Exomatter

Exomatter

Initially developed at the end of the 22nd century, exomatter did not see extensive use - at least by humanity - until the 23rd century and the development of the Drolman effect and the Mynoth process. The former is a method by which ordinary matter can be made to react to mirror matter, thus making it relatively easy to find and gather

 Before knowledge of this process spread after the Contact War, exomatter was considered to be an exceedingly precious substance by the Three Empires, and it was traded much like a currency.

Exomatter is formed via a strange combination of particles not typically possible in a normal vacuum, and requires mirror matter to forge. Sufficiently high energies can coax new, exotic sorts of particles to decay, which can be manipulated to form an entirely different subset of stable, electromagnetically interacting matter, with exceptional properties. Like normal matter, it has a set of basic building blocks, which are only stable in eachother's presence:

• Dhelatrons - counterpart to electrons, they have approximately a third more mass than the weaker particle, yet have an electric charge of -6 and a mirror electric charge of -6 as well. Its antiparticle is called the dhositron.
• Triatons - Much like a proton, though less massive. Has an electric charge of +3.
• Trimtons - The mirror version of the above, but interacts via its own type of nuclear force. Has a mirrored electric charge of +3.

Like electrons, dhelatrons form 'shell's around their more massive partners, but with a number of differences. Ignoring their incredible strength, they have three valid states in an orbital instead of two. Thus, the exomatter counterparts to noble gasses occur at exoatomic numbers 6-6, 30-30, 54-54, and 78-78.

Because it is not composed of normal matter, it does not react with normal antimatter. Antiexomatter does react with it, of course, but is also somewhat more difficult to produce - their is no such thing as a dhelatron-dhositron pair cannon. Because matter can easily handle it, and because exomatter can easily handle antimatter, they are often used for such purposes, though they possess an exceedingly high amount of friction when so contained.

With bond strengths close to twenty times that of ordinary matter, exomatter is usually used to construct ultra-strong materials, some of them reaching the low terapascal range for tensile strength. Because the dheletron possesses both a mirror electric charge and a normal one, it functions to support - and protect against - mirror matter as well. This is also a flaw - since it interacts with mirror matter, the paucity of such matter means that an exomatter object does not have many places to hide.

Triatons and trimtons are largely stable, and can 'forge' dhelatrons out of