He made two designs for the formation breaker. The first one is in the shape of a prismatic needle. The second one is the shape of a flat circular disc.
The prismatic needle was designed for penetrating barrier formations. When he was designing it, Arthur envisioned a nail that would be driven into a formation for breaking it.
But Arthur changed his mind and decided to use the flat circular disc shape to maximize the surface area of the formation breaker that will make contact with any kind of formation.
Both designs have their merits and demerits. The prismatic needle design has a more powerful formation-breaking potential because it has the ability to literally penetrate a formation, drive itself into it, and break it.
The needle design grants it a physical shape that can be taken advantage of to apply physical pressure on a formation and increase the chances of breaking it.
The disc-shaped design, on the other hand, leverages the computational power and the artificial intelligence over using brute force to break a formation. This kind of formation breaker would instead create its own formation and inject it into the target formation to break it.
Arthur knew some of their disadvantages, but he still put both designs through a series of tests to confirm it. This made him discover some things that he hadn't anticipated.
He discovered that the prismatic needle design was mostly useless because very few formations can be broken by force,, as the core of important formations is usually protected. Plus, some formations will counterattack if they sense an external attack.
Even if the formations didn't attack the formation breaker to destroy it, most of them created an alarm to inform the owner or controller of the formation about the intrusion.
At the end of the day, the flat circular disc design was superior because it could fight formations with formations.
Instead of using brute force, it would sense the operation of the formation with his divine sense, analyze the information it acquired, and then create targeted methods for breaking them.
Most importantly, it did all of these silently. In most cases, the formation that was being broken wouldn't notice anything until it was too late. And sometimes, the formations would be broken down before they could send out an alarm.
The prismatic needle design reminded him of the act of physically tampering with a computer's circuits to bypass its security measures, while the flat circular disc design reminded him of the process of gaining access to a computer by bypassing its network security protocols.
He used this idea to improve the flat circular disc design. It inspired him to add the concept of formation viruses and Trojan instructions into the operation of the formation breaker.
These additions increased the means by which the formation breaker can be used to break a formation. They also gave the formation breaker more goals other than destroying formations. Now the formation breaker can try to take control of the formation too.
At this point, he had to pause his design and do more research into the methods of control and recognition of authority by formations.
He wanted to know more about the various methods that formations use to recognize their owners and how to mimic those methods to gain authorized access and control of formations with his formation breaker.
This extended the design phase, but it was still a part of the design phase that he had planned for. This was just part of the tweaking and fixing of kinks in order to improve the versatility and capabilities of the prototype.
The prismatic needle design had been eliminated at this point. All of his attention is focused on making a product that can create fake and temporary formations onto other formations for the purpose of analyzing the operating mechanisms of those formations, analyzing that information, and infiltrating the formations for the purpose of gaining control of them or breaking them.
After that he had to carry out more stages of research, redesigning, testing, and modifications on the prototype. It was a lot of work, but he was happy to do it.
The process helped him learn a lot of things that he didn't know before and found interesting. Plus the action of creating an artifact that might be unique was refreshing. He didn't grow tired of it at all.
After another month of hard work, he finally got a satisfactory product. Even though he enjoyed every minute of the process of creating the formation breaker, he was even happier when he was done and had a finished product.
This finished product was a white, flat, circular disc object. It was 30 centimeters across. He has tried to make it smaller than that, but he needed a lot of room to put in the computing processors.
The formation breaker floated over his hands, and he gazed at it like a father looking at his child. And unlike many fathers and his father in particular, this was a child that he wanted.
He was emotional as he said, "I finally know why Thor had called his golems his sons."
The formation breaker is very similar to golems. It has a core for energy, an artificial intelligence for autonomy, and a processing core where the artificial intelligence resides.
The only things the formation breaker doesn't have are weapons and limbs. It has many sensors that are better in quality and higher in quantity than what other golems have.
As he looked at his handiwork, he felt proud. He also couldn't help but think of the immense potential of the formation breaker.
This made him say to the white disc, "This is just the beginning for you. You are capable of so much more, and you will be able to do so much more."
The white dish lit up and hummed in acknowledgement of what he said.
The formation breaker could truly hear him and understand him. It could even communicate if it wanted to. After all, it is intelligent.