It had been long known to the various space-faring races of the galaxy that every race tended to have a couple of things that they were really good at. If they were lucky, it was something that other races wanted to trade to get access to, and the combinations of things generally led to far more impressive technology than any one race would've managed on their own.
Humanity had not disappointed in this regard. They had a low population from wars at the time they'd run into the wider galactic community, and had made up for some of that with impressive automation, but the thing that had others flocking to trade with them was their skill in producing pressure vessels. Their own pressure tolerances were...limited, but the pressure vessels they produced could out-perform the best examples from other races and had impressive safety tolerances.
Oddly, they mostly traded for advanced technology from other races...with the exception of the Chanqra's power generation. They were the standard power plants used in space faring vessels across the galaxy, an order of magnitude more efficient than anything else available elsewhere, but the Humans had obtained three examples and then just...stopped trading for them. Everyone else used the Chanqra's power generators, but Humanity had decided against it for unknown reasons.
That oddity aside, their pressure vessels made transporting and storing of gasses safer than it had been and they expanded their existing production infrastructure considerably to keep up with demand.
"I hate working on ships with insufficient power generation," Jack said as he examined the damaged mounting bracket for a set of six gas canisters. "Everyone always whines when I want to hook up the high-powered scanners to look for cracks."
"We do not see how it is you wish to draw space station levels of power without having us dock at a space station," Nelo replied, having been shown the power requirements already.
"More like the rest of the galaxy never figured out how efficient steam generators are and decided that the pansy little 'solid state' generators are viable for a spaceship."
"Steam generators?"
"Yeah. It annoys the crap out of some of our engineers that nobody else in the galaxy has figured out a better way to convert fuel into usable power, but it's honestly hard to beat. Better ways to heat up the input water are a given, and better ways to manage the waste heat so that there's a lot less 'waste' involved and you aren't cooking everyone on board the ship, but you do have to watch out that you don't skip from steam to plasma. That tends to not go well."
"Your vessels power themselves with steam generators?"
"Basically. We're a long way from burning trees just to heat up the water, and you can't get proper efficiency without ridiculous-sounding pressures, but that's the general idea. We keep looking for better materials to make the turbines out of, of course, and the pressure vessels needed mean that we're constantly improving to ensure that they can handle it all."
"...what kinds of pressures do your reactors run at?"
Jack looked over at Nelo, seeing that the 'distressed shaking' their species did was already starting up. "You don't want to know and I don't want to need to drag you to a medical pod. You do have medical pods on this thing, right?"
"We do, yes, but surely the pressures can't be that bad?"
Sighing, it only took a minute to bring up tech specs on his data pad, while he palmed his communicator and entered the medical emergency code into it. He stopped there, before showing Nelo the data pad. A moment later he was working to keep the far too large creature from hurting themselves in their convulsions while hitting the transmit button on the communicator.
He had no clue how most of the galaxy had made it into space on the dregs of power they used, but surely eventually they'd find someone else willing to work with proper high-pressure physics?
