Eugene Leitl wrote:
> Is there any evidence that sufficiently stable yet complex structures
> are possible in the semidegenerate matter shell around the neutronium
> core?
Strictly speaking, we don't have much data either way. It doesn't appear to be practical to predict the behavior of matter under such conditions using our current models, and we don't have any handy samples to experiment with.
> I also wonder about thermal regime. Surface temperatures might
> range from MK to GK, which is damn broad even for nucleonic matter
> (drextech can probably only cover 0..800 K) range.
That's why I said it would be a delicate process. You'd have to do a lot of number crunching to find a temperature/pressure regime in which complex structures are stable enough to work with, and then you'd have to build a structure that can maintain such an environment for long periods of time.
The payoff in terms of increased component density would be huge, of course, but the scale of the engineering involved leads me to suspect its a moot point. By the time we could do something like that we'll be an SI civilization, and we'll probably have much better ideas.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com