---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'The Nanotrasen Project Catalog: Research, Development and Destruction'
tags: [Finalized, Lore]

---

# The Nanotrasen Project Catalog: Research, Development and Destruction

This is a document outlining, in brief, various ongoing, attempted and failed (sometimes explosively) research projects undertaken by Nanotrasen and its subsidiaries.

###### tags: `Lore` `Finalized`

## Project Gateway
### Status: Failed
After developing short range, man-portable teleportation in the form of products such as the hand teleporter, as well as more standard structures such as the traditional teleporter array, Nanotrasen attempted to engineer a massive teleportation network known as the Gateway Project. The necessity of this novel design was twofold. Both varieties of teleportation technology were highly unstable, either automatically vanishing after a matter of seconds or requiring frequent recalibration in order to avoid transposition mishaps. Additionally, the portals were only capable of transporting relatively small volumes of material at a time, usually within the realm of a few meters on any given dimension. Given the hundreds to thousands of tons of supplies shipped to and from Nanotrasen installations, these two constraints made regular teleportation transport highly nonviable. Designed to replace space vessels as a means of resupplying stations and moving personnel between outposts, these Gateways were massive, circular portals wide enough to pilot spacepods through, instantaneously transporting them across galactic levels of distance. 
    After approximately a decade in development across several research stations, these portals worked well enough in testing to be implemented in select Nanotrasen supply distribution centers and research hubs. After a few months of flawless operation, stations began reporting strange behavior from the devices – odd noises emitting from open portals that did not seem to originate on either side, portals mysteriously activating on their own, even on one occasion activating as a member of a station's janitorial staff was cleaning the area and being bisected after being caught in the ensuing opening – some Nanotrasen engineers were considering canning the project. However, these stations had begun reporting higher levels of efficiency than they had when they utilized traditional means of transportation, so these bugs were dismissed as "the price of doing business", according to an internal memo. This changed after one day wherein nearly every Gateway in the network simultaneously activated, immediately warping their surroundings as well as vacuuming in nearby equipment and personnel. Recovered video footage indicates that after several minutes of such, the Gateways created a violent EMP before every station and outpost that had a Gateway vanished. In addition, the timing of the event was such that many Nanotrasen executives were giving a demonstration of the technology to investors, causing their deaths as well. In this fashion, the Gateway Incident marked what is generally considered to be the end of the Inter-Corporate War, as Nanotrasen resources were so greatly diminished that it could no longer sustain the conflict on the scale necessary to continue. To this date, it is unknown how the devices malfunctioned in such a way, and all blueprint documentation of their design has been either destroyed or found covered in runes in a foreign script.

## Project Haversack
### Status: Ongoing
After having successfully created the bag of holding, the bluespace body bag and the mining satchel of holding with the Project Capacity research team, Nanotrasen has begun an effort to allow the mass-production of the devices, mainly by attemtping to engineer an alternative material to the rare diamonds and bluespace crystals required for their manufacture. Synthetic diamonds created by traditional methods failed to be viable. Explored alternatives have included engineering a domesticated variant of the creatures known as "watchers" for slaughter (which has had limited success due to their rarity outside of the Frontier and their inability to breed), finding a means of growing diamonds via atmospheric gas crystallization via the usage of plasma (with no success) and attempting to instead utilize anomaly cores harvested from anomalies (with little success, mainly due to the rarity of said phenomena). The project continues, unfettered by their previous lack of success.

## Project Lucifer
### Status: Ongoing
Long ago, an early prototype run of SharpLite energy pistols were produced, firing potent lasers with a self-recharging core mechanism. Sold for pennies on the dollar before Nanotrasen had the resources to flood the market with their later (and cheaper) laser weapon models, these weapons, referred to as "antique laser guns", are now rare collectors' items. They are usually only seen in display cases in the collections of ship captains or firearms collectors. However, upon seeing the dramatic increase in price and desirability of the antiques over time, Nanotrasen has begun attempts to recreate the mechanism in various forms (due to a catastrophic database failure wiping out all previous schematics, as well as an intentional measure built into the design to deliberately foil attempts at reverse engineering to dissuade copycats). While some in-house attempts have had success at mimicking the housing and design of the antiques – the result being the X01-Multiphase weapon issued to high-ranking Nanotrasen security personnel – none have been able to replicate its most iconic feature without other issues, such as the "advanced" energy gun, which was found to cause profound tissue degredation and even the growth of malignant tumors in the user only a few hours after firing for extended periods. Thus, Nanotrasen has opted to look outward, and has began commissioning independent firearms manufacturers to make their own renditions on the design, with again mixed degrees of success. The project thus continues to this day.

