Phoron

Phoron
Apperance:	Purple Solid Crystalline, Purple Gas
Symbol:	Ph
Group:	14
Period:	8
Atomic Number:	126
Molar Mass	405g/mol
Specific Heat Capacity:	200J/(mol*K)
Natural Occurance:	Anomalous
Discovered:	2352

Discovered in 2352 in Tau Ceti’s Romanovich Cloud by the NanoTrasen Corporation, phoron has irrevocably changed and defined an age of history in the Orion Spur. While initially for the better, being the catalyst for radical advancements in various sectors, it has lately become connoted with struggle, conflict, and the oddities of Bluespace.

Properties and Applications

Phoron is a typically purple element that infrequently occurs naturally in either a crystalline form or gaseous state. Due to a multitude of conflicting reasons provided by both new and old scientific communities, phoron appears bound to bluespace, with deposits often occurring in anomalous regions of space – such as the Romanovich Cloud – and with the emblematic use of phoron being in accessing bluespace for the purpose of faster-than-light travel – bluespace gates, bluespace drives.

Due to its position far down in the carbon group of the periodic table, phoron also has applications outside of bluespace in medicine, across industries within their electronics, and as a vital component for advanced quantum computing. These more specialist uses outside of as a fuel for bluespace applications often require tailored compounds of phoron, as altering the form of the chemical affects the function. The following are common forms and applications of phoron:

• Elemental Phoron is the most common type of phoron used across the Spur, as it is the only room-temperature superconductor currently known to exist – the advent of room-temperature superconductors is vital to contemporary electronics in the 25th century, and is used heavily in quantum technologies and AI, power transmission and superconductive magnetic energy (SMES) storage, computational devices, optical fibre, particle acceleration, hover technologies, and both medical and scientific imaging.

• • Distinct from solid elemental phoron, Fluidic Phoron is necessary for any bluespace applications of phoron, be it as a fuel in bluespace drives or in microscopic amounts in computer components that interact with bluespace – such as bluespace telecommunication relays. Additionally, superchilled liquid phoron has a large use in cryogenics, with particularly large cryogenic arrays (such as in specialist cryonics clinics and spaceships with large cryosleep arrays) making use of phoron over the more affordable helium that tends to be used for smaller cryogenic arrays.

• Organic Phoron is almost entirely used in the medical industry where phoron is expected to enter the body, with a minor application in traditional forms of combustion – such as vehicle combustion engines. A singular phoron atom is capable of supporting an abundance of hydrocarbon chains, an infinitesimal number of alterations impacting the organic compounds function, whether it be drug delivery, medical materials or non-bluespace drive fuel, such as in vehicle combustion engines. Phoron in k’ois and the vaurca body is also found in this state – often saturated by the proteins which allows the phoron to interact with an organic body.

• Weapons-grade Phoron, which includes compounds such as Diphoron (phoron bonded to itself) and Phoron Oxides (phoron bonded to varying amounts of oxygen), are the result of elemental phoron forming strong bonds containing immense energy with different substances. Weapons-grade Phoron is extremely explosive and often volatile – with some compounds detonating at a hair’s touch – dwarfing the explosive potential of other compounds. It is commonly used in the production of incredibly high-yield, conventional explosives, or more recently in the production of Phoron WMDs and Phoron Warheads. The former being planet-killers, the latter being city-busters. It takes a particularly skilled or carefree chemist to take a job where they are expected to work with these compounds.

• Phoron Isotopes (elemental phoron with an altered number of neutrons) also make excellent neutron emitters, playing a large role in nuclear chemistry and physics, medical and scientific radiology and radiotherapy, and in long-range and deep-penetrating scanning, such as in ship sensors and mineral scanners.

• • Supermatter is a unique, naturally occurring and impure isotope of phoron that appears in great enough quantities that its main utilities are as an explosive or in power generation. This isotope releases an unusual amount of anomalous exotic particles, lending it its strange psionic interactions with organics – no one knows why. Rarely, supermatter is used in advanced anomalies equipment due to its interaction with anomalous exotic particles.

Phoron can be found within the green circle of the starmap.

Due to the stability and energy contained in a phoron bond, it is remarkably difficult to cleave phoron off a compound and is thus remarkably difficult to purify a compound of phoron back into its elemental state. This only adds to the difficulty of synthesising phoron (eg. the mass-culture of k’ois to refine organic phoron into elemental phoron; impossible due to the explosive risk of cleaving phoron from any hydrocarbon) and adds to the cost of medical and electrical applications of phoron which require the expenditure of elemental phoron – which has more dire uses in interstellar travel – into a more specialised compound.

