Nuclear Forging

**Nuclear Forging** is an advanced metallurgical process developed by the Coalition of Intelligent Organisms in the early 3900s. It involves the use of gigantic, seething-hot nuclear furnaces to melt and reform metals at the atomic level, allowing exotic, super-strong new alloys to be constructed.

## History and Development

If there is one constant about Coalition military technology that persisted throughout their entire history, it is that the Coalition are obsessed with heavy armor. Even though their forces have a reputation of being expendable, the Coalition has always taken great care in minimizing the damage they receive during both ground and space combat. Early on, simple titanium alloys served as the basic armor equipment for Coalition forces, as it was a cheap but very reliable metal with several applications. Advancements in weaponry, combined with rising threats from hostile alien forces, made the Coalition pursue developments in armor, developing new ways of layering armor and coating it with small amounts of incredibly dense materials, such as Osmium or depleted Uranium. Unfortunately, even though the need for heavier armor grew, the ability for Coalition military assets to still retain their original speed and power after the addition of heavy armor was decreasing. Building larger, heavier weapons of war required lighter, stronger materials, and the secrets of nuclear forging gave the Coalition just that.

Nuclear forging was not something the Coalition had developed on their own. It was mostly reverse-engineered from manufacturing technology found on Countless. Field scientists analyzing the material processing facilities deeper inside of the planet found huge machines that generated immense, sun-like temperatures, reducing hard elements into amorphous masses of subatomic particles that could be reformed and recombined into new materials never before seen in nature. These machines were studied and eventually replicated by the Coalition, allowing them to create the first nuclear-forged alloys. The technology involved in nuclear forging was some of the first examples of high-level atom manipulation that the Coalition experimented with, and thanks to its discovery early on in their history, it cemented this technological feat in Coalition science for millenia to come, as well as creating the foundations for atomic transmutation and even the science behind SolBores.

## Mechanics and Usage

Nuclear forging is a lengthy and difficult process, mostly due to the sheer scale of the technology used. The nuclear forges on Countless were very small compared to later Coalition nuclear forges, which could rival the size of moons. This size isn't just due to the Coalition's tendency to make everything needlessly large. Nuclear forges need to have plenty of space in order to produce the temperatures required to forge large amounts of material at once (700-800 teratonnes is usually the default amount involved in a forging process). Nuclear forges use high-strength fusion/antimatter generators to produce energy, which they immediately turn into the raw heat that is funneled into the forge. Once sufficient temperatures are reached, material is dumped into the forge, where it immediately turns into highly flexible "protomatter" comprised of loose groupings of subatomic particles. Nuclear protomatter only vaguely resembles the materials its originally formed from, but thanks to its loose composition it can be easily manipulated and reformed at the atomic level. Force projectors inside of nuclear forges can manipulate protomatter and do a variety of things to it. It can be reformed into a tighter arrangement of atoms, increasing its density, or artificially merged with other elements to create brand new materials. After alterations to the protomatter have been made, the forge gradually cools itself and keeps the protomatter stable using force projectors until it has returned to its original energy state and reformed back into regular matter, which is collected from the forge, refined, and shipped off to manufacturing complexes to be turned into finished products. The entire process of nuclear forging usually takes a day or two to complete, depending on the size and efficiency of the forge involved. Of course, due to the law of entropy, some of the matter involved in the forging process is lost. This was especially common during the Coalition's early use of nuclear forges, where only about a fifth of the matter put into nuclear forges came back out of them as refined material. Over time, however, improvements to the process reduced this fraction significantly, making nuclear forges more efficient and practical.

Ever since its discovery, the Coalition used nuclear forging extensively to improve materials and generate new ones. They experimented with it constantly, discovering all sorts of miraculous new metal alloys and compounds that revolutionized Coalition engineering. Around 4110, nuclear forges were used to artificially harden Osmium beyond its natural constraints, while simultaneously merging it with Aluminum to make it lighter. Nuclear-forged Osmium (sometimes referred to as Osmite) was significantly lighter and stronger than anything the Coalition had used before, and became the first mass-produced nuclear-forged metal in Coalition history. Its extremely dark blue coloring and rough texture became characteristic physical features of almost all Coalition machinery from then on. Gradually, the Coalition developed specialized metal alloys for a plethora of different purposes, constructing hundreds of nuclear forges to keep up with their resource demand. Nuclear-forged metals, however, never completely replaced traditional metal alloys. Nuclear forging always remained a difficult and costly process, and outside of nuclear-forged Osmium (which was a metal the Coalition grew to be dependent on), they never produced massive quantities of other metals when traditional alloys could work just as well. This was especially true during the late Coalition Dark Age and even later into the Second Coalition Golden Age, as, in the case of the latter, the Coalition had simply become too massive, and couldn't produce enough nuclear-forged metals to outfit all of their machinery with them. Even simple things like Coalition armor suits went from being mostly made of nuclear-forged Osmium to being made of simple Titanium alloy with a thin coating of nuclear-forged Osmium layered on, showing how just how much the Coalition had cut costs later on in their history.