From the moment that they arrived in the uninhabited star system, things aboard Terminus began to get busy again.
They had found a suitable asteroid in the outer reaches of the system, a type C asteroid made of a loose amalgam of silicate rocks and clay. The great advantage to these otherwise worthless rocks was that they often weren't really solid the way that a metallic or semi-metallic asteroid tended to be.
That saved them from having to break it up into little bits with specialty tools. The technicians had crumbled a large pile of gravel for the tests with a simple hammer and had a great amount of fun doing it.
Max made his way to the test lab to see what they were up to and observe the tests firsthand, equipping his armor in advance since it doubled as protective equipment for lab experiments.
When he arrived, Nico was standing in front, facing a huge number of Innu observers, likely every technician and tourist currently aboard the ship. They had multiple tripods set up for the live stream of their experiment, but the most interesting part was where they were working.
To make their experiments easier, they created a zero-gravity vacuum tube and filled it with the material for the printing test. That way, the creation in progress didn't need to support itself and could be built layer by layer, making things much easier on the terraforming device.
They had clearly come up with a plan since they were allowing an audience, and Nico raised her hand to silence the crowd, then signaled for one of the Tech Nomads to join her at the front.
"Welcome everyone to the first round of the Terminus Trading Company's newest terraforming device testing.
As you all know, we have been teasing this for days, and now it's ready for the very first Alpha stage test, live for your enjoyment.
For today's experiment, we will be recombining this clump of gravel from a type C asteroid into an inverse dome habitable shell moon. That was the basis for the majority of the original world ships, a technology that is still well beyond humans, but possibly not for much longer.
The rotation of the vessel created artificial gravity inside the dome, allowing the occupants to thrive there for extended periods of time while still leaving lower gravity areas for experiments and specialty manufacturing near the axis and core.
This will be no more than a scale model and proof of concept, but the goal is to create a self-sustaining biome inside the sphere powered by solar collectors on the outer shell."
Nico paused her introduction for all of the observers to cheer, and then the Tech Nomad began to scan and verify the contents of the materials, showing that they were nothing special, just the most common types of rock found in any asteroid field in the galaxy.
The gravity was disabled, and the tube was evacuated of trace gases from the ship's atmosphere, then the terraforming device got to work.
The thousand-kilo ball of rock was nothing compared to what the unit was designed for, and the whole process was completed in only a few seconds after the design schematics were input.
"The schematics for the dome shell station have been uploaded in the feed's substream, so we can now begin proving that we have successfully terraformed our test sample.
We have a unique volunteer here. Meet Lucy, our robotic test mouse for the day. It will send back a full report of interior conditions after entry."
Nico placed the robotic mouse next to an airlock on the dome, which allowed the mouse inside, and a new video and data feed appeared on the screens in the room.
Inside the fifty-meter-tall ball, there were a variety of grasses, a habitable atmosphere, water features that were currently floating above their designated location, and a small engineering bay running the length of the sphere that was explained to contain the stabilization devices as well as the thrusters.
It wasn't meant for travel, but as a space station, so the thrusters were minimal, but enough that it soon began to spin inside the chamber, and the mouse, as well as the floating water, were forced to the wall.
Gravity inside was very low, as expected for a small station at low-speed rotation, but it was enough to prove that the concept was valid.
As far as a space station went, it was no big accomplishment for any of the Alliance species, or really even for humanity, other than the fact that it had been technologically infeasible to actually create one before today, so the questions naturally turned to deep questions about the device that created it, and how it differed from the standard versions that anyone in the Alliance could obtain with enough credits or influence.
"The basic recombining process is completely different, as you see here. Also, if it is fed organic matter, it can directly recombine large molecules and complex compounds without breaking them down, providing the energy efficiency of one of our Replicators while creating organic compounds with the versatility of a full atomic recombination function." Nico explained while a stream of data flew over the screens and was sent along with the broadcast.
"An Alliance copyright legal team will now join us for verification of the copyright and intellectual property rights. These are not our employees. The generous folks at Nurba Gruber Terraforming sent them to us to ensure that our design team violated no Alliance patents."
That brought a few laughs from the audience. It was quite the way to view an undercover team of investigators that had been sent by your competition to try to trap you in a legal proceeding and bankrupt your new designs.
Fortunately, the Alliance had the technology to make it easy, and a certified patent verification device was placed out in the room by the Valkia and Giant duo, where it began to scan both the sphere and the terraforming device.
"Patents belonging to the Terminus Trading Company identified. No other patented physical substructures were identified. Beginning software analysis." The device reported to the audience.
This was the hardest part for any of them to pass. So much software had been written and patented over the years that trying to write code that was original enough not to be a direct ripoff of existing software was a nightmare.
For this reason, most companies would simply license software from a group of existing designers, then recombine it into their signature product, with a nominal fee paid. Nurba Gruber wasn't looking forward to having a new competitor in the field of Terraforming, though, and they would quickly buy up entire software companies to deny Terminus Trading Companies the licenses if necessary.
"Code segments unique to three patents belonging to the Terminus Trading Company identified. No other patented software identified." The device reported then began to broadcast a signal with its detailed analysis of seventeen million near matches, which were deemed not copyright violations by the testing device.
