Nanolaminate

Nanolaminate, also known as Laminar armor or Laminar plating and colloquially known as Nanolam by the UNSC, is a category of materials widely used by the Covenant. Nanolaminates are ubiquitous in the Covenant as cladding materials, from weapons, armor and vehicles to starships and even architecture and everyday objects.

These materials are difficult to meaningfully categorize in terms of their material properties, as different nanolaminates often have little in common beyond their manufacturing process in assembly forges. Generally, nanolaminates are renowned for their versatility, durability, light weight and highly advanced thermal management properties, a necessary trait due to the ubiquity of directed energy weapons in the Covenant meta-civilization. Beyond these basic traits, specific types of nanolaminate vary wildly in their properties, and their exact structural composition and features depend largely on the intended use case; for example, a common warrior's nanolaminate armor is less than a centimeter in thickness, while that on a warship can be many meters thick and have dozens of layers.

Nanolaminate is a collection of numerous layers of alloys, composites, meshes and metamaterials overlaid on one another in the sophisticated manufacturing processes that characterize Covenant assembly forges and fabricators. This combination of layers results in a material that is highly versatile and multifunctional. This is also the primary requirement for its mass manufacture, as laminar sheets cannot be produced in conventional industry due to the very particular combination of nanomachines, gravitics, magnetic fields and other specialized machinery used in Covenant manufacturing processes. The various layers that comprise nanolaminate are applied in different ways, from using nanomachines to "grow" the base structure around a supporting honeycomb mesh to strands of superconducting thread embedded within the material to serve as waveguides for energy shielding and overlaid with thermal-distributing refractive crystalline layers to form the pearlescent sheen Covenant armor is known for. Most nanolaminates also have select programmable features, such as the ability to change color or patterns at will.

By the late 2560s, the UNSC was beginning to be able to produce small patches of a nanolaminate equivalent due to the reverse-engineering of assembly forge-like systems.

T'Soram-blend
If one were to ask about what would be the best pattern for armor plates, regardless of cost or rarity, some of the most prominent shipwrights would point those produced by the small T'Soram Clan of the Sunlit Worlds. It exhibits an extremely high tensile strength-to-weight ratio; a thin sheet of T'Soram nanolaminate provides much of the same protection as a plate half again or even twice its thickness, depending on the material compared. It is equally resistant against kinetic, explosive, and energy weapons, although some dedicated competitors can beat it in individual areas. Out of the forge, it has a distinct reddish hue with a dark swirls that are present throughout its thickness, which serves as a useful way of determining if a given ingot is genuine.

Although highly valued in starship armor plating, T'Soram-blend's difficulty to work and bond with other materials has seen it viewed unfavorably by armorers, despite its benefits in infantry and vehicle armor. This has affected its versatility, with the addition of embedded micro-radiators and shielding circuits driving up the labor hours and therefore cost far beyond its already-absurd price tag.

The T'Soram Clan was careful to keep the secrets behind its creation to themselves, with the knowledge being passed on from Kaidon to Kaidon through the generations. The current material was the result of almost a dozen cases of experimentation and iteration, and the various lords were still making changes to further refine their masterpiece. When their clan was destroyed by a coalition of rivals, the knowledge to create the T'Soram-blend was lost for almost a century. In the late-2540s, the Worldly Guilds of Akurr-Zufam began selling new plates of this alloy, propping it up as one of their signature products.