How common is Trinium?[]
How much trinium do you think is left in the MW?
Gormagon (talk) (Contribs) 22:59, September 12, 2011 (UTC)
Is it more or less common then Naquadah?
Gormagon (talk) (Contribs) 22:59, September 12, 2011 (UTC)
- I'd say less, at least in the Milky Way - the only races that we know of that use it are the Asgard (a multi-galactic civilization, so no proof that they get any Trinium from the MW.), the Tollan (a non-imperialistic race of pacifists who seem to have colonized a total of 2 worlds (Tollan and Tollana) with their superior technology), the beings the Salish called their "Spirits" (whom we know virtually nothing about, that particular population of Salish (getting their Trinium from said "spirits" - likely refined by their technolgy and not by the natural process they think it is, by the way), and Earth (with low demand as Trinium is a secret material only used in SGC-related technologies that lack wide-scale adoption.) Compare this to Naquadah, which was used in large quantities by the Ancients (the stargates, at least, are made of Naquadah, and there's a lot of them and they're something like 60 odd tons apiece), and later supports the Goa'uld empire which is very Naquadah reliant and lasts as a major galactic power for several thousand years at least. Assuming that most of the Naquadah used by the Goa'uld is not whittled away by its fission applications (like the Naquadah enhanced nukes used by Earth at several points), I'd say there's a lot more Naquadah around than Trinium - I'm assuming from a logical standpoint that technological cultures will use what they have access to - after all, most of the naturally occuring elements on earth have large scale commercial applications, even the super-rare ones.
Which is better for hull alloys?[]
What is its melting point?[]
I would guess that base refined Trinium would melt at 12,000 F. Tungsten melts at a little over 6000 F. We have cermaic based materials that melt at 9000 F.
What is Trinium supposed to be? Element, Isotope, Alloy...?[]
It has properties that sound more like they come out of a material scientist's dreams rather than anything approaching realism (unlike Naquadah and Naquadria). There's 3 basic categories for metallic substances that we may not have discovered yet: stable post-transuranics (to steal the Schlock Mercenary terminology), unknown stable isotopes of known elements, and alloys.
An alloy is a mixture of elements containing at least one metallic element (probably as a large percentage of its mass.) Steel is an alloy that's mostly iron but has a small amount of carbon. Stainless steel adds chromium and a bunch of other metals that make it resist corrosion. However, Trinium can't be just an alloy of known elements - you don't mine alloys, you create them through various mixing processes (in the case of steel, we exploit the carbon coming off of the coal being used to melt the iron ore, so the mixing happens as part of refining the iron ore into pure iron.) The "refined" trinium might be an alloy, but there's more to it than just an alloy, or we'd be making it ourselves once we figured out the recipe.
The concept of post-transuranics, as definied in the Schlock Mercenary webcomic, is a series of stable super-heavy elements that hangs off the bottom end of the current version of the periodic table. Element 150, for instance, might be one. So far, all the elements after uranium in the periodic table are radioactive - many of the newer ones (like Uut and Uuo) are so very unstable we're not even sure we've actually made them...that's why their name is bastardized latin for "one-one-three" or "one-one-eight" - they don't last long enough to prove it. Materials like this, though, would be extremely heavy and likely have radioactive isotopes. Naquadah and Naquadria fit this rather nicely - they're obscenely heavy, have applications in nuclear-based WMDs, etc. (Oh, and since their atomic number is so very high, they'd have a LOT of energy pent up in those nuclei, and thus would have very high yields in fission reactions. Yep, definitely Naquad(ri)a.) This concept, however, works poorly for Trinium. Trinium is supposed to be a hundredth the weight of steel, and higher atomic number tends to mean a heavier material - lead is heavier than iron, gold is heavier than lead, uranium is even heavier (oh, and 4 or 5 ingots of naquadah requires 2 Jaffa to carry it). So Trinium is probably not a post-transuranic.
It could well be an isotope of a known element, though. We do lots of research into isotopes, but that's largely based on medical applications like emitters for x-ray or CT scanners, radiotheraphy for cancer patients, etc. I don't know of anyone who's working on finding stable isotopes of metals for purposes of developing super-materials. The hundredth-the-weight-of-steel idea conceivably fits an aluminium (or possibly even lighter metals like lithium) isotope, and who knows what the implications would be for material properties like strength.
So an isotope seems like it would be the most likely candidate for trinium. For that matter, the name itself evokes a named isotope - hydrogen has 3 named isotopes: protium, deuterium, and tritium - the latter 2 named for their atomic weight. For that matter, the name Trinium could reflect the atomic number of the material - element #3 is lithium, the lightest metal, so. (That said, we've probably figured out all the stable isotopes of lithium by now - with only 3 protons to work with, the nuclear structure has a very limited number of stable possibilities. Still, no one ever accused Stargate of being 100% scientifically accurate.Rashkavar (talk) (Contribs) 12:41, July 26, 2014 (UTC)