## Project Pugilist
### Status: Ongoing
Though jetpack designs are very popular and utilized across the galaxy, no satisfactory solution has been found as far as making them compact. Even if some models can fit inside bags or other compact containers while undeployed, functional jetpacks are found to universally monopolize space, be it in classic back-mounted form, or integrated into a belt or suit-side design. In an attempt to create a compact and intuitive design for Nanotrasen mineral acquisition specialists or atmospheric technicians, glove or gauntlet mounted models have been in continuous development for the past two years. Prototypes have varied wildly in approach. One model reverse-engineered a popular Syndicate weapon colloquially referred to as a 'power fist', intending to utilize its use of standard-issue atmospheric tanks both as a means of easy refueling in the field and to cut down on manufacturing new fuel types or containers. This model swiftly backfired due to two core problems: first of all, without dramatically increasing the tank size (rendering the compactness of the design moot) or dramatically reducing the thrust-power (making movement slow and lethargic, while also being horribly inefficient due to repeated sealant failure), the 'power guantlet' could only be utilized a handful of times for monodirectional course corrections before running out of fuel, making anything but brief spacewalks totally unfeasible without an entire spare satchel of air tanks. The second problem was that of user impression – due to the method used by prototype engineers to convert the directed-impact weapon into a locomotive tool, users often reported that utilizing the item felt like being 'punched in the stomach', in at least two cases actually causing compound fractures in the testers' forearm and pelvis, respectively. Another model wired a compact propellant tank into a set of projector gloves, creating essentially micro-thrusters that could be used to precisely navigate as well as spot-weld without the need for a welding tool. The problem, of course, was the location of the tank – the tank was too large to fit in pockets, leaving the only options to the back or belt, and placing the engineers back in their original position. The most recent attempt, and the most desperate, was tenured by a member of Nanotrasen Loss Prevention as both a locomotion tool and a self-defense weapon – a ballistic guantlet, firing energized metal projectiles to generate thrust and fend off attackers. While the design does solve problems of capacity (Nanotrasen power cell designs are fairly compact, and the magazines utilized are reasonably sized) and provide a continuation of the previous iteration's dual-purpose theme, some engineers have questioned the practicality of shooting at whatever is in the opposite direction of where you wish to travel, while more valiant members of Loss Prevention have questioned why one would wish to move away from a target, as opposed to towards it. Nonetheless, progress continues on the project, unabated.

## Project Sacred Soil
### Status: Failed(?)
As an unfortunate fact of life, people die when they are killed. While modern medical technology has made the revival of the dead trivial, so long as they have an intact brain (or, failing that, some blood that can be scooped into a beaker for implantation into a mature *legumen mimica*, otherwise known as a replica pod, a specialized plant breed discovered by the Project Simulacrum team), the small matter of, well, being upset by dying in a workplace accident or corporate raid makes employee retention difficult. Even when saddled with medical debt related to the costs of revival, the sheer expansiveness of the galaxy results in permanent disappearance fairly frequently. Therefore, Nanotrasen Research and Development has sought to create a modified variant of *legumen mimica* which, upon implantation into a suitable (i.e. dead) host body, will reanimate them at a low level of independent thought, making them ideal for manual labor without any difficulties regarding complaints about insufficient pay or dangerous work environments. Because of legal loopholes regarding the bodily autonomy of a corpse reanimated in this way, these "pseudopods" lack any of the demanding litigation that would normally be levied for such a flagrant violation of the natural order, even sidestepping concerns regarding the abuse of technology normally laid against such due to its "natural" origin. Additionally, the implanted *legumen mimica* allows for the host body to replenish its energy via exposure to sunlight, rather than requiring food or rest like a traditional carbon-body worker may. However, the project has had one major problem: in order to achieve the proper "parasitic" adhesion to a host body required of the project's parameters, Project Sacred Soil's iteration of *legumen mimica* was crossbred with a specific variety of *pueraria caelus flos carnivorus*, or an approximate translation of flowering space kudzu. As a result, while initial hosts were operating perfectly within project parameters (highly suggestible, yet very much capable of manual labor tasks such as moving boxes or cleaning floors), after these initial subjects were placed in several installations in need of greater manpower as a test run, a novel behavior developed. After a few weeks of subsistence entirely on sunlight, the pseudopods began exhibiting concerning tendencies, such as attempting to feed on protein-based leftovers and acting belligerent towards supervising staff members. This came to a head when onboard one of these installations, several of the subjects (who had been members of the very first "successful" test runs of the modified *legumen mimica* strain) became overtly hostile to their handlers, wielding a combination of provided work tools and aggressively mutated plant tendrils to attack staff members, before attempting to consume their corpses. Additionally, as part of the rapid-adhesion technique that made the process so efficient with intentional implantation, attacked staff members were themselves implanted during this feeding process, causing the reanimation process to spread to their corpse and create a new pseudopod. Within a matter of hours (based on implantation date, with earlier subjects falling into this feral state faster), several other installations were entirely consumed by the strain before response teams could be mobilized. The project is officially abandoned, and the subsequent cover-up is extensive, as overseen by Nanotrasen ERT Squadron: Ruins. However, internal rumors suggest one or more overly ambitious research directors within Nanotrasen R&D are attempting to revitalize the project, in an attempt to advance their careers and provide a new workforce to facilitate reclamation of lost Nanotrasen holdings in the Frontier.

