Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Spiral Technology

Can't Win, Can't Break Even
In the modern era, power has always been produced by rotating a magnet and a metal coil relative to each other. But, like everything else, it is not 100 percent efficient. The laws of thermodynamics get in the way of pure 1-to-1 energy generation. The Aquilan research firm Toppa, headed by one Simon Scavatore, made attempts to achieve perfect efficiency. While Toppa was able to find various ways to increase the efficiency of energy generation systems, absolute efficiency remained out of their grasp. After the onset of the Embry Civil War, investors could not be found and Toppa faced the prospect of complete bankruptcy.

Salvation came, oddly enough, in the Minutemen. The Commander of the nearby Minutemen force commandeered the building Toppa was centralized in, and promised it funding and as much room to expand as it needed. After the initial, painfully embarrassing attempts at abusing this privilege, Toppa settled on a new size and pay rate roughly double their previous, all out of the pockets of their Minutemen backers. And when the nukes began to fell the Minutemen was able to evacuate all personnal to the Castle where they can continue their research.

You Spin Me Right Round
The discovery of Spiral technology came as a happy accident. Scavatore noticed an experimental generator left spinning for much too long and shut it off. But it kept spinning, for some reason. Finally, Toppa turned to drawing power out of the generator. Eventually, they were able to stop it. Someone compared the energy input and output of the generator; shockingly, the generator had retained nearly all of the energy input into it. While the efficiency wasn't still absolute, it was as close to it as Toppa could ever hope to get.

The generator was enthusiastically disassembled and examined. The metal used in the coils was laced with veins of an unremarkable isotope of iron. Unremarkable, that is, in all ways but one. While no one could determine just exactly how the metal worked, it was found that, when subjected to significant angular velocity, it would retain its momentum with remarkably little energy loss, surpassing the efficiency of any other known energy storage system in existence. Anything that requires rapid circular motion, from buzz-saws to jet turbines to drills, could be improved by this discovery, and the Confederates were sitting directly on top of the only firm that knew about it.

The isotope was christened "Spiral Metal". The Confederates immediately set to work exploiting their personal hole in the laws of physics. Spiral drills can spin faster and dig through tougher material than normal drills can. Spiral wind turbines can produce hurricane-force winds at a much smaller size. Spiral missiles can retain their effectiveness even at extreme ranges. There are dozens of potential applications, only requiring a little spin.