The Adamantine Rapier

[nick012000]

Since you asked me to address this in another thread, and the forum is actually allowing quote tags to work properly now...

Hm. Hmm. Hmmmm...

The man who, among Fen, goes by the hero-name "Adamantine Rapier" largely missed out on being one of the First Fen because he was an Australian. He was on the message boards, he got the 'Wavium in the early days. He just decided that, given how America was cracking down and Australia wasn't, he would rather stay on the ground with his family and finish his university degree before he went Up; in the meantime, he tinkered with his nanobots and sold cheap Earth stuff to the folks who had gone Up. As things turned out, his family moved shortly afterwards and he wound up starting almost from scratch on his new degree; he didn't mind, since he had almost failed so many classes he had almost been kicked out already (only the abuse of the university's disability policy to "Withdraw without academic penalty" whenever it looked like he was going to fail a course had stopped that). Fortunately, he did much better at his new university; he wasn't sure if it was the intelligence-enhancing side-effects from working with Handwavium, the fact that this degree didn't have one-off laboratories that he kept missing, or if they just had lower standards. He suspected it might have been a mix of all three. In any case, he graduated in 2012, and just as he was getting ready to go Up, the Boskonian War started. So he kept on going, spinning up his nanofabricators and selling flexible carbon nanotube sheets that could be easily applied to vehicled and then Handwaved on for extra armor. He also first experimented with ship design, producing the O'Neill-class Big Honking Space Gun, which he produced and sold to Operation Great Justice throughout the war. Then, Boskone Prime fell, and he finally got his shot at going up with the end of the war. So, he finished the last few ships Great Justice wanted, and built himself a factory ship and a few O'neills fitted out a semi-autonomous drones, and moved to Titan to set up shop. A pipe into the local hydrocarbon sea and a few runs by a tanker drone to Rhea for water ice later, and he was back in business, running the CHON into a nanofabricator tank to resume his business of selling biological materials to the Fen; a while later, once the dome was finished, he resumed his business of selling nanocomposites as well.

Okay, first of all? Paragraphs. Learn 'em, love 'em, 'cos damn.

Second, the base backstory here (student who works with handwavium but doesn't have to run for his life) is perfectly fine. It's a nice change of affairs from the usual backstory.

Sorry about the wall of text.

Third, I have questions. Like, what is a Big Honking Space Gun and what does it do? Where'd he get the production facilities/cash for said space guns? Is he producing these while in Australia, and if so why doesn't the local government notice and/or take an interest? Why doesn't he just take off during the war?

In order: A variety of ship he built and sold to Great Justice and maybe the Australian armed forces, that's basically a giant railgun with fusion reactors wrapped around it, with a small crew compartment and a Schlock Mercenary annie plant slapped on the back for propulsion, on top of the ammuniton bins and capacitor banks; it's probably one of the few Fen spaceships capable of breaching a Handwaved hull with its shipboard weaponry, at the cost of being relatively slow and something of a glass cannon. He built them with his nanobots. Yes, he was; he probably had to get a license for building warships. He didn't take off until the war was over since he didn't want to risk getting shot at.

And here's a big question. Why is he called the Adamantine Rapier? The backstory above doesn't explain why he'd take that name or why people would call him that. Is he a Super? Does he actually have a diamond rapier? (That would be p. cool, jsyk.) Does he fight crime with a flock of antigrav drones with pointy bits on the end to make a miniature Million Blade Storm and somebody got a photo? (That also would be p. cool, jsyk.) If you're going to give the character a superhero name, you've got to at least explain why that name and not another.

In order: he'd say it's because he "strikes swift and true into the heart of evil", though that's largely just posturing; it's really just something he made up because he thought it sounded cool. Yes, he is a Super (and also a Cyber, and maybe a Heinleinian as well). He's got some carbon nanotube swords, yes, as some of the many integrated weapon systems his suit possesses. Actually, he probably has experimented using autonomous antigrav drones with pointy blades on them, since that sounds like one of the ways to get around the Slapstick Effect, even if he might not have done much actual crimefighting with them; Australia's a pretty safe place to live, everything considered.

Mundane Talents:
Nanobot Expertise: He was the first Fen who mucked about with Handwavium-enhanced nanobots; when most Fen were building flying cars, he was pouring Handwavium on ultrafine graphite dust in the hopes of making general assembler nanobots (he succeeded, but all the first batch could make was Deus Ex action figures; it took him months of experimentation to get them to make anything useful). Ever since then, he's been one of the leading experts among the Fen on the subject of the combination of handwavium, nanocomposite materials, and nanobots.

...yeahno. Sorry, one of the core precepts of handwavium is it doesn't work like "dump it on something and wish really hard," and waving graphite to turn it into dry nano is way, way the hell across that line. As of 2020 nobody has dry, Eric-Drexler's-wet-dream nanotech available to them, not even the faction with the Unabridged Big Book of Hax nor the faction(s) with weak/strong superhuman AIs in the basement. Asking for that right off the bat's too much, I'm afraid. Rob's microbot idea is a good way of looking at it, though - it may not be a cornucopia but never underestimate the power of a swarm.

I think this has been addressed in further posts.

