Soul Crystals

Soul Crystals are turquoise coloured crystals that contain the power of all the souls a Soul Dragon has devoured in it's life and not used as a Soul Blast as well as the power from the Soul Dragon's soul. They are only formed when a Soul Dragon dies. Nobody really knows how these crystals produce energy, but some theories suggest that the 'soul' energy is actually Zero Point energy, regardless of where they gain their power from, these crystals have a finite usage life and will get dimmer and dimmer with use until they lose their characteristic glow.
Despite their rather rare production method, they are extremely common on or near DragonKin worlds, as Soul Dragon outposts would often contain multiple Soul Dragons, which yield many tons of Soul Crystals on death. The crystals are found in large chunks, sometimes fragmented, and often buried underground although it isn't unknown for them to be on the surface if Soul Dragon habitation was recent on a geological scale.
A fully charged crystal will glow brighter than a partly drained crystal, and a non-glowing crystal is either nearly depleted, or fully depleted. Larger crystals contain more energy than smaller crystals, and will last much longer.
Charge is held equally across the entire crystal at all levels of charge. Example, carving a chunk 10% of the size out of a large crystal for use in a handheld weapon will retain 10% of the charge from the large crystal.
==Uses==
Soul Crystals main, and only use, is to power technology made by, or retro-engineered from, Soul Dragons. They are also known to be compatible with Dragnite Crystal based technology, such as that used by the Ancient Dragoians, with the most minor of adaptions. As most technology in the Dragoian Home Galaxy that is related to space travel is either mostly based or fully based on Soul Dragon technology, Soul Crystals are valuable to nearly every space faring species.
Once a Soul Crystal is fully drained, it loses the majority of it's colouration and is often crushed into a powder and merged with glass to form a sturdy near transparent material suitable for use in Starship windows that can take considerably more abuse before cracking than glass.
== Stability And Overloads ==
Soul Crystals are stable, and can survive considerable abuse (such as energy weapons fire) without exploding. However, they can be forced to overload inside a Soul Crystal reactor, which results in a devastating explosion that not only decimates the reactor, but depending on how many crystals were being forced to overload, a blast radius that ranges from a few Kilometres (a small, partly drained crystal) to entire solar systems (a fully loaded dreadnought size reactor (multiple metric tons of Soul Crystals) in the event of a cascade overload. Safety lockouts will typically prevent an overload from cascading to multiple soul crystals, resulting in any overload, deliberate or not, to only happen in the Soul Crystals within the reactor that were being drawn from as the reactor went into an overload state, limiting the devastation from an overload to just the ship and at most a few kilometres around it.
These non-cascade overloads are too small ranging to be much of a threat in all but the tightest packed fleet actions, but can cause devastating damage if used too close to planets or other similar stellar objects.
The forced cascade reaction overloads of Soul Crystal reactors are outright forbidden by DragonKin species due to the extreme collateral damage such an overload can cause, as well as the wasting of valuable resources. As a result, most DragonKin made Soul Crystal reactors require heavy modifications to force a cascade overload to ensure one cannot happen accidentally during combat.
== Raw Vs Reactor ==
Some species can adapt their technology in such a way that they can directly utilise power from a "Raw" Soul Crystal which produces a slightly higher power output, and no possible chance of an overload compared to a reactor. Very few species actively use "Raw" Soul Crystals, as the receptacle to draw power from them must be shaped to the crystal, which is fine for small items such as personal weapons where a large Soul Crystal can be carved to a uniform size, but makes them almost impossible to use reliably to power starships or other large power-requirement items.
A Soul Crystal reactor however can use any Soul Crystal inside it once the reaction has been jump-started by an external power source. However, reactors siphon a small amount of the Soul Crystal's power to keep the reaction going and have the potential to cause devastating overloads. Soul Crystal reactors are also often too large and bulky for small item use except by extremely large species and are almost exclusively used to power large-scale planetary defences or starships.Category:Minerals
Category:General
Category:Soul Dragons