While closely electronically controlled, hardlight barriers are fail-secure, and freeze in place, inert, when power is lost to the root projector. Hardlight dust and electricity are consumed during active operation, though only small amounts of electricity are required to maintain control of an already-fabricated hardlight structure; Syn. fabera, the bioceramic's operating bacteria, is self-replicating and requires no replenishment after initial installation under normal operating conditions.
Composition
A hardlight structure is composed of three distinct elements — the inert bioceramic itself, the electronic programming unit (commonly termed a 'root projector'), and the synthetic bacteria Synthebact fabera, which responds to the projector's electrical commands to rapidly either extrude or recycle powder-like polycrystalline bioceramic at specific times and in specific directions, consuming a specially mixed hardlight 'dust' to do so. Syn. fabera, an artificially constructed chemosynthetic bacterial species, is purpose-built to precisely create and destroy hardlight material, and is capable of producing thousands of square meters of hardlight per second when supplied with enough energy and dust fuel.
Hardlight root projectors can either surround the structure entirely, or can generate an unbounded structure from a single projector; while the latter can be deployed in any configuration and is often used in art installations, the former allows for less command lag in extremely precise and time-sensitive hardlight applications, such as airlocks, military shielding, or biological seals.
Applications
The development formulae and programming software for base hardlight are openly available on the internet under the OMaF Permissive License, with a wide variety of derivatives available either freely or for purchase. As a result of this availability and its versatility, hardlight sees wide use in disparate applications, ranging from common avant-garde street artwork to military fortifications, though the latter often uses proprietary military dust formulas with increased strength and other beneficial properties over the open base formula. As even base, freely open-formula hardlight provides structural strength, impact resistance, and blast resistance approaching that of traditional aluminium oxynitride, it is often used as a cheap, easy-to-produce extruded personal or structural armor by civilians, police organizations, paramilitary forces, and criminal groups.
Passthrough hardlight systems use these components along with a precise, finely-tuned LIDAR scanner and radio transceiver attached to the hardlight structure's root projector, capable of scanning for and identifying approaching objects on both sides of the structure, as large as entire freighter spacecraft and as small as individual packing crates. When an identified, friendly object contacts the hardlight structure, the root projector programs the local bacteria to precisely delete regions of bioceramic and then regenerate them in an exact configuration, allowing the object to essentially 'phase' through the hardlight structure while retaining a perfect molecular seal.
These properties make passthrough hardlight especially common in space-based, medical, and military applications; for example, to allow the atmospheric sealing of a busy hangar bay or repair yard while still allowing spacecraft to transmit in or out, to allow a perfect seal against airborne pathogens in an isolation room airlock, or to block incoming weapons fire while recognizing and allowing outgoing weapons fire to transit out. The latter application, sometimes termed Passthrough Hardlight Shields, or PHASes, has seen increasingly common deployment in urban warfare and breaching operations in the Sol Defence Corps since the 2090s, though the bulkiness of root projector batteries makes personal infantry use entirely impractical; most commonly, PHAS modules are carried on the back exoskeletons of lightly-armed squad-level shield specialists, or are mounted on the exterior of an infantry fighting vehicle.