(Awake, but not really "here" 'cause I have to run out and take care of an errand. Wanted to squirt this onto the wires before I had time for it to slip my mind. More of that dangerous shower-thinking, if you're curious.)
I'm looking for a substance that would be incredibly difficult to penetrate mechanically but transparent to electrommagnetic radiation at nearly all frequencies (at least all non-visible ones). Something about which clueful folks might intelligently say, "We have no way to cut, drill, or break that." My first thought, of course, was diamond (this was originally going to be an entry asking whether diamond is radio-transparent), but hey, people cut diamonds all the time by fracturing them, so what would stop someone from smashing a diamond box by hitting it hard enough to break it along planes of the crystal?
Ideally, I want something non-metallic (see note about transparency to non-visible EM), which rules out adamantium, and besides, I'd rather a) use a real-world substance if one exists and b) avoid swiping someone else's fictional substance unless it really makes things a lot easier on the reader (assuming I ever get around to writing the story-idea that came to me in the shower). [Edit: I've just rememberd that General Products hull material would work, except that my comments about preferring a real-world substance and being hesitant to use someone else's fictional substance still stand.] I've already got an idea for what to do if I have to make something up with a bit of technobabble. Expense is not a factor; I'll just assume that the person building an enclosure out of this material is incredibly wealthy. And possibly very patient. The box made of this stuff will be a cubic meter or so, and able to survive having the building it's in catch fire and collapse.
Transparency in the 1GHz-100GHz range is required; RF below 1GHz would be useful, as would 60Hz, but if it's opaque or severely attenuates the lower frequencies I can work around that. Opacity at near-IR, visible, and higher frequencies is desirable but not required. And I know so little about materials-science that I'm not even sure where to start to construct a Google search string. Anyone know what I'm looking for, or should I go tune my technobabble?
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Sorry I can't come up with something better. Perhaps look for a metallurgic website?
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Dunno whether that makes much more sense than what you thought I was thinking or not.
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And the sad thing is, that unless you conveniently suspend the laws of chemistry and physics as we understand them, you're left with speculation and fiction, which for speculative fiction is just fine, innit?
So stop worrying and give yourself permission to be implausible. Stop trying to be perfect and cover all your bases and write the dang story already. If the story contains "truth" it won't matter how implausible the stoopid detail is. Nobody doubts Big Bird's credibility, do they?
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Diamond dust (or perhaps larger particles) embedded in an an acid-resistant epoxy substrate.
The epoxy would provide the flexibility to resist shatter attacks, the diamond particles would spoil cutting/drilling attacks.
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Tangentially (deflected by the GP hull material thought), I'm now wondering what properties The Grandmother Of All Buckyballs would have -- how tough would a meter-diameter Fullerene, a carbon gargantuamegasupermolecule, be? You'd have to break a covalent bond to cut it ... but would that make it trivally susceptible to chemical attacks (similar to an analogous weakness in GP hulls)?
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