Something I had laying around for quite a while... still in "writer block mode" in terms of stories, but maybe the wiki/tech posts will break the block.
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Mimetic Plastic
»You dropped WHAT into the plastic wavium batch this morning?«
- heard after the Tentacle Whiteboard incident on Jenga, Summer 2018
»Controlling mimetic plastic is not just about computer power, its about distributed algorithm and self-organizing structures. Just google for cellular automatons to learn more.«
- Cathy about Mimetic Plastic programming
»No more buying used smartphones for drones, call up Stellvia, we need a few hundred tons of venus oil.«
- Cortanas, at the end of her presentation of the first generation HOWOs
Despite its heavy and ubiquitous usage by the catgirls, Mimetic Plastic is no original development of Catgirl Industries. The prototype was acquired by Cathy during the raid on Nehalenia from Quattros lab, but it’s unknown if it was a development of Quattro itself or not.
In its unmodified form Mimetic Plastic looks like an unicolored sheet or block of plastic. But by applying certain external or internal stimuli, the material begins the bend, twist or even flow into a different form.
With the years Catgirl Industries managed to create a whole family of different strains with widely varying capabilities. A major part of the ongoing research is to combine the capabilities of multiple strains into a single one.
Strains of Mimetic Plastic
The original strain of Mimetic Plastic was a breathable substance that was skin and fur friendly. It had only limited movement capabilities.
Quickly afterwards an airtight variant of Memetic Plastic was developed. Together with the original strain they became the starting point of Catgirl Industries Dynamic Pressure Suit project.
Another common strain is the Touchscreen Strain. This transparent Mimetic Plastic is used in combination with touchscreen capable tablets and smartphones and is able to produce real buttons, switches and similar 3D surfaces over the user interface. Certain quirks prevented a large scale production of this strain for years and when they were finally resolved holographic interfaces were already available.
The Mini Madcat project also used a different strain of Mimetic Plastic as muscle fibres.
Holographic Waveguide Optronic (HOWO)
The most important development related to Mimetic Plastic was made in 2020 in a lab at Jenga. Since the foundation of Catgirl Industries in 2015, the company had always been very dependent on the import of Smartphones or other computer hardware from Earth. Especially Cortana and Serina looked for locally built replacements for years.
While other research groups worked on spacesuits, delicate manipulator arms or even artificial muscles for robots, Cortana pushed a small research group deep into the details of microscopic deformations of Mimetic Plastic. Using a refined technique of an existing strain which was able to produce internal tubes and cells on demand, they created a variant that was specialized on minute internal changes.
In early 2019 they finished a first prototype cube that could produce multiple types of optical metamaterials within. Combining this technology with a nanoparticle that had been developed for a new kind of holographic projector system, they managed to build a very compact and flexible optical active element, capable of emulating simple computational elements.
More than a year later the group presented the other catgirls the first Holographic Waveguide Optronic cube. While the first generation of the small cubes were not as good as waved computer chips from Earth, they could be produced on Jenga from Venus Oil.
Since then Catgirl Industries has not imported Earth made computer hardware anymore, all hardware has been built based on the new holographic circuits as soon as the storage of the old hardware was gone.
Counter Pressure Suits (Tron Suit)
The current spacesuit technology of Catgirl Industries is also based on Mimetic Plastic technology. The suits uses a multilayered fabric of different Mimetic Plastic strains to create a suit that is comfortable to wear but can shift into a counterpressure style full body suit.
In 2022 the suit is made from four parts, tights, t-shirt and boots. It is normally controlled by a 'Third Eye' collar, but can also be controlled by voice commands. A drop of blood is necessary to adapt a suit to a new user, reverting this personalization is a time consuming procedure.
In addition to the normal parts a circular disk can be attached to the back of the suit to provide energy, cooling liquid and oxygen recycling for long-term operation.
Composition
The inner layer is a thin sheet waved with a strong Handwavium strain normally used in medical and environmental systems. It keeps the skin or fur from becoming irritated or itchy and is fully permeable to air coming from the middle layer.
The outer layer is waved to prevent it from being pierced and ripped, with similar attributes like a loose mesh of carbon nanotubes or kevlar fibres. It contains microscopic openings to exchange air with the environment, but these openings can close on command of the inner layer.
The middle layer is made from a rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb. Some of these microscopic cells form a mesh of tubes between inner and outer layer to make the whole structure breathable, others are used as a circulatory system for cooling liquids. The middle layer also contains a mesh of holographic circuits, that control the contraction and expansion of the tiny cells to pump liquids and morph the shape of the suit.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... ahedra.png
Usage
The suit has three modes, casual, sealed and closed. In sealed and closed mode blue or orange colored lines appear along the suit to represent that its active and fully functional.
When not in use the suit is normally switch to 'casual' mode, which means that all four parts behave like pieces of cloth that can be worn below other clothes.
In 'sealed' mode the parts of the suit extend and form a single piece body suit. The sleeves of the suit form gloves for the fingers and the tights form a protective sheet around the tail (if the user has one). The suit then constricts to provide the necessary counter pressure against vacuum. The suits thickness increases by a factor of two to three to provide better isolation and shock absorption.
'Closed' mode means the suit makes the outer layer airtight and deploys a transparent helmet around the head from the neck and shoulder part of the suit.
