Beneath

Hi guys, new explorer here! I've been following the blogs and discord for a while, and joined looking to help out

Having worked as an organic chemist myself, I keep thinking about that batch reactor pellet-production plant on Er'Cana. Cool as that admittedly is (after I figured out it was a chemical plant and not a power plant), it is a very time-consuming way of getting those lake algae going. It would be cool if we could synthesize that ourselves, in bulk, and not be dependent on the Er'Cana plant alone.

Could I help to analyse a pellet? If it's a polyphosphate salt, as I suspect it is from that heating process to make it and the way the algae use it as an energy source, we could make it ourselves in a continuous process. Er'Cana likely has the phosphate needed as raw material, and the Surface does as well.

Also, I saw the thread from earlier this month about the soundsystem in Kirel, and I'm happy to report I found it last night and it works amazing

Best regards!
Ereshkigal

Shorah, Welcome aboard!

Fellow pellet researcher here! Speaking primarily about my own experiments and test results here, and may not necessarily reflect other people's results when testing.

I've done experiments of my own on the pellets, trying to figure out if there was a missing ingredient or a way to improve the efficacy of the pellets. I've ground them up, cut them up, tried mixing my own batches based on the elements present in Er'cana... I've shoved 'em whole sale through vacuum tubes on a timed delivery mechanism, even... Nothing really seemed to help matters, much.

My attempts at recreating the pellets themselves outside of Er'cana have not gone anywhere well, unfortunately. The issue may be I just am missing something, or that the facility has some portion of the process black boxed and I'm unable to recreate that process externally, and I'm not entirely sure which it is.

I've tried various mixtures of elements present in the age, ranging from samples of the stalk plants to what I and others have theorized to be plant seeds disguised as rocks (Though, that makes them hard to differentiate FROM rocks, as my last blender can attest to. RIP Smoothie Master 2.8), as well as taking elements of the local water as potential sources for food processing.

All of it has either been as effective as a poorly made pellet, or non effective at all. In that, I suppose my efforts aren't too bad- though I should be thankful I haven't had an experiment explode in my face yet like some pellets have been known to do.

Unfortunately, figuring out what the heck the Pellets are has been just as... well. Unfruitful. Chemical analysis of the pellets has been as frustratingly obtuse as much as DNA tests of the Algae itself have been. I honestly haven't been able to get any coherent results from either. I'm honestly beginning to suspect that the whole Lake Ecosystem is reliant on some element foreign to Earth that I can't identify in Er'cana.

You're welcome to give it a try and see if you can do better than I can on the analysis front, though. I'd also wait to see if anyone else wants to chime in on the matter.

On an unrelated note, I'm happy to hear you found the sound system alright!

Shorah Calum!


Hmmm... the explosiveness suggests something indeed a bit more high-energy than a polyphosphate. It does look like some sort of polymer to me, possibly a high-energy compound encased in a polymer matrix for stability. Destroying or damaging the matrix could then set off an explosion, if done umder oxygen. I'll take some samples back for molecular weight analysis (under argon!).

Quick update: I went to Er'cana yesterday and took some pellet samples back to the Surface with me. They do indeed contain a polymer matrix,with molecular weight around 100.000 g/mol. It's a very unusual sort of polymer for biological things; to be able to use it as an energy source, the algae need some strange enzyme systems, for sure.

I did find nitro groups present in the material, which helps explain the energy content and occasional explosivity. There is, however, more going on; each pellet is a complex mixture of compounds, some of which don't make sense from the perspective of Earth biochemistry. More analysis ongoing!

Well, atleast I wasn't going crazy on the analysis front. Definitely some foreign-to-earth materials in the system somewhere.

Foreign to earth molecules, yes, but made of the same elements from the same periodic table, hence the compatibility with Earth (the same might even apply to the D'ni themselves, and any other Garternay-based lifeforms). It means we can find out what it is eventually, but we'd have to synthesize everything if we want to produce pellets ourselves; ready-made amino acids and phosphates from here won't work.

Having observed some of Calum's more insane experiments, all I can say is that I wish you good luck.