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Himmelsschmiede
Himmelsschmiede
Image from Steve Bowers

Heavy industrialized system in MPA space - One of the largest Deep Well industrialized Zones that ever existed in the terragen sphere

Construction began in 4736 AT when the relativistic linelayer Matthew Fountaine Maury arrived with a nanogauge wormhole to the New Magnitogorsk hub. On board the Maury carried the equipment needed to convert the gas giant Himmelsschmiede VII into exotic matter and expand the wormhole to 25 meters.

System before it was converted into heavy industry center

* HS red super giant of 46 sun masses of 8 million km diameter
* HS I mercurian planet at 44 million km from the central star
* HS II mercurian planet at 71 Million km
* HS III-VII gas giants of 77,133,412,86 and 57 earth masses with lots of metallic moons
* HS VIII pluto type planet
* An asteroid belt at 560-580 Million km from center, lot of heavy elements between HS V and VI
* A comet cloud of 63 earth masses outside the planet's orbits

Next some nanotech and matter conversion systems were brought in. The nanomachines separated a comet that closely approached the star into its elements. The Hydrogen and Helium content were used to power conversion furnaces that converted everything of iron and higher atomic mass into magmatter. The elements in between were ejected through thrusters that changed the comet's orbit. At the same time 2250 solar cell arrays of 1,000km by 1,000 km with godtech antimatter producers were built from the crust of HS I. The planetary core was used among others to build 14 coil guns powered by antimatter direct conversion systems. They were assembled in a closely spherical arrangement and each was loaded with a projectile made from 1 megaton of magmatter. When all 14 projectiles hit each other at the center of the array they collapsed into a black miniature hole.

To stabilize the new black hole, now serving as deep well, in spite of Hawking radiation the unused portions of HS I & II were added to it. At the same time engineers had started to disassemble the gas giants and now inserted their matter into the new black hole. All the structures until now had been made from asteroids, the inner planets and the countless moons of the gas giants. As the gas giants were being dismantled their heavy elements were extracted and processed into a miniature ovaloid dyson type shell of 1000 000 km diameter and 100 000 km height around the black hole. This shell served as the main energy source for the Himmelsschmiede system. Special godtech collectors that covered the entire inner surface of this shell collected both the Hawking radiation of the hole itself and the Bremsstrahlung emitted by the matter accelerated in the tremendous gravitational field. The collectors also converted some of the gravitational waves produced by mass whirled around in strong fields into usefull energy.

The largest pill ever designed also housed the magnetic systems controlling the accretion disk and guiding the useful heavy elements out. Deep Well enclosures are the only Dyson type structures that are not spheric, but ovaloid.

When the system operated at optimum efficiency about 18-21% of the infalling matter were converted into heavy elements and the rest entered the hole. The immense Hawking radiation provided the Himmelsschmiede antimatter factories with enough energy to create several megatons of amat every day. During its great centuries (7200-8100 a.t) about 5000 earth masses of stellar matter were processed every year, gaining 1000 earth masses of a programmable element distribution and 500 EM of amat. The new materials were processed primarily into components for megastructures (88% of total output) terraforming infrastructure and needed elements (4%) and ships/ISOs/beam riders.

Himmelsschmiede is connected to the rest of the MPA by two wormholes. The New Magnitogorsk nexus served an area that was being developed and thus readily absorbed everything the vecs and tweaks at the Deep Well churned out. During the development period of the New Siberian plexus of the MPA between 4778 AT (on Brahe 7 the first load of iridium and titanium was produced) and about 8100 A.T. large numbers of Dyson swarm elements, Banks orbitals, weylforges, ringworlds were made from material made and processed at Himmelsschmiede. Most terraforming projects in New Siberia used equipment made from processed stellar matter. After that wormholes from there transported the components to new regions in need.

The other wormhole leads to Kepleria in the center of the MPA and was used primarily to bring energy in form of mat/amat packages into the busy centers of the Alliance and onto the main export lanes. Several beam rider routes touch the system which does not contain any unprocessed matter any more.

Most of the synthesized elements were brought to the outer areas of the stellar system and then processed into components ready to be assembled into everything from a dyson sphere to a beanstalk to an angelnet node. In such processing places, usually large free flying space stations bionts can survive while the intense gamma radiation makes any Deep well and its control elements almost exclusive territory of vecs, although some sun miners, especially from the SunSpot Diggers clade and space adapted neosquid or SANQs that are expecially hardened against the radiation work on these structures, as well. The largest processing centers, the Amboss stations first constructed at Himmelsschmiede but still running at full blast in more recent DWIZs, are huge disks with a diameter of about 100000 km and a thickness of 5000 meters. Each of them processes one earth mass of raw elements every day. That means that the station takes its own volume in once an hour, seperates the elements and isotopes, produces the needed alloys and compounds and shapes them into desired parts. These are then launched directly into the wormholes by magnetic launchers on the surface. Even though most systems are self-repairing and use non-sapient robots to perform maintainance work, still 4 million vecs as well as 7 million bionts (superbright humans and SANQs mostly and all more or less heavily cyborged) are required to keep things running. These stations are each controlled by a specialised AI, the Industriekapitaen series developed in 311 a.t. in what used to be Germany, and later ascended to SI: 2 in the NoCoZo. The entire system, deep well, stargates, beamrider stations, processing plants, ship traffic and everything else are controlled by the dedicated AI E who forges civilisation from the fires of the Sun, also called the Great Blacksmith. The ruling archailects of the MPA were so fond with its performance that E was cloned in a godtech storage system.

Himmelsschmiede Dyson sphere parts are manufactured to less than a mm deviation per million km of side length. Also Himmelsschmiede terraforming facilities like lunettas or atmosphere processing equipment are known on thousands of systems which were made usable by the components forged by the hellish forces of a black hole. After about 3500 years of continued operation all matter of the star had been dropped into the deep well and all processing operations were diassembled and what was still usefull was shipped to a new star. The last kiloton of Tantalum made on Einstein 25, 10?285 AT. was cast into a sculpture of the system while it was running at full blast and put up at New Magnitogorsk.

Today the Himmelsschmiede system is an empty place, just a huge black hole, some structures that are too cheap to transport them anywhere else and two large industrial-size wormholes. It has been used up and now is a barren place of no use for anyone, except as a traffic node from Kepleria to New Magnitogorsk. But its legacy lives on in thousands of megastructures and permanent terraforming systems that bear the crest of the Himmelsschmiede, a large black anvil set in front of a blazing white accretion disk with the letters HS engraved. The Himmelsschmiede project was special neither because of its size (the Metasoft DWIZ known as Hephaestus' Forge used a star of 52 sun masses) nor because the black hole was custom made for the deep well (first done at Hellsgate, also MPA in 5333 a.t.) but because it was the first time a solar system was chosen to be used most efficiently in this way and then systematically deconstructed to serve one purpose. Since then all major ruling archailects seek out otherwise worthless stars to be converted this way, especially when a large wormhole in the system is useful in other ways as well. The experience made by the Great Blacksmith at Himmelsschmiede can be shared by everyone who is willing to pay 1% of the extraced usefull matter equivalent in amat. After the contract has been signed a new copy of the mighty A.I is brought online in a godtech processing node weighing roughly 1700 tons and measuring 5*5*10 meters (the standard size for an interstellar transport container). The sturdy computronium slab uses amat as source of energy and is included in the price.
 
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Development Notes
Text by Martin Andreas Cieslik
Initially published on 16 December 2003.

 
 
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