robkelk Wrote:How about this for nanotech:
Wave some Mindstorms by dunking them in a vat of 'wavium.
Let them dry - they shrink.
They don't work unless they're wet again, and only when they're wet with liquid handwavium. This means:
- They only work in a vat or a tank.
- Different strains of 'wavium produce different results. Undifferentiated 'wavium (the stuff Noah usually uses) lets the 'bots make action figures.
So he can have some nanotech - quirky, unreliable nanotech - without breaking the setting. Reliable hardtech nanotech is still something that the Whole Fenspace Catalog experts say is a decade away (unless one of The Girls did some tinkering - those who have the outline for LoGG, see chapter 4 - in which case it's only a half-decade away for anyone who has the results of that tinkering).
Hmm. I don't like the idea of making nanobots out of plastic and motors and whatnot, because that's not how they work, to my knowledge; they're made out of carbon and move by manipulating their electromagnetic fields to cause their molecular structure to flex. He might have built microbots that way, though, as a way of scaling up assembly from what the nanobots assemble on the molecular level.
Quote:Rakhasa Wrote:I also would try to avoid creating hardtech items with you nanos: They are the end, 'waved product (so your flexible carbon nanotube sheets, for instance, are already pre-waved, and strong enough for extra armor)
That's an excellent idea. It also has precedent: the Catgirling Machine.
That's fine by me.
Quote:I'm a bit worried about this bit in the original writeup:
nick012000 Wrote:Because Death Rays are AWESOME!: His suit of power armor is equipped with a wide variety of weapons, both 'waved and hardtech. Unfortunately, his still at actually using them in combat is amateurish at best. Fortunately, he's never actually been called upon to use them in a life-or-death situation.
Weapons need ammunition (or power, but death rays aren't something handwavium makes and they aren't in the Whole Fenspace Catalog either), and there's only so much room on a suit of power armor.
Load too many weapons (and ammo clips) on, and you've got a battle-mecha, not a power-suit...
I'm picturing something along the lines of a cross between Iron Man, the Mjolnir suit from Halo, and the Mobile Infantry armor from the original Starship Troopers. Shoulders, wrists, hips, a concussive cannon in the center of the chest, et cetera. As for Death Rays, well, you can buy multiple megawatt industrial cutting lasers off of the Internet. Rig one up into a Handwavium power source and targeting rig, and you're good to go. Even 'waved "death rays" can be useful, despite their inability to kill people; you can have anti-vehicular rays that always allow the crew to bail out like in the 80's GI Joe cartoons, concussive rays to knock enemies away from you and create new "doorways", disintegration beams that leave their victims naked and unarmed, stun beams, et cetera. Additionally, it might be possible to bypass the effect by having the 'Waved weapon simply being the delivery device of the actual lethal payload, by doing things like sticking knives onto the guts of a bludger (since simple bladed weapons aren't affected by the Slapstick Effect), or building a hypervelocity dart launcher and loading the darts with cyanide (since it's not the dart that kills you, but the poison inside it).
Quote:Since the raw, original graphite only was able to create action figures, perharps the nanomachines need a template for more complex items.
I'd say that they'd probably need to assemble it from computerized blueprints; in the case of relatively simple things like solid blocks of carbon nanotubes or most simpler crystals, he just inserts the unit cells and tells it to make however much in whatever basic shape, and it can go to work; he only needs to get them to disassemble things if they're more complicated items; manufactured goods, biological materials, and the like. Or if he happens to find a sample of some interesting material he wants them to analyze. They just originally came with the action figure blueprints built in and optimized for due to a quirk of the process that made them. Well, unless you stick them inside someone in sufficient quantities to cause a biomod, anyway; then they'll start fusing with your biology, turning you in a nanotech-augmented superhuman in deference to the source material used to originally flavour their handwavium, in similar fashion to how Jet Jaguar found himself female and fused with a suit of armor.
EDIT: Damn it, is there anyway to turn the "helpful" preview off so I can just see the tags? Damn thing's messing up my post, stopping me from splicing the quote tags the way I want to, and going to "bbcode" on my account makes me have to muck about with HTML. Except when the BBCode works just fine, in a totally inconsistent fashion.