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Kevin Kostlan
Kevin Kostlan
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Suppose you need to dig underground through solid rock to build your secret base. You have a drill with stealthy and efficient Future Tech but other tech is mostly present day.

What do you do with the material you removed? Where does it go? My thinking is that you could compress the quartz into Stishivite which is (I think) metastable at room pressure with a density of 4.3 g/cc (about 65% denser than quartz at 2.65) and is the second densest form of silica (not sure how stable the densest form is, it is very rare).

But you would still have to excavate and compress about three times (assuming mostly quartz based rock) the volume you end up living in. How best to manage all this material while keeping it underground? A growing centralized dumping chamber or maybe just using it to line the walls of the tunnel?

Suppose you need to dig underground through solid rock to build your secret base. You have a drill with stealthy and efficient Future Tech but other tech is mostly present day.

What do you do with the material you removed? Where does it go? My thinking is that you could compress the quartz into Stishivite which is (I think) metastable at room pressure with a density of 4.3 g/cc (about 65% denser than quartz at 2.65) and is the second densest form of silica (not sure how stable the densest form is, it is very rare).

But you would still have to excavate and compress about three times (assuming mostly quartz based rock) the volume you end up living in. How best to manage all this material while keeping it underground? A growing centralized dumping chamber or maybe just using it to line the walls of the tunnel?

Suppose you need to dig underground through solid rock to build your secret base. You have a drill with stealthy and efficient Future Tech but other tech is mostly present day.

What do you do with the material you removed? Where does it go? My thinking is that you could compress the quartz into Stishivite is metastable at room pressure with a density of 4.3 g/cc (about 65% denser than quartz at 2.65) and is the second densest form of silica (not sure how stable the densest form is, it is very rare).

But you would still have to excavate and compress about three times (assuming mostly quartz based rock) the volume you end up living in. How best to manage all this material while keeping it underground? A growing centralized dumping chamber or maybe just using it to line the walls of the tunnel?

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Kevin Kostlan
Kevin Kostlan
  • 758
  • 4
  • 9

Underground tunneling without spoil piles

Suppose you need to dig underground through solid rock to build your secret base. You have a drill with stealthy and efficient Future Tech but other tech is mostly present day.

What do you do with the material you removed? Where does it go? My thinking is that you could compress the quartz into Stishivite which is (I think) metastable at room pressure with a density of 4.3 g/cc (about 65% denser than quartz at 2.65) and is the second densest form of silica (not sure how stable the densest form is, it is very rare).

But you would still have to excavate and compress about three times (assuming mostly quartz based rock) the volume you end up living in. How best to manage all this material while keeping it underground? A growing centralized dumping chamber or maybe just using it to line the walls of the tunnel?