"Saw this article in front of Yahoo, saying a search for a certain rare metal used to make PS2s (along with other electronics) has caused a war in Africa!

http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/playstation-2-component-incites-african-war/1231745

Weird coincidence huh? Maybe Cameron could sell her stashed bar for a small fortune! "

"ok, so this stuff is for electronics. So why did Cameron want it? She's certainly not going to manufactor a new chip. I got the impression it was to repair her endoskeleton. Were the writers full of crap after all?"

"Coltan is the ore (Columbite+Tantalum) from which Tantalum is extracted. Tantalum is the prefered metal for use in high-speed capacitors, a must-have for microelectronics. Its presence in the Congo (Zaire) has helped fuel civil war there. Not really sure why the T:SCC producers used that name - probably just liked the sound.

Description of Coltan:
http://www.economy-point.org/c/coltan.html

Civil confilct in the Congo:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/172835086.html"

"An apparently good background article on coltan is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan.

People chiefly extract tantalum and niobium from coltan. Tantalum, due to its heat resistance, is indeed used extensively in capacitors and electronics. Because tantalum has such low chemical reactivity at any temperature below 150 degrees Celsius, it's also very good in medical instruments. It is also used rather extensively in ARMOR, and certain tantalum allows are much stronger than steel.

There are three good reasons why tantalum would make a good component in Terminator endoskeletons:

1. It is used for making armor alloys that are stronger than steel.
2. It is heat resistance.
3. It has good biological compatibility in medical implants.

Now Terminators have flesh over the endoskeletons. Ordinarily blood and living tissue would cause corrosion of steel, but perhaps a tantalum-based endoskeleton would resist corrosion well. Also, a non-reactive metal would be unlikely to poison or harm biological tissue (hence the real-world use of tantalum in medical instruments and implants, Terminator science fiction aside!) Hence, tantalum sounds like a good choice for Terminators overall due to strength, heat resistance, and compatibility with the biological covering.

I don't know whether the producers of the show realized all of these things when they brought up "coltan". However, I'm still surprised that the Terminators would want to collect a tantalum ore. It takes a fair amount of processing to convert an ore into a metal. Why not get the metal instead? Of course, this is a science fiction show and not reality...

I am not aware (maybe I'm wrong) that you can form an ore into bar stock like that, but I'm also not a metallurgist. As far as I know only actual metal can be formed into bar stock.

T-888"