Synthetic Diamond

Synthetic Diamond
Type	Construction Material
Tech Level	TL–10
Cost	Cr0.5
Size	1 liter
Weight	3.5 kg

Synthetic Diamond is mass-produced slabs carbon in a diamond crystal, a useful industrial good in TL–6 to TL–9 cultures which cannot produce it themselves Basic 1 m x 2 cm x 10 cm slabs cost about Cr100 in bulk and mass 200 kg each. The most common applications are research and industrial, such as windows in high-performance aircraft or deep-diving submersibles, wind tunnel monitoring ports or high-refraction lenses for astronomical use.

Synthetic diamond in large and/or curved areas is only commercially possible with fusion power and contragrav technology, and is not economical until TL–11. It is the material of choice for transparency, toughness, and scratch resistance. Prior to its development, such applications required synthetic quartz, which is technologically less sophisticated, but also not as capable and prohibitively expensive for most applications.

Its limitation as a structural material is its brittleness: it breaks rather than bends, and any weapon may cause severe cracking over a large area, regardless of its thickness.

This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Mongoose Publishing or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.

• Greg Porter. Central Supply Catalog (Imperium Games, 1996), 41.