Well, I had been thinking of carbon ... I was considering "inventing" a "diamond glass" that was neither diamond nor glass -- not completely amorphous/acrystalline like a true glass, but maybe an aperiodic quasicrystal so there'd be no cleavage planes?
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)?
The first thing that comes to mind is that fullerenes have an excess of unbound electrons. This is likely to cause problems in the EM coupling. Any even weakly and locally conducting medium is at least an attenuator.
(no subject)
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.
(no subject)
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)?
(no subject)
(no subject)