Sooo what is it and where does it come from.

Seems strange it only can be found by killing bots.
Where to the bots get it ? Some secret mining location that is not accessible by anyone else ?
Do bots actually produce it somehow that is not possible by any other nation ?
It just seems strange in general that there is no real reason for it's existence other then put their for a reason to kill bots.

It seems to have come out of thin air and yet I'm not sure it's explained in the backstory.
Shouldn't we at least have a backstory about it ?

It comes from the land of Tedious, where Arklan fairies flitter and the shrill hum of the queens fry your electrical systems.

How many items are in the backstory?

It's a bot-drop, manufactured by the Hive, like any other bot-drop. Learn to farm it, buy it from those who do, or go without.

Move along, nothing worth spending time on here.

Because the hive is technologically superior in every way. They make the best positron blaster, the best gatling cannon, and their radar can see thru ion storms. They somehow have a networked shield regeneration system, as the Leviathan's shield is bolstered by every queen under its command. Their mining beams, apparently built-in to every drone as they don't register with an add-on scanner, generate no heat. I'm even suspicious they COOL asteroids.

So, when Corvus decided to build unauthorized copies of a TPG capital ship hull, of course they wanted the best silk steel they could get, they opted for hive tech. Not to mention they realized grey-spacers would rather shoot bots for an eternity rather than move one more moth load of normal Silksteel. You can explain the bots carrying it because they build stuff in space with it, like the scaffolding structures in Edras (a project they seem to have long abandoned). Why do Arklan Guadians carry more than any other bot? maybe that's what they're guarding: The stash.

Just be thankful you only need a measly 9,000 units for today's Type-M, and not the 30,000 we needed back in my day, when we had to EVA to school thru ion storms!

Now go kill more bots!

The fact that it's synthetic silksteel is interesting; that implies there is such a thing as natural silksteel. Somewhere there is a creature that produces steel infused silk. Probably a Serco creation.

Anyway, perhaps the reason we have to harvest SSS from bots is that proper ship factories don't use it in the first place; perhaps they have access to a better process that uses other materials. That process might rely on very fancy equipment and economies of scale, making it completely inaccessible to individual players like us. Meanwhile the Trident Type M cottage industry isn't a big enough market to entice companies to produce SSS for it, so we have to go get it ourselves.

I just thought it was interesting that there was no mention of it while it's required for building ships.
I had assumed it was manufactured as a synthetic built material and was a wreckage drop similar to a scrap metal drop. However, there is no reason that nation ships don't drop sss too since it's required for all ship construction for all nations.

And all this sss manufacturing going on with hives you would think there would be some queen hauling of sss around somewhere or a levi kill would be protecting some sort of manufacturing plant someplace.

Just sayin sss is a most interesting material and even a slight mention in the backstory would be nice.

Even if to say it's unable to be created by any nation and can only be obtained by extracting it from the hull of hive bots.

Which came first, the backstory or the SSS?

The back story was written like 10 years before SSS was even a twinkle in its daddy's eyes. There have been a tonne of things added since then that are not referenced, you really cannot expect the devs to update it for every little item they add now can you?

Also, it's called the backstory, because it happened BEFORE.

Ever heard of ambergris? It's like that, except from hive bots instead of whales.