Avenio wrote:The United Colonies of Earth wrote:What did you expect...no, wait. What's so wanky about it? Everything? I don't know how effective it would be otherwise.
Pretty much everything. You picked random large numbers and picked out a list of vaguely impressive-sounding metals, threw them together and asked us what we thought of them.
Yes, well, I chose them for their high resistance to acids (iridium), high melting point and hardness (tungsten), high strength-to-weight ratio (titanium), durability in the face of projectiles (chromium), and resistance to neutron-induced radioactivity (vanadium), and wonder if these properties still apply in alloy of all five.
The atom numbers were sort of random. I thought a heavy element might have space for technobable special properties. You know, apophenia. Pattern-seeking at random.
I derived the last big number from the fact that I wanted FTL travel to be nearly instantaneous at superluminal velocity, which led to me writing in the draft of my first book that a UCE Exploratory Ship got to Proxima Centauri in two seconds, then dividing that by the distance, roughly, from here to that star. The resultant number is the speed.