Trivia:
******************
Mimetic Plastic
»You dropped WHAT into the plastic wavium batch this morning?«
- heard after the Tentacle Whiteboard incident on Jenga, Summer 2018
»Controlling mimetic plastic is not just about computer power, its about distributed algorithm and self-organizing structures. Just google for cellular automatons to learn more.«
- Cathy about Mimetic Plastic programming
»No more buying used smartphones for drones, call up Stellvia, we need a few hundred tons of venus oil.«
- Cortanas, at the end of her presentation of the first generation HOWOs
Despite its heavy and ubiquitous usage by the catgirls, Mimetic Plastic is no original development of Catgirl Industries. The prototype was acquired by Cathy during the raid on Nehalenia from Quattros lab, but it’s unknown if it was a development of Quattro itself or not.
In its unmodified form Mimetic Plastic looks like an unicolored sheet or block of plastic. But by applying certain external or internal stimuli, the material begins the bend, twist or even flow into a different form.
With the years Catgirl Industries managed to create a whole family of different strains with widely varying capabilities. A major part of the ongoing research is to combine the capabilities of multiple strains into a single one.
Strains of Mimetic Plastic
The original strain of Mimetic Plastic was a breathable substance that was skin and fur friendly. It had only limited movement capabilities.
Quickly afterwards an airtight variant of Memetic Plastic was developed. Together with the original strain they became the starting point of Catgirl Industries Dynamic Pressure Suit project.
Another common strain is the Touchscreen Strain. This transparent Mimetic Plastic is used in combination with touchscreen capable tablets and smartphones and is able to produce real buttons, switches and similar 3D surfaces over the user interface. Certain quirks prevented a large scale production of this strain for years and when they were finally resolved holographic interfaces were already available.
The Mini Madcat project also used a different strain of Mimetic Plastic as muscle fibres.
Holographic Waveguide Optronic (HOWO)
The most important development related to Mimetic Plastic was made in 2020 in a lab at Jenga. Since the foundation of Catgirl Industries in 2015, the company had always been very dependent on the import of Smartphones or other computer hardware from Earth. Especially Cortana and Serina looked for locally built replacements for years.
While other research groups worked on spacesuits, delicate manipulator arms or even artificial muscles for robots, Cortana pushed a small research group deep into the details of microscopic deformations of Mimetic Plastic. Using a refined technique of an existing strain which was able to produce internal tubes and cells on demand, they created a variant that was specialized on minute internal changes.
In early 2019 they finished a first prototype cube that could produce multiple types of optical metamaterials within. Combining this technology with a nanoparticle that had been developed for a new kind of holographic projector system, they managed to build a very compact and flexible optical active element, capable of emulating simple computational elements.
More than a year later the group presented the other catgirls the first Holographic Waveguide Optronic cube. While the first generation of the small cubes were not as good as waved computer chips from Earth, they could be produced on Jenga from Venus Oil.
Since then Catgirl Industries has not imported Earth made computer hardware anymore, all hardware has been built based on the new holographic circuits as soon as the storage of the old hardware was gone.
Counter Pressure Suits (Tron Suit)
The current spacesuit technology of Catgirl Industries is also based on Mimetic Plastic technology. The suits uses a multilayered fabric of different Mimetic Plastic strains to create a suit that is comfortable to wear but can shift into a counterpressure style full body suit.
In 2022 the suit is made from four parts, tights, t-shirt and boots. It is normally controlled by a 'Third Eye' collar, but can also be controlled by voice commands. A drop of blood is necessary to adapt a suit to a new user, reverting this personalization is a time consuming procedure.
In addition to the normal parts a circular disk can be attached to the back of the suit to provide energy, cooling liquid and oxygen recycling for long-term operation.
Composition
The inner layer is a thin sheet waved with a strong Handwavium strain normally used in medical and environmental systems. It keeps the skin or fur from becoming irritated or itchy and is fully permeable to air coming from the middle layer.
The outer layer is waved to prevent it from being pierced and ripped, with similar attributes like a loose mesh of carbon nanotubes or kevlar fibres. It contains microscopic openings to exchange air with the environment, but these openings can close on command of the inner layer.
The middle layer is made from a rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb. Some of these microscopic cells form a mesh of tubes between inner and outer layer to make the whole structure breathable, others are used as a circulatory system for cooling liquids. The middle layer also contains a mesh of holographic circuits, that control the contraction and expansion of the tiny cells to pump liquids and morph the shape of the suit.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... ahedra.png
Usage
The suit has three modes, casual, sealed and closed. In sealed and closed mode blue or orange colored lines appear along the suit to represent that its active and fully functional.
When not in use the suit is normally switch to 'casual' mode, which means that all four parts behave like pieces of cloth that can be worn below other clothes.
In 'sealed' mode the parts of the suit extend and form a single piece body suit. The sleeves of the suit form gloves for the fingers and the tights form a protective sheet around the tail (if the user has one). The suit then constricts to provide the necessary counter pressure against vacuum. The suits thickness increases by a factor of two to three to provide better isolation and shock absorption.
'Closed' mode means the suit makes the outer layer airtight and deploys a transparent helmet around the head from the neck and shoulder part of the suit.
Trivia:
- Cortana thinks that she can increase the efficiency of the HOWOs a lot with improvements of the necessary cross-compiler system.
- The first mass deployment of the HOWOs was the third generation of CIs Exocomps.
- The Exocomps use a Mimetic Plastic system to produce tools and manipulators since 2020.
- The Tron suits helmet has a tentacle like attachment that can automatically plug into the mouth of the user when the suit detects the user becomes unconscious or is about to throw up. While active this also blocks the user from speaking.
- A security variant of the Counterpressure Suits is still "Work in Progress" in the early 2020s.