Phoron can be found and mined within this region of the galaxy, however it is not found in sizable deposits outside of Tau Ceti’s Romanavich Cloud, and Elyra. The Romanavich Cloud is still where a vast majority of all Phoron used in the spur (outside of Elyra) is mined - there is very little to be found outside of it, though it is not an insignificant amount. The fact any can be found outside of Tau Ceti’s gravity well is the main reason the Alliance allowed the independence of Tau Ceti at all - they still, up until the collapse, had access to a source of Phoron.

The Phoron Scarcity

Within the circles of intellectualism of the contemporary Spur, there has been an organized attempt to first find and then justify a specific date for the start of the “Phoron Scarcity.” However, in reality, the phoron scarcity was a crisis years in the making, though all who should have known better ignored the obvious signs. Ever since phoron’s discovery in 2352, it slowly became an essential resource for the modern functioning of the Spur; for it is the only element known to be a Room Temperature Superconductor (RTS) without extensive chemical alteration. While phoronic compounds are also incredible in their own right, phoron’s primary utility comes from its status as the only RTS currently known to exist. It is this property that saw a rapid increase in demand, with incredibly limited supply even able to be mined, ensuring from the very beginning that the Romanavich Cloud would run dry. However, this was conveniently ignored by most of the academic world, heavily reliant on megacorporate funding. Those who went against this narrative were denounced by all of their academic peers as conspiracy theorists; though time would prove that they were in fact stating the uncomfortable truth. Not acknowledging this truth would cause perhaps the largest crisis since the Interstellar War; the ongoing Phoron Scarcity. This was not even their greatest mistake. Far larger was pinning a long period of sustained and massive economic and technological growth onto this limited resource, creating a massive, spurwide, bubble, and if it fully popped, it would bring everything down; thankfully, that hasn’t happened yet, though the prelude to beginning itself was bad enough.

It began in 2462, when it became undeniable that NanoTrasen’s mines within the Romanavich Cloud were beginning to run dry of the precious material. There was no official announcement of this, but interstellar entities - nations, corporations, and others - started to panic, with disastrous results. The Alliance ended up fracturing, with the government sacking middle and outer ring colonies, before retreating back to their most developed core worlds. At the same time, Biesel was fending off another unsanctioned incursion by a Solarian Fleet into its space, with the help of the Republic of Elyra and the Coalition of Colonies. The Izweski Hegemony entered economic freefall as a result of the scarcity, and openly accepted Hephaestus Industries establishing a total monopoly within the nation as a result. In short, the phoron scarcity took the galactic order, which had (aside from Biesel declaring Independence) been maintained since the conclusion of the Interstellar war, and upended it entirely. No-where was this more clear than the collapsed Solarian Alliance, where bands of naval fleets refused the order to retreat to the developed core systems, and instead set up a multitude of warlord states in what would soon become known as the Human Wildlands; though much of the blame for that crisis lies not with the scarcity, but the policies of previous Prime Minister Frost and the fascistic ATLAS.

The Spurian Economy and Phoron

The Orion Spur in the 2400s is home to an extremely complex interstellar economy, where goods are shipped distances of lightyears regularly, and markets are more heavily interconnected than at any other time in history. Many attribute this to the discovery of Bluespace in the early 2400s, which made long distance interstellar travel significantly easier than it was in the past, and caused markets that used to be far separate to become interconnected. With bluespace becoming less and less common as a result of the current phoron scarcity, markets are threatened by once again becoming more isolated, after over five decades of interconnectedness, creating turmoil and uncertainty going into the future. However, the scarcity has had far more chilling effects on the economy of the spur beyond threatening to separate interconnected markets, which is caused by phoron’s properties as a room-temperature superconductor (RTS).

For the average consumer across the spur, prices for most goods have steadily increased, as merely the day-to-day operations of a city and industry have steadily increased since the scarcity set in, and currently, without government intervention, prices would comfortably sit at around four times what they once were. With government intervention, prices have on average doubled overall, though this varies significantly from planet to planet and nation to nation. However, there is an unavoidable problem on the Horizon. Since the discovery of phoron, the spur has experienced a long period of massive economic and technological growth, all of which was underpinned by this limited resource, Phoron. Now that it has begun to become scarce, all of that growth may be wiped out, having been nothing more than a massive, spurwide, economic bubble. That bubble has yet to pop, as discoveries such as Orchard Moon give hope that the situation can be resolved. Yet only time will tell if those hopes are misplaced. If you’d like to read more about the Spurian Economy and the effects of scarcity on both the macro level and for the average consumer, its page can be found here.

