>> And I seem to remember back in the days of RQ2, there >> were things called power storage crystals. Could we >> have something like these, but bigger and very >> immovable, built into the Wind temple?
Stewart:
> Joerg mentioned pegmatite. In pegmatitic rocks, crystals of feldspars
> like orthoclase or microcline (see Trotsky's links) can reach the
> size of a house or larger.
> And that's in *our* world...
When I worked in Norway, it was controlling the quartz from one such deposite. While not monocrystalline, the polycrystalline quartzite formed a lump of 70 yards in diameter. I once parked my car in there...
Polycrystalline bricks of Quartzite with crystal size around 2 mm are pretty, shiny, and a dazzling white. They also are quite impossible substrate for masonry, so the only way to build with them is using them as they happen to break up, drystone or mortared. For a pure white effect, the mortar would have to be (and remain) white. Impossible with all other minerals I mentioned, since their surfaces will be overgrown with algae, lichen etc. Unlike the cliffs of dover, fortifications don't tend to break off now and then, cleaning the surface. With quartzite, you have a fairly inhospitable surface.
You get a fairly white face mortaring quartzite into a surface - see the reconstructed face of Newgrange.
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