A Merging of Science and Mysticism?

[Niil Spaar]

Niil chortled.  "We should get together and create a lightsaber construction 'do's and dont's' manual.  'Problem:  Lightsaber catastrophically blows up in your face upon ignition.  Step One:  Bacta immersion, one day.  Step Two:  Did you have time to detect the power surge?  Was it A)  The EM field generator (see page 12), or B)  The emitter matrix (see page 13)?'"

Niil shook his head.  "Seriously, though, things haven't been going too bad.  Taking time and doing the diagnostics along every step has stopped anything nasty from happening.  So . . . lemme know when you're ready again."

[Collan]

"Or c) power spikes across the capacitance bridges," Collan laughed, "And this was the easy part. Now I have to attune this crystal," he held up a smaller, slightly greenish translucent quartz [assuming we can choose], "to the resonance matrix."

Collan unplugged the power supplies and sinks, "Oh...and fit the power cell in now...but that's trivial," Collan pointed the hard point connectors, "I made it so I can test with external power and the internal cell on the same ports. I'm having to learn electrical engineering at the same time I'm learning how to make this work right."

"I'll probably end up spending the next two weeks just making this part work...I'm pretty sure the circuit patterns and power controls are right."

[Niil Spaar]

OOC:  Gahh, I had a great post almost set up, and then I realized that I overlooked a very crucial point that made it impossible . . . I already said that Niil hadn't found a crystal yet.  So now I have to put it on the back-burner until I find a crystal.  Snort.   

"Yeah, all the tweaking and calibrating,  And don't forget the calibrating and tweaking.  Say . . . if you've got some spare time, can you give me a hand hunting out some good crystals to test out?"  Niil hesitated, then added in an embarrassed mutter, "Something in purple, or bluish-purple would be great."

[Collan]

Collan smiled, "Of course! Ch'lana has a fairly decent collection of quartz and quartz-like ones. I don't think he has any lightsaber crystals...or if he does they're not in here."

He pointed towards a rack of drawers, "I found this guy in there. I don't remember if I saw any purple or purplish-blue though."

Collan stretched and flexed his fingers and rotated his wrists back and forth to loosen them back up. He walked over with Niil to help him look.

"How long have you been studying that saber now?"

[Niil Spaar]

Niil slid the first drawer open and had a look through the crystals there.  Greens, blues, yellows, but nothing in purple.  Checking the second drawer, it was much the same.  He idly played a finger through the crystals, but nothing in the color he was looking for.  So you can't find purple.  What . . . are you trying to make a fashion statement? He did select an interesting yellowish-orange quartz crystal, though - more yellow than orange - and carefully set it aside; it looked like it had good clarity, so it was worth testing out.  The next drawer revealed much of the same, and Niil chose two other crystals; one a vibrant green, and another with a cloudy light blue color.

He opened the final drawer, and started sifting through the crystals there.  Nice quality quartz.  He selected another blue as a likely candidate . . . and stopped.

And grinned.  There, right underneath the blue one he'd just selected and socked against the corner of the drawer, was a blue crystal tinged with purple.  He set aside the blue one, and gently plucked the bluish-purple one out of the drawer as if the very act of breathing on it would shatter it.  He stared at it intently, and slowly nodded to himself.  It looked good . . .

Carefully picking up the five crystals, and brought them over to the work station.  "Found one, Collan!  More blue than purple, but check this out!  Oh, yeah, I also selected a few other ones if you wanted to check them out.  I've got a really bright green one here, a yellowish with a tinge of orange, a cloudy light blue, and a deep blue.  They look pretty good; I was gonna use the engineering calibration laser to test out their diffraction patterns."

[Collan]

Collan took a look at the deeper green and ooo'ed.

"I missed that one. It's just the color I was looking for. I have a feeling all of these crystals either are completely or have no flaws to prevent them from being used."

Collan tossed the green stone in the air, "let's see how they look!"

[GM Craig]

There, right underneath the blue one he'd just selected and socked against the corner of the drawer, was a blue crystal tinged with purple.

No way am I letting you have a purple sabre.

[Niil Spaar]

OOC:   Ahhh, bite me.       Okay, I can deal with that IC.

Niil lugged over the engineering calibration laser, and set it at one end of the table.  Hitting the activation stud, he punched a button on the laser's datapad and looked over the menu for a few seconds.  Finding what he wanted, he pulled out a mini-vise from the laser's accessory case and carefully attached it to the front of the laser's casing.  Tightening it down, he then handed a set of sterile gloves to Collan.  "Okay, slap these gloves on first.  Next, you wanna clean that crystal off as best you can.  There's a cleaning solution you can use to scrub it down. Make sure you get every millimeter of the gem cleaned thoroughly.  Two minutes should do.  Then, you want to wash and scrub the crystal down with ionized water for about the same amount of time.  Once you've finished that, give it a good blast with some compressed air to dry it off., and wipe it down with a lint-free cloth.  I'm gonna do the same thing with my crystal here."

[GM Craig]

[OOC: He's got yellow quartz, blue quartz and green quartz available.]