Mitigated Effects

Though the more important use of Phoron lies elsewhere, one cannot ignore the impacts it has had on Interstellar travel in terms of raw tonnage. Prior to the scarcity, approximately 75% of the entire Spur’s mercantile trading traveled primarily along bluespace routes, attributed to the speed allowed by bluespace and more convenient routes; it allowed for fewer ships to spend less time moving goods around, reducing costs across the board for interstellar shippers. Yet since the Scarcity has begun, these reduced costs have slowly risen and, at this point, are more extra costs, rather than reduced ones. As such, prices for both imports and exports have risen, which comes alongside rising inflation. In the face of this, more and more interstellar shippers have begun falling back on the pre-existing warp network, always utilized to some extent even during bluespace’s dominance.

When the Solarian Alliance undertook the construction of a majority of the Bluespace Ring network - which to this day holds as the most expensive and extensive construction project in the history of the Spur - instead of getting rid of the existing warp gates, they built the new bluespace network on-top of them. In other words, both the bluespace network is overlaid over previously existing warp gates. Bluespace was the mainstay of interstellar travel throughout the spur, especially commercial travel - having a significant speed advantage - but warp travel never totally died out. Its relative cheapness made it attractive to those who were in no hurry - such as vacationers, and the like. Additionally, more remote areas of the spur, such as the Human Frontier, never stopped making use of warp gates - as they were too poor to afford bluespace gates. In fact, prior to the collapse “Warp Cruises”, a vacation on the way to a vacation, were incredibly popular amongst all walks of life - and some say are what allowed warp travel to remain relevant until the scarcity.

Phoron is integral in the construction of bluespace drives, being required to create the bluespace crystal matrices that create and ‘aim’ a bluespace tunnel, as well as the majority of other drive components, such as large phoron heatsinks capable of absorbing the immense amounts of energy released by a bluespace drive.

Since then, what was once decried as archaic has become essential to maintaining a barely stable state of economic solvency - though every country struggled in its own way. Some - like the Solarian Alliance - who saw the provisional military junta massively increase its spending in an attempt to keep the already shocked Solarian Economy afloat (and going deeply into debt as a result); whereas others like the Izweski Hegemony welcomed mega corporate monopolies with open arms. Some nations, such as Elyra and Biesel, simply accepted the scarcity at first (though not without riots in Elyra), and managed to cope due to their own supplies of Phoron (though Biesel has since begun having issues and has begun a policy of soft-rationing). Surprisingly, the hardest hit nations tended to be those which were more developed - from heavy use in a large number of industries, to the validity of bluespace, even to the creation of medicines - phoron was an Achilles heel to these well-developed societies who suffered greatly while others, such as the much poorer Tajara States, and if we put aside the potential famine, the Hegemony, didn’t see a drop in the quality of life given how low it was already.

Attempts to Resolve the Scarcity

Almost every government and entity within the Spur has undertaken a project, or multiple, intending to resolve the scarcity. The most well-known of these was the infamous Solarian project Violet Dawn, which took place on Mars, that subsequently breached containment, setting fire to most of the atmosphere, leading to a staggering number of still uncountable deaths. The once red planet turned purple, and to this day, firestorms rage in the southern hemisphere. However, this was far from the only endeavor undertaken. Perhaps the most successful has been the SCC’s project to scout the spur for more phoron, a project that would lead them to discover Orchard Moon, a deposit of Phoron that has for the past years offset some of the worst effects of the scarcity. However, the Romanavich Cloud runs drier day after day, and where once Orchard Moon offset the worst effects, by now the situation is similar to how things were before it’s discovery, and only show signs of getting worse.

What then, of Elyra? The normally isolationist state has withdrawn further from the wider Orion Spur, having some of the last viable deposits of Phoron remaining. It has cut off nearly all phoron exports, and rumors persist that the Elyran mines are beginning to run dry as well; with the government taking panicked steps to diversify their economy. It is unlikely that Elyra will open up until this crisis has abated, unless forced by outside interference.

Lastly, there are the many attempts at creating a synthetic phoron, the most infamous of which was the aforementioned Violet Dawn. As all attempts at creating a synthetic phoron will be associated with this, those entities undertaking such projects keep them out of the public eye, under the heaviest of security. Rumors of “research villages” have popped up on many different planets, corporate-owned villages where entry and exit are strictly controlled to keep the secrecy of these projects. No one on board the Horizon would have anything to do with one of these projects, or have knowledge of it. So far, these projects have been a waste of money and resources, as no tangible results (or ones that didn’t burn down a planet) have been produced, and researchers despair that it simply might not be possible.

OOC Note; It is in this way that the scarcity remains consistent yet distinct between different planets, factional entities, and other dividing lines in the lore. This is a GENERAL SUMMARY of the lore, and it is highly advised that you read the specific page about the origin of any character you may wish to make rather than just this.