Slice of PI

Planets get touchy-feely

Kichae Chandramani
Jafo Entertainment & News, Inc.

JITA – The claws of industry have reached in every direction, but for far too long the planets have escaped their grasp.  Now, thanks to over a century of intense research and development by some of the brightest scientist and engineers in the cluster, the technology allowing industrial tycoons to lift stuff has arrived.

“This is a momentous accomplishment,” says Dr. Palinkazs Dömötör, the lead researcher on Dömötör Industries’ Great Dömötör Insertion and Removal of Terrain project.  “We now have, for the first time ever, the ability to break up, turn over, or remove materials from objects larger than moons.”

“Now all we need is a technology that allows us to successfully mine null-sec veldspar asteroids.”

The breakthrough came about a year ago when Dr. Jühasz Szöke, a research assistant on the project, saw his children playing in the piles of silicate rubble left on the floor of the Hyasyoda refinery station that they called home.

“My Son, Huszar, was on top of a pile of scordite,” says Dr. Szöke, “and he was throwing rocks at his brother Lukatz, who sat below.  Then, much to my surprise, Lukatz started throwing the rocks back up at Huszar! It was at that point that I thought to myself if it’s possible to toss something up in an artificial gravitational field, then maybe, just maybe, it’s possible to do this in a natural one, too!”

“We were originally going to send it to market under the project name,” says Dr. Dömötör, “but the guys in marketing didn’t think consumers would understand what words like ‘insert’, ‘remove’, or ‘terrain’ meant.”

Today the technology is known as Planetary Interaction, and, while it has yet to gain widespread acceptance across the galaxy, its use is on the rise.

Using Planetary Interaction small and medium sized operations are now able to produce materials that were so rare and difficult to produce only the largest megacorporations could afford the laboratories to develop them.

“Astral Mining, TransStellar Shipping, and their buddies can no longer claim their virtual oligopolies over such rare commodities as water and oxygen,” says Dr. Dömötör.  “The power to develop these products is now within the reach of every pilot in the sector.”

“So long as they’re willing to pay me the licensing fee.”