Industry in the Zambarau Concord

Terraforming
Just before the Formation Era, the Zambarau started to become involved in a variety of terraforming projects. This was a natural next step as in many solar systems they had become involved in banking and investment (which in turn had led on from information processing and storage), and terraforming was like a large scale version of investment - buy a cheap, barren, world and turn it into an expensive, developed, world. Terraforming is not particularly a single technology but a multitude of technologies which are used in different situations; the Concord has never had a main terraforming ethic or technique but just tries to get projects done as efficiently as possible. Despite terraforming technology being many decades old there has been little improvement in terms of the time it takes to complete.

Commonly used terraforming equipment includes giant sunshades and solettas (or lots of smaller ones flying in formation) to change sunlight concentration, multi-kilometre long fluid-filled tubes for altering the temperature, space tugs for moving asteroids around and cutting them up and a variety of other tools.

Generally, due to the timescales involved and the resources at stake, most terraforming projects are performed by robots, under the control of a computer using simulated intelligence; all projects are watched over (and sometimes even run) by Zambarau overseers. Computers used in terraforming projects will usually analyse a planet, decide on its suitability for terraforming and use simulations recommend the most efficient terraforming method to use. When deciding on a planets suitability a terraforming computer will use a number of factors (current conditions on the planet, demographics such as birth rates, and populations of different races) to calculate what the best environment to terraform the planet into will be; this is due to the fact that different races in the Concord live in different environments.

Timescales for terraforming have not changed much since the Pre-Formation Era (when terraforming was first undertaken by the Zambarau). Today, to terraform Mars into an Earth-like environment it would take the Concord about 30 years (Pre-Formation Era: 50 years) and to terraform Venus into an Earth-like environment it would take about 160 years (Pre-Formation Era: 200 years). It is thought that the Zambarau Concord is reaching the lower limit of terraforming timescales, and for terraforming to take place any faster serious large-scale megaengineering structures would have to be put in place on candidate planets.

Dynamic Compression Members
Dynamic Compression Members (DCMs) are an essential piece of construction technology that make mega-scale construction possible in the Zambarau Concord. This was the first piece of significant technology contributed by the Astatines, having theorised such technology for many decades before signing the Concord.

Despite years of research into the subject, none of the races of the Zambarau Concord have discovered any construction materials stronger than carbon-based giant molecular structures such as graphene or carbon nano-tubes. Many, much stronger, building materials have been theorised but all of them have been considered a long way away in terms of technological development; so the Astatines decided to take a different approach.

DCMs are basically long, straight tubes that have had any air evacuated from them. Through these tubes a stream of massive particles travels at high velocity from one end to the other; on reaching the end, a reflector magnet curves the stream around to make it travel back to the other end. This reflection of the high velocity stream puts constant pressure on both reflector magnets, causing the tube to become very rigid. By altering the energy content of the mass stream more force can be applied to the reflector magnets; an opposing force must be applied to the reflector magnets, though (from the support of a structure, usually), to prevent this force being great enough to tear the tube apart.

The main worry with DCMs is that they require power to run, and would fail if the power supply were cut off. Proponents of DCMs claim that the mass stream loses almost no energy from the bending effect of the reflector magnets, and a DCM could run for many hours without the construction it supports beginning to become structurally unsound. Many precautions are taken with constructions that use DCMs, including emergency power supplies, backup DCMs (in case of failure or the need for a maintanence check); most constructions, especially ones in space, have 'failure modes,' which allow them to safely break apart in the unlikely instance that all of their DCMs fail. DCMs are usually surrounded by a Faraday cage, to prevent outside electromagnetic sources from affecting the mass stream.

Dynamic Compression Members are most commonly used in some large space habitats or other space-based megastructures (especially Sceen structures), and are also used in many high rise Astatine buildings (which can go up for miles). The Drones are showing significant interst in advanced DCMs for construction of a giant ring-shaped colony in interstellar space (which is expected to take many centuries). An important thing to remember in construction is that DCMs can only exert compression, not tension, meaning engineers often have to turn back to an older construction mindset (for example, the Drones would have to build their giant ring-colony more like a cart-wheel than a bike-wheel).

Nanofabrication
Like genetic engineering, nanofabrication was another technology that was used widely in terraforming but had to wait much longer for widespread adoption, even more so for nanofabrication due to its complexity. Nanotechnology had already been used on a wide scale in computers much longer before even terraforming.

Despite the best efforts of manufacturers, an efficient form of nanotechnology could not be developed that was 'free-floating,' individual nanoassemblers that flew through the air rearranging atoms; there was just too much to control and handle at once. The most advanced nanoassemblers could not go far beyond nature's equivalent (micro-organisms). The new approach was to build nanotechnology in blocks so that manufactured products could 'rise up' and slowly be assembled layer by layer over time; this was considered the 'bottom-up' approach as it led on directly from 3D printing and integrated circuits. This bottom-up approach turned out to be much more successful than the previous top-down approach. Today nanofabricators are often used domestically for the production of various custom-built items; however, in industry nanofabricators are only used in the manufacture of highly delicate components which require atomic-level accuracy. Special 'multifunction assemblers' have been developed that can use nanofabrication for construction using precision while 3D printing components are used for the much faster manufacture of 'cruder' parts of a product; despite this traditional mass production is still favored over nanofabrication of cruder products.

A later spin-off of nanofabrication is programmable matter. This is like a half-way point between the top-down and bottom-up approaches that were used in the original development of nanofabricators. Programmable matter is made up of a multitude of semi-independant nanomachines that can lock together and interact, able to rearrange themselves to form different shapes and textures. Even slower than nanofabricators (which usually take several minutes), programmable matter takes several hours to change shape and texture from one object to another and is therefore confined in its use to furnature, sculptures and sometimes clothing (taking several hours to change shape). Programmable matter is relatively heavy and not strong enough to be used in construction; instead of breaking under pressure programmable matter seems to liquify.

Muon-Catalysed Fusion
Muon-Catalysed Fusion (MCF) is a form of nuclear fusion that has been persued for several centuries by many races and has only recently become possible. MCF is the only physically possible form of 'cold fusion' known to science. It operates from the idea that muon particles are like electrons in every way, apart from the fact that they are 207 times more massive; therefore if the electrons of atoms are replaced by muons the atoms will be pulled 207 times closer together and fuse 207 times more easily - potentially at room temperature. The only problem is that muons decay away in a matter of microseconds, and it takes a lot of energy to create muons, so each muon must be made to catalyse hundreds or thousands of fusion reactions or more energy will be consumed making muon than is produced by the fusion reactions.

This problem had no 'easy fix' that could be worked out by a QC, only the gradual refinement of technique can increase the number of fusion reactions per muon, until eventually a viable MCF reactor is produced. This is why the technology took so long to develop. However, the Zambarau electrostatic fusion reactors have worked well for centuries and still have a much higher power density than MCF reactors, this is because MCF reactors are intended for a different purpose. Because of the ease that fusion reactions take place in MCF reactors (hydrogen to helium at only 20°C) they are excellent for creating heavy elements, with an energy output from fusion right down to iron. Inputting more energy into the MCF reactors than comes out allows fusion into elements even heavier than iron.

MCF is leading to the adoption of the Combined Production System, in which you could theoretically make any product from hydrogen. First, MCF reactors would turn the hydrogen into the required elements for production; these elements are then fed into nanofabricators to make components, which are assembled on a robotic production line. Of course, this system is currently rarely used and is usually considered wishful thinking, as currently not even nanofabricators are considered efficient or economically viable for mass production.