Bibliophile: I don't think any of us were planning on manufacturing Qubits? I think we were just going to siphon off a few more from the linked reservoirs we had. Kremlin: Qubits wouldn't come from rare elements. They'd probably be the electrons from helium atoms. Rarer elements would be no easier to produce qubits from (Probably harder in fact). The energy requirement is also pretty low (A bit below 80 eV per entangled pair, plus whatever is required for containment). Actually, now that I think about it, manufacturing qubits would be pretty straightforward and require little more than helilum and a big capacitor, plus somewhere to put them. Hell, IRL I could probably make some qubits in my basement. (I don't know what I'd do with them once I had them, or be able to store them effectively, but I could [i]make[/i] them). Also, in-universe they aren't really even remotely expensive. IIRC, Qubits are a couple hundred million to the cent.

ORCA: Cleanrooms are very, very easy to come by when you're cruising in space, and from what I know of Bibliophile's campaign, his dudes are gatecrashing mainly through gates anchored to bodies that have an escape velocity you can achieve with a particularly aggressive fart-sneeze. (Fhzneeze?) Anyway... I would say that it's probably not something too hard to do, given the incredible resources that group has at their disposal. Back in the solar system, the real expense of QBits is that you have to get QBits whose mates have been physically shuttled to whomever you want to be talking to, or vice-versa. Since both parties' start points are here, that's a non-issue. If you want a half-way plausable reason to say "it's not going to be very effective," then just say that manufacturing QBits [i]successfully[/i] is hard. Like, for each "QBit Forge" you have going, it successfully manufactures approximately one QBit per minute, amidst billions which either failed to entangle properly or which were then observed and hence, de-entangled. And since each QBit tranmits precisely one bit of data, once, you need a [i]loooooooooot[/i] of them to send messages. The standard QBit factories are enormomassivehugegigantomungorbig factories, where they have literally billions of QBForges running in parallel. But I wouldn't say that, personally, I'd go with the "Sure, knock yourselves out. If you can build and launch a rescue mission that rescues hundreds of thousands of biomorphs and millions upon millions of egoes from an incoming TITAN bushbot using an Orion vessel, you can make your own QE comms."

Chernoborg wrote:

Which is almost exactly what Shadowdragon 8685 just said:P . Although I'd check the warranty on your vacsuit in that fart/sneeze scenario!

[url=http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2012-11-25]Maxim 25: If the damage you do is covered by a manufacturer's warranty, you didn't do enough damage.[/url]

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

Anyway... I would say that it's probably not something too hard to do, given the incredible resources that group has at their disposal. Back in the solar system, the real expense of QBits is that you have to get QBits whose mates have been physically shuttled to whomever you want to be talking to, or vice-versa. Since both parties' start points are here, that's a non-issue. If you want a half-way plausable reason to say "it's not going to be very effective," then just say that manufacturing QBits [i]successfully[/i] is hard. Like, for each "QBit Forge" you have going, it successfully manufactures approximately one QBit per minute, amidst billions which either failed to entangle properly or which were then observed and hence, de-entangled. And since each QBit tranmits precisely one bit of data, once, you need a [i]loooooooooot[/i] of them to send messages. The standard QBit factories are enormomassivehugegigantomungorbig factories, where they have literally billions of QBForges running in parallel.

Actually, come to think of it, shipping costs alone should drive the price of a Qubit reservoir significantly above the price listed in the books. And I'd say the time is probably closer to one every three seconds than one per minute. That's still pretty slow though. Any particular device can only produce one pair at once, which means purely linear economies of scale.

Chernoborg wrote:

I've been waiting for Erulastant to respond, she knows the actual stuff that is the foundation for all our speculating! I agree that in game it can't be all that hard to make as every faction has a ready supply . Indeed, in real life researchers seem to have access without requiring CERN level infrastructure. So at some level they can be made quickly and cheaply.

*blink blink* That was unexpected. Thanks! (: It's always nice to be recognized. I will admit that as one of the qubit-hungry players in question, I'm a bit biased. But, like I said, I could make qubits in my basement (If I was willing to throw a couple thousand dollars at it, which I'm not, because I have no use for a pile of qubits, and I do have uses for a couple thousand dollars). So I'm pretty sure the infrastructure is well within our in-character capabilities. The most likely block for us would be if none of us knew much about the process of qubit creation, but we have a QE reservoir linked back to sol system, so we could call in a favor to get the wikipedia page on qubit manufacture, which should be enough for our engineers and academics to figure something out.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

You don't already have a Portable Solarchive on the topic of applied quantum mechanics? For Shaaaaame. :P

You mean chemistry? q:

Quote:

[e]Also, IIRC, QBits and QE comms were [i]not[/i] post-Fall inventions, and you guys have a [i]massive[/i] number of people in cold storage and in cryo-sleep, including scientists of all stripes. You could look into waking some of them up to consult, too.

Qubits are definitely a pre-fall thing, used for quantum computing. I'd have to double-check to be sure about when the first QE comm was made, but it shouldn't matter too much. If we know qubit manufacturing and we know the engineering of a QE comm (We can always take one apart if we need to figure that out, but I think we fabbed a QE comm earlier so I don't think that's necessary) then we should be able to figure out how to produce the right sort of qubits. (I'm still thinking hydrogens with spin-coupled electrons is most likely the standard because it seems like they'd be easy to produce and to store. I would say that the hydrogens are then put in long-chain carbohydrates, except that is completely out of line with the stated mass and volume constraints of the qubit reservoir. ~10 g for 10^23 qubits ~=10^10 small reservoirs)

well when you get to a galactic scale elements are not rare in traditional sense. sure the heavier ones are in lower quantity but there is just so much matter in 1 galaxy its astounding and i i have yet to read gatecrashing but i have not seen anything that says pandora gates only serve destinations within the milky way EDIT: these two sources could be useful http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept04/Henry/frames.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements

It is not so much that you have to keep the particles from interacting with [i]anything[/i]. You just have to keep them from interacting with anything that would affect the entangled quantity. For electrons, the simplest way to do this is probably to attach the electron to a proton and make hydrogen. The proton imposes no conditions on the electron spin (Which is the entangled quantity), so the entanglement won't be destroyed unless the entire hydrogen interacts with something. (Specifically forming a covalent bond with another atom. Scratch that polysaccharide idea btw.) An electrically neutral hydrogen is much less reactive than the electron on its own. You...might? be able to build a nice little fullerine box for one. I have no idea how well that would work (Sadly I am not a nanoengineering specialist. Or even a nanoengineering amateur) but I don't think that would require a whole lot of specialized tech in-universe. Party Pooper Answer: You don't. Arbitrarily small implies that you could take a value smaller than planck length (But greater than zero) for your tolerance, and precision at that scale is impossible. Of course, the traditional concept of solid matter stopped applying more than 25 orders of magnitude before that, so I guess this all goes to show that there's a lower bound on straightedge tolerances (And lengths).

Photons shouldn't cause a problem unless they're energetic enough to ionize the hydrogen and the electron gets lost somewhere. That's well into the ultraviolet, which should be avoidable just by keeping the interior of our reservoir dark and cold. I'm pretty sure that thwacking an electron with a photon won't do anything to its spin, and that's the only think we really care about preserving. What are the tricks you know and why don't you think they could be used on a smaller scale?