Anthony Jackson wrote:
 > Stupidly enough, superdense is less dense than tungsten, so
 > it's not at all clear that it's anything nuclear.

Yes, the chemical composition is far from clear.

The listed density may not be so stupid if the starting point is
alumin(i)um or even iron.

This does of course assume that there are metastable allotropes of these
metals way off in the phase diagram somewhere that you can get to with
Traveller Tech Level 12 metallurgy.

If we start with other crystalline compounds (diamond? sapphire?)... who
knows?

"It's magical technology, so we can't understand it!" seems a bit of a
cop-out to me.

The performance characteristics of a device should be describable.

Yes, we can't understand how a TL 15 gadget (say) works 'under the hood'
but it should be possible to outline limits so that it doesn't violate
known physical constants too much.

"It's not a meson gun - it actually causes random neutrons in the target
to become antineutrons and annihilate. The management at General
Products didn't like the names the lab group were proposing. What the
hell is an AWABAC device[1], anyway?"

Rob O'Connor

[1] Augmented Weak interaction Accelerated Baryonic Annihilation Cascade