Black Girder

'Black Girders' is a slang term used by engineers to describe various advanced construction technologies. These devices may be particle fountains, ZPM-powered magnetic grids or other advanced technology. However, from the engineer or architect's point of view, they can simply be treated as big slabs of material with impossibly high strengths, which happen to require power. It is becoming common for some architects (especially on class 4 and 5 planets) to simply put a black rectangle in their plans, with specifications on how much weight it needs to support, and then let physicists determine precisely which kind of technology best fits the job.

This term is also coming into use in other areas of Power Science to describe a piece of technology which may be incredibly complex to engineer, but whose effect is incredibly simple.