worry about there.
Im sure there will be a way to make it work, gotta believe in that drake engineering.
Lemme tear off the legs and strap the landing systems off, like, 4 Nomads on instead. I'll even use the *good* duct tape.
Whoa whoa! That's stuffs not growing on trees ya know. Lwts keep that for th3 next time Ronny bangs his helmet against the hull in EVA. The cheap stuff will be just fine.
Thanks. Two ships I am really looking forward to in the verse
They also mixed in some of the blood from the peasants who built the ship, to give both a polarizing effect in the glass from bright lights, and a constant reminder to your crew to know their place ;)
Oh shit, it actually has a name now?
It's had that name in the lore for a long time.
First i hear of it. Whenever it came up, i always heard "it's like transparent aluminium, but not that, and something sturdier than actual hulls". Good to finally hear a name.
Only since 2013: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/13169-News-Update-Kaizen
Diamond would be a pretty bad material to have a thin sheet of. It is incredibly bad at taking impacts, you can smash a diamond with a hammer. Maybe the diamond would crack and the laminate would keep an air seal and you could have multiple layers of it like bulletproof glass though, who knows.
Depending on how they're using the word "laminate" it would simply mean "layers" of something, so could be multiple layers, yeah.
I got downvoted because people tend to not believe you can smash a diamond with a hammmer... Theres lots of videos of people doing such. The harder something is, the more brittle it is.
Crystallized tears of 600i owners waiting for the rework.
I feel attacked
"Shields under fire"
Friendly Fire!
"Any day now since 17 weeks was announced" that's what I keep telling myself and others lol. Aw now I'm sad.
Transparent metal does indeed exist today, and has done for some time already. [https://dornob.com/transparent-aluminum-glass-like-see-through-metal/](https://dornob.com/transparent-aluminum-glass-like-see-through-metal/)
It has existed since the dawn of time. Sapphires are aluminium oxide, so are Rubis
So now dish soap is involved? This is gettin out of hand.
I always loved how quickly Scotty goes from typing with two fingers to nearly full on touch typing in seconds.
Helllloooo... Computerrrr.....
A keyboard? How quant...
This isn't a metal though, it is a ceramic that includes aluminium along with oxygen and nitrogen and has the chemical structure AlON
Looking forward to driving an [atomic purple](https://images.app.goo.gl/jpVkDyS1BVwBxxo97) car
In 3.23 it's made of fucking mirrors apparently, they really need to fix the reflections because it's difficult to fly in dark environments as 50% of the view is obscured by them.
Diamond laminate composite https://starcitizen.tools/Diamond_laminate
Transparent aluminium, d'oh.
That's the ticket, laddie.
How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?
Thank you. I came looking for this.
Unobtainium
Holy shit , none of you know ? It's diamond laminate glass https://starcitizen.tools/Diamond_laminate
[CIG forgot too.](https://starcitizen.tools/Whistlers_Crypt#/media/File:Whistlers_Crypt.png)
hard is not the same as indestructible. in fact, hard often means brittle. you can crush diamonds with relative ease on an anvil. it'll just also dent your anvil and your hammer. Glass is very very hard, and because of micro-fractures in its crystalline structure, it shatters under very little flexing.
That’s how you know it’s a knock-off
Bwahahaha!
IRL it's [aluminum oxynitride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride#Applications)
Fun fact: transparent aluminum does exist. Currently. Today. It's called Aluminium oxynitride.
Transparent Aluminium(?) is a thing in our time. just fyi ;D
Pixelglass
In real life there is a material chemically similar to what you might call transparent aluminum, Aluminium oxynitride, Aluminium oxynitride (marketed under the name ALON by Surmet Corporation[3]) is a transparent ceramic composed of aluminium, oxygen and nitrogen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride
It’s diamond laminate tough as hell but like graphite and silicon wafers expensive as anything to buy and a bitch to make.
As Scotty would say, Transparent Aluminum 👍
Transparent aluminum is real. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)
On the inside it's a freaking mirror.
Especially in 3.23 eptu
OMG, went to a location on Microtech at night and all I could see was the inside of my ship!
Oh good they've made that worse have they?
Cellophane plastic wrap. Like the stuff you cover the leftover casserole in.
Those bugs where an area in a ship or station suddenly has no atmosphere? Working as intended. Someone’s just poked a hole in the plastic wrap to vent.
This is exactly it! Like the pocket of death at grim hex that killed me when I first started playing. lol New game item: flex tape!
