Blue Star Enterprises

Chapter 3-26

"That's quite something," Lucas admitted as he stood up after examining Alexander's nano-printer. "Don't get me wrong, Alex, I think it's wonderful that you have a new piece of tech for me to ogle, but it's just another printer isn't it?"

Alexander could excuse the man for thinking that. "It's not just a printer, it's a nano-printer."

The young man glanced around the workshop, his eyes landing on the other printers that were set up around the room. "I believe you said those other printers," he nodded towards the standard printers, "were capable of nanoscale production. I believe you even ranted about how Nova's tolerance requirements were absurd and the only thing that should require nano-scale production should be high-end processors."

"…Ok, so yeah, I did say that, but I was annoyed at the time. That woman is impossible to please. And those printers are only capable of just barely hitting the nano-scale tolerances needed." Alexander tapped on the clear top of his prototype printer. "This thing is nearly one hundred times more accurate. I say nearly because, at that scale, I'm relying on the particle size of the material I'm working with more than I am on the accuracy of the machine."

"An impressive feat, for sure, but you can't tell me that there aren't already industrial-scale printers capable of doing the same thing."

The man seemed less than sold on Alexander's new invention. Thankfully, Alexander hadn't asked Lucas there to sell him on the printer, but what he had created with it. It had taken a few months to work the bugs out and get a properly working nanoform lattice. As it turned out, the lattices were rather delicate, and even an errant gust of wind while moving them could break off the super delicate filaments that resembled dandelion fluff, only at the nanoscale. His hard work had finally paid off and he now had the first run of new processors to show the young man.

"Ignore the printer for now," Alexander stated. "I only showed you it so I could tell you what I made by using the device." He walked over to the other new machine in the workshop. This was a blocky, utilitarian device that lacked the flair and beauty of something meant to be used as a display. The fabricator was a simple, durable, industrial design meant to last. "This is what I wanted to show you," Alexander said as he gestured to the device.

Lucas paused, looking at the device oddly before approaching it and giving it a closer look. "It doesn't look like a printer. What is it?" the man asked, generally curious.

Alexander smiled since he knew he had the man's attention. "It's a nano-scale chip fabricator."

Lucas jerked upright at that statement. "No. It's impossible. You're lying. I've never seen one in person, but I always expected them to be… larger."

"I'm sure the current generation of unified computronics supercomputer fabricators are much larger and more involved. This fabricator is over eighty years old and is only capable of producing the processor portion instead of the whole integrated computronic."

Lucas whistled at that. "So you can make eighty-year-old supercomputers now? I guess they would still be better than what you were making before. You said this machine was only a nano-scale fabricator?"

Alexander nodded.

"Then why not just print the chips with your new printer? It seems like requiring multiple machines would be less efficient."

Alexander sighed. "I tried. The fabricator processes cannot be replicated by the printers. I even printed an exact duplicate of a working processor and it burned itself out as soon as I ran power to it. I shouldn't be all that surprised, this isn't the first time I've run into the limitations of printing."

"Does that mean you have working processors for me to play wi- I mean test?" Lucas asked, quickly correcting himself.

Alexander chuckled and popped open a plastic case off to the side. Inside the case were dozens of the newly minted processors, safely stored in individual form-fitted foam containers. "I need you to design and test hardware configurations for these. I've done a few tests myself by running them through an advanced chip computronic as the interface as well as a current supercomputer computronic. If the testing was accurate, these processors should be capable of about half of what a current supercomputer can handle."

Lucas swallowed hard as he looked at the crate filled with processors. "That means, that case is worth hundreds of millions of credits. Are you sure you're ok just letting me mess with them?"

Alexander gave the man's shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "I calculated it closer to a billion credits if I sold them on the open market. I don't plan on doing that, at least not at the moment. As for letting you mess with them, I trust you. If I didn't I would never have given you so much responsibility or made you BSE's head of testing."

For a moment, Alexander thought Lucas might faint from excitement or shock, but the man's wobbly legs strengthened a moment later.

"I don't know what to say," the young man admitted.

"You don't have to say anything. It's nothing more than what you've already been doing."

Lucas shook his head. "This is not the same, Alex. Testing your engines and helping out with the ship builds was fun, don't get me wrong, but this could be groundbreaking."

Alexander shrugged. "I would prefer we keep the groundbreaking stuff to ourselves. For now, I just want a reliable and cheap source of high-quality electronics. The price of computronics has doubled since the war started and keeps going up. The delivery that Jasper brought is nearly exhausted as well." All of the supercomputers had been used in ships, which included the new control ships that were assisting with mining operations. His remaining supply of advanced computronics wasn't far behind.

The problem was that each independent bot as well as his more advanced printers required one of the advanced computronics. He could reuse them if needed, but he would prefer not to unless it was absolutely necessary.

The ring printers were even worse as they required multiple advanced chips to operate properly and the mega-ring that he used to make the fishbone ships required sixteen of the advanced computronics just due to its sheer size. Alexander wasn't sure if he could have gotten away with using a single supercomputer in the construction or not. It wasn't something he had considered with his limited supply of computronics modules. That might be worth testing after Lucas worked out the hardware and software issues for these new processors.

Alexander could do the work himself, but it would involve a lot of tedious testing and retesting and Lucas was far more proficient with coding and computers in general than he was. Plus Alexander didn't really have any other work for the man to do at the moment. This was the perfect project to keep the man engaged.