Former Engineering Student: He remembers a fair bit of his Engineering classes, though he's no professional engineer. He still has more formal training than many Mads do, though.
Programmer: A fair hand at computer programming, better than most Fen, if not as good as many AI. Formally trained, too, thanks to his (abandoned) Mechatronics Engineering degree, and his Aviation Technology degree (which required 11 IT courses).
Pilot: Possesses a Private Pilot's License to go with his degree in Aviation Technology.
Business Management: Got a little bit of formal Accounting training from his Aviation Technology degree, and some practical experience running one, selling biomatter to the Fen in exchange for things he could sell. He's no corporate raider or Wall Street executive, though.

I'm sensing a theme here, and I'm kind of troubled by it. I'd like you to explain why the qualifer "better than most Fen" is necessary here, please.

Because most of them are just nerds. I mean, sure, among the BNF you've got more than your fair share of tradesmen (like the folks of Prometheus Forge) and pilots (like the Soviet Air Force), but those folks are the exception, not the rule. I don't care how good you are at IT or officework, it's not really going to help you pilot a ship to Mars or figure out how to design something.

Strawman Political: He's way to the right on the political spectrum, and a combination of Asperger's Syndrome mind-blindness and Fen stubbornness means he can and will take it too far when discussing politics on the Internet. He's been banned from more message boards than he can count as a result; some of the Senshi on boards he's on have gone so far as to accuse him of being a Turnerite (he isn't, though he understands where many of their complaints are coming from).

... If he actually has an autism-spectrum disorder (and not Internet Asperger's, which is a different beast entirely) then he probably doesn't understand where the complaints are coming from. Just sayin'.

He can totally understand the complaints of the Far Right, being pretty far to the right himself. When they start complaining about immigrants or Muslims or whatever, he'd nod; he just doesn't agree with the anti-Semetic stuff, the calls for violence, or their tendency to be mixed up with organized crime.

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.

Question: Where did the power armor come from? Don't recall seeing that before.

He built it. I just hadn't mentioned it. Basically, think like a crossover between book Mobile Infantry, Halo Mjolnir armor, and the Iron Man armor in appearance.

Handwavium Abilities: He biomodded himself by getting one of his robots to use an electroshock harness to induce unconsciousness for a few seconds, and then inject a mixture of nanobots, guacamole, and Mnemosyne's Honey into his brain (through the orbital cavity, lobotomy-style), and a similar mixture into the marrow of all of his major bones. The rest of the day sucked balls, but it was worth it in the end.

... tare:

Why? Most people just mix up a cocktail and down it with the drink of their choice. What in the hell possessed him to resort to this... needlessly sadistic form of modification?

Because if he just drank it, it could have done practically anything in the vein of "nanobot-upgraded transhuman", from just giving him an upgraded immune system to turning him into a woman or a cyborg death machine. He wanted specific organs to be affected in fairly specific ways, so he decided the best way to ensure those organs were the ones the biomod affected was by introducing the handwavium directly into those organs. He chose to inject the Handwavium into the brain through the optic cavities to avoid producing structural weak points in the skull, and into the bone marrow to facilitate both handwavium-enhanced Orion's Arm-style "computronium" bones, and the replacement of his bone marrow with the nanobot hives that produce his nanobot blood.

My eyes are augmented: Turns out that injecting nanobots and handwavium into your brain through your eye sockets can have side-effects. Who knew? Now his eyes are robotic, capable of zooming in, recording video, and seeing in the infrared.
And so is my brain: Vastly improved intelligence, eidetic memory, learning ability, reaction times, and so forth. He's got a computer with an Interwave and radio transmitter in his head, and his bones have been replaced with pure computronium as a long-term storage method for his memories.
I'm definitely not going to die from old age...: His bone marrow has been replaced with nanobot-manufacturing machines, and his blood with nanomachines. His red blood cells are replaced with respirocytes, his white blood cells with a nanobot immune system, and his platelets with biological repair nanobots. The last of these is capable of repairing even the damage from aging, rendering him biologically immortal, as was his goal all along.
... and hopefully not from violence: His bones, being made of a handwavium-reinforced nanocomposite, are immune to everything short of anti-tank weapons. It's a pity everything surrounding them is still so squishy. Fortunately, his biological repair nanobots are capable of regulating his bodily functions to prevent him from going into shock or bleeding out, and can, with sufficient raw materials and a few hours, regenerate lost limbs. Additionally, with the assistance of his immune system nanobots, they render him virtually invulnerable to NBC attacks.

I get the sense that most of this, if not all of this is intended to be the result of the nanotech rather than the handwavium. See my comments above on the use of nanotech. Now, as a handwavium biomod it's not outside the realm of probability, but it should come with some interesting downsides. Jet has all of this and possibly more, but can't take off the suit. AC Peters got functional immortality with a side of bipolar and identity disorders. The Rapier here... well.

Well, the nanotech is about as soft as Handwavium-enhanced tech can get, as demonstrated by the fact it can biomod you when injected into your body. As for downsides, that's what I was trying to do, though maybe it resulted in him compulsively assuming a role as a member of the "secret masters", like the Illuminati or SEELE. Hell, maybe he was the one who coded that chat client the SMOFs use for their official conferences. You know, the one that displays everyone as just an array of numbered monoliths?

The TL;DR: There's potential, but it doesn't quite fit. Advanced nanotech in 2012 is too game-breaky. There're more questions asked about the character than are answered, and those questions need to be answered. Also a whiff of "I'm better than these Fen losers" which may be unintentional but aren't exactly endearing. More work is required.

So Speaks Galactus.

I hope I've answered your questions to your satisfaction, then.