You are alone. Your ship's data core is damaged.

No matter your knowledge of physics and chemistry, the ship will not do anything it doesn't understand. You must complete experiments to teach the ship how to function again.

What about as part of the story you have specific problems to solve for which you need a material with certain properties, so you have to experiment with throwing together what you have to make a material with those properties (or "good enough"). Then make it possible to have multiple solutions with varying quality, and if you get one that's bad enough but still passes, it opens up a new branch in the story where you have to fix it again or new puzzles occur because these things aren't good enough.

- oxidation state
- electronegativity
- atomic mass, atomic number
- covalent radius
- van der waals radius
- ionization energy
- structure type (crystal or whatever)
- speed of sound
- themal conductivity
- magnetic ordering
- cas registry number (?dafuq?)
- molar heat capacity
- heat of vaporization
- heat of fusion
- critical point
- triple point
- element category
- group/block
- period
- electron configuration
- phase
- melting point
- boiling point
- density
- stable isotopes

Every element needs
- counts: protons, neutrons, electrons
- properties(?): flammable, reactivity
- charge: +2/0/-1/whatever

Hydrogen 1
- flammable, reactive
- in almost everything, most common, lightest
- colorless, nontoxic, odorless, nonmetallic
- mostly occurs as two hydrogen bonded together (if not bound w something else)
- important in base/acid combinations (look this up)
- first element in existence, only one to spontaneously generate
- Greek: hydrogen -> "water-former"
- mostly used to produce ammonia and for fossil fuel processing (hydrocracking)
- em-brittles many metals

Helium
- colorless, nontoxic, odorless, nonmetallic, inert, non-atomic
- 24% of total elemental mass
- created by fusion of hydrogen in stars
- named after Greek god of the Sun
- liquid helium used in cryogenics, cooling superconductive magnets
- protective atmosphere for arc welding
- most on earth comes from decay of thorium and uranium

Lithium 3
- soft, silver-white
- highly reactive, flammable
- store in mineral oil
- corrodes w water / oxygen(?)
- almost unstable, anything bumping it can cause it to de-stabilize into helium and hydrogen
- used in nuclear weapons as fusion fuel, was first nuclear reactor, breaking into helium/hydrogen
- trace amounts in organisms
- neurologically mood-stabilizing
