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in UEEF marines we find out that the karbarran Sekitan is an ore that includes large amounts of 'ununpentium', which is described as an element that releases antimatter when it breaks down.
this in fact, was based on real science, as UnUnPentium (the placeholder name for element 115, detected in 2003) was a very real element, and it does show signs of releasing positrons (anti-electrons) as it decay's.
in June 2016 it was officially named Moscovium, after the Moscow Oblast where the research facility that found it was located.
the real element has a half life of only 0.8 seconds or less, depending on isotope.. but some of its isotopes come pretty close to the 'island of stability' where there are enough neutrons present to decay happening fast.
this would suggest that the Sekitan in robotech, with its "UnUnPentium" (given the different history, i can buy it not getting the current IRL name), is of a (fictional, so far) heavier isotope that has a long enough half life that there is still a large amount of it around after billions of years. (interesting Note, it's decay products are Nihonium (element 113, named 2016, half life of between 70 milliseconds and 20 minutes depending on isotope) and hydrogen. Nihonium itself is radioactive and deacys into Roentgenium (element 111), Roentgenium into Meitnerium (element 109), Meitnerium into Bohrium (element 107), Bohrium to Dubnium (element 105, and where the half lives get long enough to easily measure). i won;t bore you with even more decay reactions here.. just know it goes another 5 stages before it hits Plutonium 238.
all of these are highly radioactive and put out a lot of energy just as they decay, in addition to a lot of positron emissions. absolutely tiny amounts of these could build incredibly powerful and tiny nuclear reactors, and odds are that is what Sekitan power plants actually are.. with the Positron emissions at various stages along the way acting to boost the energy levels even more.


since Muscovium is a synthetic element, created in a lab, this suggests that karbarra has or has had some fair exotic conditions in the past. Muscovium is created by bombarding Americum-243 with Calcium-48 ions. While Americum-243 is technically a natural element, it is only produced as a result of nuclear fission reactions in a nuclear reactor. this does not mean it had to be some sort of lost history thing though. we see natural Nuclear Fission reactors have formed in our own world's history, where conditions are right, so it could still be natural. but for karbarra to have such rich deposits would suggest that it had a lot of these.. suggesting that uranium and related elements, like thorium, not only were very common on the planet, but it naturally got so concentrated to not only create a reactor, but to create a breeder style reactor that created even heavier elements. (before people break in with "but steampunk".. the shovel and furnace fixation of karbarrans likely grew out of the mining techniques needed to obtain radioactive ores, and the refining processes required to separate it out from the ore and enrich it. Sekitan being so abundant, it is likely they discovered nuclear reactors fairly early on in their history.)

this would suggest that karbarra was probably just plain saturated with heavy elements, which in turns suggests that their native life is probably highly toxic to non-karbarrans, due to the high levels of lead other decay byproducts. either the life there evolved to incorporate these elements into their biochemistry, or they evolved ways to capture, store, and flush out the toxic elements highly efficiently. not to mention obscene tolerances for radiation exposure.

it seems likely that even before karbarra embarked on industry and polluted their world, it was probably not all that healthy for anyone else but karbarrans.

something to keep in mind when the UEEF troops are fighting there.

Ahhhhh....the line between mad science and real science becomes thin indeed.

Its awesome how rpgs lead to higher education.

This is a great point and I will use this science behind it for my own games. Great job.

So early Karbarrean alchemists were really nuclear chemists?

taalismn wrote:So early Karbarrean alchemists were really nuclear chemists?

well in our own history, the more serious minded Alchemists were looking for ways to convert one substance to another, which is basically what nuclear chemistry is.

if there are a lot of actinide's in their planets crust (like all of these, plus plutonium, uranium, etc) it seems reasonable they'd find them in naturally occuring concentrations high enough to be equivalent to the fuel pellets we stick in radiothermal generators. and that they'd figure out how to refine the raw ores into a more concentrated form fairly early on.
even without knowing why they generate heat, they might use such radioactives in for example, early steam engines. they may well could have used radioisotopes the way we used coal and oil. and if they were naturally resistant to radiation and contamination, they wouldn't need the heavy shielding we would.
and if their planet has lots of heavy metals and radioisotopes, it would follow that they'd also have lots of other less common elements.. iron, aluminum, rare earths, etc.
as a result certain areas of their tech might have advanced faster than our own, while others might have developed slower. (much of our plastics and synthetic fibers technology grew out of experiments into the composition of and attempts to artificially make various materials that came from oil and coal, for example.)

For some reason, I've missed this post...but now I have found it. Thank you...to Wikipedia and my game notes, away!

-STS

This is fascinating.
And of use to me, even though I don't play much Robotech I do like to design my game worlds...

what this can mean in terms of technology (since i've got had some people asking elsewhere abut it) is that their hardware would use some fairly advanced principles. they'd develop nuclear science, electricity, advanced metallurgy, etc fairly fast, because they'd have a lot of metals and heavy elements to work with. on the other hand technologies reliant on organic materials and light elements, like plastics, oil, and some types of ceramics, would probably develop slowly. gunpowder for example might not have taken off as easily on their world, since carbon, sulfur, and nitrates would likely be harder to find in sufficiently pure forms for the early experimentation, meaning it would probably occur only after the early days of an industrial revolution allows for refinement or artificial production. on the other hand, it is likely they'd have developed the concepts behind coilguns and railguns fairly heavily, and with easier access to rare earths and to stuff like bismuth telluride, they probably would have developed computers fairly easily as well (although their higher end systems would likely operate on slightly different properties than the silicon based systems we use. IRL we are only just now starting to look into material like Bi2Te3 for computing, because it allows lower energy computing via Spintronics. which uses the spin of electrons for computing rather than voltage levels. with easier access to metals and rare earths, the karbarrans would be able to experiment with these materials more easily and would find such things earlier)

the limited use of of plastics and ceramics would effect how their technology looks. it is likely that they would use lighter mass metal alloys where we would use plastic or ceramics. it also means that they would probably use a lot more analog systems for display, like CRT's or actual dials, instead of LCD screens and such. (LCD's use organic chamicals for their liquid crystals). combined the result would have much of the same feel as the "steampunk" and "deiselpunk" aesthetics. like stuff from the late 19th and early 20th century, although the mechanicsm behind it would be far more advanced.

so before the Tirolians conquered them (much less the invid), it is liekly their native technology leaned towards portable railguns for personal armaments, body armor of metal plates (and EBA looking like a cross between platemail and an old style diving suit), and so on. one good guide might be to mimmick the aesthetics seen in the CGI Captain Harlock Film from 2013, specifically the Arcadia and its crew. the ship, despite being extremely advanced, has a very steampunksh vibe to it, with pipes and exposed metal, and the way it looked before turning pirate feels to me like something the Karbarran might build (though IMO with railguns instead of energy guns) the combat armor of the Arcadia's crew also illustrates the kind of "high tech but steampunk looking" aesthetic i figure the karbarrans would have.

By the same token, some of the stuff in 'Steamboy' could represent early terrestrial-use Karbarrean gear.