[Collan]

He grabbed the gloves from the air as Niil tossed them. Collan put them on, wriggling his fingers in and then pushing the fork between each finger together on his hands to secur the gloves. He took a bottle of the cleaning solvent and the smell wafted to his nose and eyes. He blinked and crinkled his nose.

"This stuff is potent," Collan noted as he began cleaning. The little soft cleaning brushes barely fit in the hands of the glove but it worked. Collan scrubbed and scrubbed with it getting every nook and crevice on the semiprecious stone. Finally he got to the cleaning stage with hyperpure ionized water to pull off any lingering bits of debris or solvent. He then put the crystal into the compressed air chamber and set it to blow pure nonreactive nitrogen to dry it.

"Niil...do you have any mounting cases to hold it when I get it out? I'd like to keep it as clean as possible."

[Niil Spaar]

Niil shook his head.  "Nope.  The medbay has some sterile glass vials, though; that might work.  Give me a few minutes; I'll run down there and grab a few."

He returned some time later with a handful of vials.  "Just take a set of micro-clamps, swab them down well, and use them to plunk your crystal in one of the vials; that should do the trick.  Maybe treat another crystal or two as well if the green one doesn't pass the diffraction test.  I'm gonna start cleaning the purple-blue one I found."

Niil again picked the crystal up in his hand and held it up to the light, admiring it's color.  "This should make for a cool saber blade . . ."  His voice trailed off as he stopped, puzzled.  He could feel a slight stickiness on his fingers.  Frowning, he transferred the crystal to the other hand and looked at the hand that he'd been holding the crystal in.   He didn't imagine it; his fingers were sticky.  What the hell?  Grabbing a cloth, he soaked it in isopropyl alcohol and rubbed his hand off.  Setting the cloth down, he took the crystal back from the other hand . . . and found that the fingers on his other hand were now sticky!

"Okay, what the hell is going on here?"  Niil muttered to no one in particular as he took the rag and thoroughly scrubbed his hands clean.  Tossing the rag back on to the table, he picked up the crystal and looked at it again with a critical eye.  Now the surfaces were badly smudged; he could see the impression of his fingerprints all over the crystal's facets.  Niil's eyebrows rose.  On top of all that, he could now smell a faint odor from the crystal itself.  Collan had turned to look after Niil's outburst, equally puzzled.  Niil brought the crystal to his nose, and took a careful sniff.  Then another one, albeit deeper.  Puzzlement gave way to startled recognition, and recognition gave way to a mix of amusement and disgust.  "This has got to be someone's idea of a joke,"  Niil grunted as he shook his head."

Collan came over.  "What?  What happened?"

To Collan's amazement and horror, Niil placed the crystal in his mouth.  "Uh-huh.  A grape rock-candy.  Not a frakking word of this to Ch'lana, you hear me?  Not a word.  Let's get your real crystal set up for diffraction testing, shall we?"


OOC:  There, I got rid of the bluish-purple crystal in an IC post.   

[Collan]

Collan looked appalled and then burst out laughing.

"All right...let's see what we have here."

Collan rolled the crystal gently into the laser calibrator and flipped it on.

"Spectrometer says it's almost pure silicon dioxide with trace elements," he then his the rotators and watched the difraction meters.

"And a near perfect structure. I think this one is a good candidate."

[Niil Spaar]

"Excellent," Niil said around a half-mouthful of rock candy.  "Tell you what . . . go ahead and test another backup or two while I get my . . . replacement gem cleaned up."

Niil looked at the others he'd selected, and finally settled on the milky blue crystal.  After taking a tentative sniff of it - good, a real crystal, not kanda fruit! -  he proceeded to meticulously scrub it down with the solvent.  Satisfied, he then repeated the process with the ionized water and then blasted any remaining solution and micro-particles off with compressed air.  Picking it up with a dry clean cloth, he rubbed it down and carefully placed it in one of the glass vials.

"So, did you find a good backup crystal?  Mine's ready to be tested."

[Collan]

Collan held up lighter green crystal he'd had earlier and was starting to clean.

"Sticking with the first one I found," he replied as he started cleaning it for testing. He watched Niil cleaning his crystal, "I figure the really hard part is going to be working the crystal. I've not yet thought of a way to test if it's the right size or configuration without just trying it out."

"So how did you figure all this out?"

[Niil Spaar]

Niil laughed.  "I was thinking back to my senior school days on Alderaan.  Physics.  Well, more particularly, optics.  I remember Ch'lana telling us that we had to use crystals with stable patterns in lightsabers, or else the resonance would go to hell.  So I thought back to an experiment that we did involving lasers and prisms.  We even tried some gems.  So I checked around in here first before asking Ch'lana, and there was the engineering calibration laser right over by that bench.  The thing has a built-in manual, and a walk-through guide on how to use it!  So I browsed through the menu, and lo and behold, there was a section on checking mirrors, prisms and industrial gems for refraction/diffraction." 

Niil shook his head.  "I feel like an ass, Collan.  I got so wrapped up in all the different training and experimenting with this laser that I completely forgot to tell yo about it.  Sorry about that."