Armasail (CivBE)

Wonders

Armasail
Wonder in Beyond Earth
Cost	1500
Maintenance	None
Requires	5 Floatstone Synergetics
Specialist slots	None
Effect	+5 Diplomatic Capital
Notes	City suffers 50% less damage from ranged attacks.

The Armasail will permanently tie up 5 Floatstone resources.

Quote

"A well-prepared businessman has bulletproof contracts and bulletproof suits." - Hutama, We are All Destined to Prosper

History

Durable, ductile materials have always been the subject of deep interest for material scientists because of the apparent contradiction: Substances at once pliable and resistant. These materials are also of great utility in creating protective materials of various types. It may be argued that substances like Kevlar and chainmail from Earth's antiquity are merely the first instantiations of this idea of an armored fabric.

Promising lines of inquiry into these materials blossomed during the Seeding, as solar sails and light, flexible shielding for colony ships became critically important. Manufacturing these substances, however, taxed the drained, post-Mistake Earth, and it was widely speculated that it would be a long time before any settled world could produce the kind of armor fabric that Old Earth turned out in its final days. Even the smallest scrap of this fabric could be reused again and again. The oldest known of these is the Terran Standard of Marine Brigada 1, a fragment of a solar sail now painted with the Christo Astarte.

Materials engineers on this world were able to incorporate local materials, ranging from woven Floatstone filament to resilin strands, in their quest to create new armor fabric that could be easily made on this new world. Of these efforts, the best known, and best functioning material is Armasail - a shapeable fabric that can be created in memory and non-memory versions which can be made almost as hard as carbon nanofiber. Armasail strands are directional, and frequently interspersed with thin wire of gold or another conductor. When electrical currents are passed through Armasail, it can become rigid and nearly indestructible, and then almost effortlessly spring back into a soft, flowing cloth.

An Armasail garment is studded with countless microsensors that respond and react to sudden shocks or disturbances and stiffen the cloth to resist. A diaphanous veil of Armasail can easily resist punctures by railgun slugs or the fragmentation of an artillery shell. An Armasail shirt can resist cutting by grayblades or fractal knives. Even when it fails to protect, it is usually the result of the microsensor array breaking down rather than a fault of the fabric itself.

New fabrication methods continue to reduce the time and material cost to Armasail, which leads many military theorists to posit that armor may be in a position to trump all but the most unwieldy of weapons for the foreseeable future.

Images

This wonder does not have an in-game 3D model.