The wave, for all its ingenuity and apparent creativity/playfulness, does try to do things in an efficient manner, with the least effort for the results it gives. That's why a waved craft has to have, in general, something approximating most of the systems it needs before waving, and why Handwavium can't just create something out of nothing. Attempts to make handwavium create something with nothing but itself as its working materials probably forces it to shfit into solid 'wavium, which only acts as a power source IIRC. There's probably no even half-way efficient way of doing classical "quick change" shapechanging as a biomod (transforming mecha don't count at all), and as Jeph's case illustrates, even radical changes are slow and require a pre-existing framework on which "build" them.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.