Lore of Yore: The Solomite Solution
Of all the dangers faced by cosmonauts of the void, none are so pernicious and pervasive as the accumulation of space matter on spaceward surfaces during interstellar flight. In other words, pilots have a hell of a job keeping their windscreens clean.
While travelling through the luminiferous ether, a standard rocket ship can pick up millions of space microbes, photons, and particles, clinging to the electrostatic hull or tangled in the kinetic field generated by turbines achieving light-speed. While engineers have been able to prevent these particles from shooting forwards at the cessation of light-travel, and thereby saving any unwary planetary body in their path from being peppered by the tiny, hurtling projectiles, their solution means that rocket ships are left grimed with the greasy after-effects of space travel.
One of the most stubborn of these interstellar stains is solomite, a hardy mineral which clings to a spacecraft’s hull in lumpy deposits, amassing in greater numbers the further a cosmonaut might fly. Solomite deposits have clogged turbine intakes, caked the muzzles of blazer cannons, and plastered themselves across portholes and windscreens the Fifteen Galaxies over. And no self-respecting space captain would be caught shimmying up a ladder to scrape solomite off their prized vessels with a squeegee.
Instead, a solution was discovered by the unassuming trawler captain Norah Venfield. Having completed a cargo run to Sessoon, Venfield stopped overnight at the nearby Nidifice Rest Stop, but in the morning awoke to a surprise. Her tramper, moored in its bay below an ark belonging to F.C. Wombell of the Great Galactic Travelling Menagerie, had acquired a coating of fat, furry slugs which had dropped through the ark’s slats in the night.
These were truckles; silicon-based molluscs native to the moonlets and moss spirals of the Circle of Orion which grew fat and happy on space dust, carbon crystals, and solomite. These persistent critters eat as much as they sleep, and cling fast using mucus-covered suckers to stuff their furry bodies to bursting. While this proved helpful in wiping a ship’s hull clean of pesky solomite, the problem then became the removal of the truckles once feeding was complete. Attempts at stroking, tickling, and singing the critters into a malleable state proved counter-productive, as truckles latch even more securely to their perches in sleep. One of the only reliable methods of truckle removal was to electrify the hull, which knocked the fluffy lozenges off, but with the unfortunate side-effect of outright killing the critters. Because of this, the profession of truckle sweeper saw a boom in several docks and ports across the British Empire, and many ex-truckles became tiny oddities in the gutters of a hundred worlds.
