Velenem

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Revision as of 17:09, 7 January 2020 by Siddharth1 (talk | contribs) (Production and Usage)
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Velenem is an artificial material produced by the Gudersnipe Foundation, one of many projects designed to safeguard information for long-term storage. Normal paper will eventually break down; and while electroplated metal can last for geologic epochs, it is time-consuming to create books this way. The process for producing Velenem was invented during the Golden Age; and while staggeringly expensive, it has several advantages.

Production and Usage

The exact material composition of Velenem is a trade secret, but analyses show it to be mostly silicon and carbon. The production of the base material is carried out at a few key factories, and once completed and cut, it looks and feels like thick paper or card stock. While it can then be printed with an ordinary printer, the Foundation also produces specialized printers for it. These work by enacting a specialized chemical change which penetrates a third of the way through the material. In addition to not degrading like normal ink, the penetration makes it much harder to wear or rub away.

Once printed, pages can be bound into books or placed in binders, but the recommended storage medium is boxes made from non reactive metals, with printed sheets placed between unprinted in stacks of five hundred. If properly stored, the Foundation guarantees Velenem for ten thousand years (or your money back!).

All costs totaled, a single page of Velenem, printed by the recommended method front and back, costs ten GATE credits.

Micro Velenem

The information density of normal Velenem is not great, but its primary function is to provide human-eye readable documents that can last for geologic epochs. For a slightly better density, the Foundation also introduced Micro Velenem.

Using a similar process(and working only with a specialized printer), data can be encoded on pages as tiny dots using a binary sequence of ones and zeros. In this system, the marke actually penetrates the entire sheet, making front and back the same. A single page can hold about 8.5 million bits of information, or about one megabyte. This is sufficient information density to hold thousands of pages of text, or to encode images so they can be read and understood. The key importance of the Micro process is it can still be read with comparatively simple tools(a basic understanding of magnification) and decoded logically.

The recommendations for storage are the same, though with the added suggestion of either vacuum or inert-gas, and a maximum stack size of one hundred sheets instead of five hundred, as any small degradation can ruin large portions of the data.