## Project Truesight
### Status: Ongoing
Nanotrasen employees often employ a variety of eye-based personal equipment in order to go about their work: meson goggles for engineers, medical HUD scanners for medics, security highlight HUDS for security staff, and so on. Oftentimes, however, on short-staffed stations and for ERT squadrons responding to highly-multifaceted crises, multiple of these pieces of eyewear are nigh-essential for repairs, crew evaluation and more, both taking up useful space in crew personal storage as well as creating a greater level of clunkiness to operations mandating constant switching of eyewear. While short strides have been made in integrating certain items, such as the various integrations made for standard occupational scanners with night vision goggles and the modern development of the multipurpose engineering goggles capable of a variety of modes (as well as the utilization of autosurgeons to surgically implant such scanners), Nanotrasen has yet to develop a true "omnilens", as the optometrists on the Project Truesight team have named it (in the same fashion that engineers in pursuit of a perfect project material often dub it "unobtainium"). While some may say that surgical implantation would be the easiest means of accomplishing this task, it has failed to pass muster for three reasons. First of all, autosurgeons are very expensive, especially ones designed to implant on or around the ocular nerve. Second of all, many test subjects (and overzealous roboticists and doctors) have reported that multiple implanted HUDs, while merely 'tingly' in the short term, cause long-term pain and the rapid development of large cataracts after several hours, a set of symptoms collectively referred to as Ocular Implant Instigation Syndrome (OIIS). Lastly, implantation prevents the sharing of these scanner functions, in the event of theft, loss or (most likely) budget cuts preventing every individual from being issued one. Thusly, Project Truesight's focus has been squarely on the development of a set of glasses or goggles capable of holding up to the stress and chaos of the workplace. The struggles have been twofold – computationally, fitting that number of wireless connections, video feeds, procedural light enhancement technology and other qualities of the vision settings all in one piece of glass designed to fit in a jumpsuit pocket is a tall order. Additionally, the material requirements associated with each one of these scanner types are high and diverse, meaning each pair of prototype omnilenses costs several times as much in waste materials compared to its "component" eyewear. However, the project is in continual development, as part of Nanotrasen's Clothier Development Initiative.

## Project Lehmur-Schur
### Status: Successful
Before space warfare properly developed, theorycrafting abounded around exactly what sort of weaponry would be used to prosecute it. The most popular theories have posited the use of explosive projectiles, such as autocannons, or energy weapons, such as lasers. In fact, many civilian vessels utilize turrets wielding lasers or traditional small-arms fire, for the purpose of fending off hostile fauna or very unperceptive hostile sentients. However, for ship-to-ship warfare, a previously-unaccounted-for variable emerged.

You can dodge a laser bolt.

This phenomenon, known as the Zero Effect, projectile stuttering or, colloquially, "space lag", causes most traditional weapons fire to be dramatically slower than expected when operating outside the core worlds, allowing an individual to dodge projectiles with relative ease, so long as they are aware of their attacker and able to move properly. This principle also extends to larger targets, and at higher speeds – so when hostile ships traveling at hyperspace attempt to attack one another, the ability for either target to hit the other breaks down entirely.

Project Lehmur-Schur solves this problem. Utilizing bluespace portal creation technology, the Lehmur-Schur Device creates a massive, explosive beam of energy that is spontaneously teleported to its target, causing a large explosion directly at the inputted coordinates and cutting in half anything in-between. In so doing, problems associated with the Zero Effect are nullified and target destruction is assured. Due to the non-massive nature of the energy beams, calibration issues that accompany traditional teleportation technology are nonexistent (with investigations into the potential utility of the technology as a means of local power distribution ongoing). Even heavy armor does little to prevent complete annihilation by the main beam, with the most famous example of such being the near-total destruction of the SBC Starfury by a vessel using the device. Coordinates can be acquired fairly easily – standard navigation beacons, GPSes and even certain biological phenomena create sufficient readings to obtain a target lock. Of course, any target lacking any of the previous is essentially invisible to a Lehmur-Schur Device due to an inability to manually aim the bluespace portal emitter. After the Lehmur-Schur Device was tested to a satisfactory extent on a small pirate group in the stellar region of Gorlex, the prototypes, now known as Bluespace Artillery, were deployed across Nanotrasen holdings, most iconically on the Osprey-class vessel employed during the later portion of the Inter-Corporate War.