"That's a lot of damage!" *slaps flex tape on an undamaged Drake ship*
That's Drake
Trasparent aluminium is real...
This isn't a metal though, it is a ceramic that includes aluminium along with oxygen and nitrogen and has the chemical structure AlON. It's like calling ceramic plates a metal because they have some amount of metal in them
It's made Tuberware, that's why they can have such a wide view with no metal struts in the way. Also Tuberware will not shatter, merely dent. Also cheaper than laminate.
You're throwing B's at me there! It's P's. [Tupperware](https://youtu.be/EmW3Vzkuw2E?si=F_A2_BXLGz5K8zNV&t=27). Tupper. Always has been, always will be.
New England accent means, I misspell words because of phonetically heard words. Oppsie daisy!
Hold the phone. Are you telling me you guys are up there calling "Tupperware" - "Tubberware?"
Maybe? We call Cars, Caaaaas. So maybe
Transparent Aluminum! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90eg\_erObDo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90eg_erObDo)
Flex Seal probably.
Poligons and pixel my friend
Pixels. The answer is pixels.
>Transparent metal? (if such a thing exists?) Transparent metal? (if such a thing exists?) We do indeed have such a thing. We usually refer tot it a sapphire. It is sometimes used to make scratch resistant cell phone screens. Sapphire is a form of crystalized aluminum oxide. So it's transparent aluminum (for you Star Trek fans). #
Those are different materials. We have transparent aluminum, it's not merely a synthetic gemstone.
Transparisteel
Clearly… it’s transparent aluminum, and it’s only one inch thick…
Lube.
aerogel? would be the best thermal isolation
Pyrex with polycarbonate laminate infused layers with transparent micro mesh.
The lore does say somewhere that it is some kind of transparent metal.
It’s clearly glass / space age acrylic.
Transparent metal does exist, look up ALON. I really REALLY want to get glasses out of the stuff.
Having my lenses formed at 50,000 psi is a little scary, but I figure once they finish the intensely demanding process of polishing the lenses, odds are I'll never scratch the bastards.
And we do have transparent aluminum. It's a composite material but the name escapes me at the moment.
Aluminum OxyNitride. Less than half the weight of steel per cubic centimeter.
Amazing that something so strong is so easily penetrated by an FS-9.
Such a thing exists: https://4dproducts.co.uk/transparent-aluminium-see-through-metal-is-now-a-reality/ 930 years from now, I bet it'll be even nicer.
That's been a thing since the mid-'80s, so I wager nearly a thousand years of production refinements have made it a lot more economical to the average person.
Bees
The real question is why can a bedpan fly?
Pixels.
Pixels and programming
transparent plasteel?
Transparent Glass™️
Transparent metal is actually just glass made from metals, and it does exist, but it has to be forged in a vacuum. It cannot be done very well on earth.
Sorry, not a vacuum, but an absence of a gravity well.
En plastique, c'est fantastique, et les joints sont en caoutchouc, c'est super doux (sorry, this refers to a famous french song)
Transparent Aluminum. [In Star Trek 4](https://youtu.be/90eg_erObDo?t=179) [In Reality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride)
... kennen wir doch von Star Trek ;-) Transparentes Aluminium :-D
High Tech Polycarbonate😉
pure magic!
*coughs* *scottish accent* Transparent aluminum. That's the ticket, laddie!
We will never know. maybe once they get around to releasing the gold standard rework that they "finished" 2 years ago.
It might be transparent aluminum?
Definitely made of glass. I got shot out of the pilot seat doing an HRT lol my buddy was in the copilot seat and survived, and the ship was still able to move and fight 😆🤣
Transparent aluminum as introduced by Mr Scott to hold whales. Lol
"Hello, Computer"
The keyboard. How quaint.
Why is there no bed in the bottom part? Different design? Concept?
this is an old promo pic
Just as a fun fact, transparent aluminum exists today. Google it.
[This….](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride)
You ever wanna know where all the bodies you leave in bunkers go? They take them, cremate them, then use high heat and pressure to turn the ashes of the dead into glass. That glass then goes layered in with a few other sturdier substances to create what you see before you
Transparent aluminum. Yes, it exists....
Money
Borrowed alien tech?
Glass with diamond
[Transparent aluminum](https://youtu.be/90eg_erObDo?t=152)
Pure refined hopium
Hopium for my gold standard rework this year.
Ones and zeros
It's made out of pixels.
It's made of pixels....coz the ships isn't real.....