"Obviously, I'll do it. I certainly have more than enough experience with outdated computers," he said, gesturing around at the facility. "Any design considerations?"

Alexander had to pause and think about that for a bit. As it was, he couldn't simply swap out a computronic supercomputer for this new processor. While one of the new processors was capable of operating five bots simultaneously, that was the limit. Adding a sixth to the mix always caused the processor to overload.

That meant he didn't have the same buffer as he did with the computronics. Running two of the new processors in tandem would solve that issue and should bring them in line with the current computronics, but he wasn't sure if there would be one hundred percent efficiency across a shared connection. There would need to be either a software or hardware link to allow the processors to work in tandem.

He decided to err on the side of caution. "Try to do your best to make a single hardware solution that can fit in the existing confines of the computronics format that I'm using, but allow for scalability. I want to be able to link processors to work in tandem."

"Hmm. That's a lot to ask for, but I'll see what I can do. I assume you want to replace the need for the computronics entirely without redesigning systems?"

Alexander's avatar bobbed up and down in a nod.

Lucas smiled. "Well, I did ask you for a project. This one should keep me busy for a bit at least."

Lucas walked over to the case, tried to pick it up, and grunted. His eyes widened slightly at the weight before he put it back down and called a nearby auto-cart. Alexander watched in amusement as the man transferred the large case to the back of the auto-cart. He would have helped, but the man had waved him off when he attempted to approach.

Once the man was gone, Alexander locked his workshop from the inside and went back over to his terminal. What Alexander hadn't told Lucas was that he had printed and tested those processors over a month and a half ago. That was right after he created the prototype nano-printer.

He had quickly abandoned the printer design after his initial exuberance over it had faded when it performed so poorly. It was a combination of issues, but most of it boiled down to terrible design choices on his part. It had taken him sixteen tries to get a working nanoform lattice for the processors. That didn't include the five failures he had attempting to move the forms over to the fabricator.

It turned out the high speeds and rapid movements back and forth caused the armatures on the nano-printer to quickly develop slop in them. Even the tiniest bit of movement in those armatures prevented him from reaching the accuracies he desired. Half the time the printed components were worse than what his current generation of printers was capable of. Considering he had designed it as the next generation of printers, that was unacceptable. He had been forced to replace all the armatures every single time he made a print, and even that didn't guarantee accurate results. To get the one working lattice, Alexander had been forced to slow the printer down to one-tenth the speed.

That was another unacceptable consolation that forced him back to the drawing board with his design. Alexander knew he was onto something, the printer wouldn't have worked at all otherwise. He just needed to iron out a few bugs first.

He accessed his modeling program and brought up a design he had been working on since that day over a month and a half ago. He wanted to show the fleet that he hadn't just been sitting on his ass printing more orbital defenses when they returned. With two months having passed since they left, he didn't have a whole lot of time to make his goal a reality.

The new printer popped up on his holo-display. It was a complete rework from the ground up, throwing away all the armature nonsense and material canisters from the printers. The material size inconsistency of the smelted material also posed significant issues to accurate printing, but he had been able to mostly work around that by having the printer reject the powder if the grain size was too large. He also tried sifting the material, but it was a nightmare to sift nano-scale dust.

Since he couldn't use the material that came from a smelter, Alexander simply designed his own system to create a uniform nano-scale base material. He pulled in examples from the mining equipment, the printers, the smelters, and even his own work with the static field generators to produce what he called a nano-stripper.

It was a lot more involved than the material feed tanks, but if it worked, it would always guarantee a one hundred percent pure material of a much closer dimensional tolerance than the smelter was capable of. The stripper was not a replacement for a smelter though. It would be much too slow for that.

The design allowed Alexander to feed any sort of bar stock to the stripper and it would store the converted material, much like the smelter did, only the material consistency could be guaranteed.

With the hard part done, Alexander moved to the actual printer.

He had thought about this issue ever since he learned that the armatures would not work. One night while worrying over the problem, he asked himself why he even needed armatures, or feed tubes for that matter. The static field was already sensitive enough to hold single particles and move them into place. Why couldn't it also pluck them directly from the material containers the same way?

That took a bit of added programming on Alexander's end, but he was pretty sure he had it working correctly now. Doing it this way also meant the new printer wasn't limited to how many arms it could have. It could essentially have an infinite amount of arms assuming electricity and processing power were available.

The only limitation of this new design was the lasers used to set the material. Those would need to go if he ever wanted to reach the goal of single-atom printing, but that was an issue for much later.

Over the next few days, Alexander printed and assembled the new nano-assembler, using the previous one to make some of the really finicky parts.

This new nano-assembler was much larger, almost matching one of his robot production cells in scale. Gone was the viewable print chamber as well, the whole machine taking on a much more industrial scale look to it. There was still a camera inside the vacuum chamber to keep an eye on the print. It was the only real concession he made to keep track of what was going on inside the device.

He had also incorporated a direct connection to the fabricator to allow the nanoform lattice to be moved to the other machine without any direct contact or exposure to air. That should reduce a lot of the issues he was running into when he first started trying to print the lattices.

Another reason for the much larger size of the new machine was the item he planned to print first. Sure he could reprint the nanoform lattice to test for accuracy, but he decided to make something else that had plagued him for nearly five months. He was going to finally print Dr. Lund's device. Considering how demanding she was on tolerances, it would be a good test for the new nano-assembler. He would like to hear her complain about it being out of tolerance after this. Enjoy exclusive adventures from empire