The Adamantine Rapier

[nick012000]

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.

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.

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.

Quirks:

Sleep? What is this "sleep" you speak of: His sleep routines have been thoroughly fucked up from years of spending all night on the computer while at university. Injecting Handwavium-powered nanobots into his brain didn't help, either.

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).

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.

There is life outside the Internet?: Addicted to surfing the Internet, and tends to procrastinate other, more important things in favor of more websurfing. Usually to his detriment.

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.

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.

Handwavium Quirks:

Arrrgh, it burns: Highly vulnerable to EMP and electrical surges due to the degree he has been augmented with cybernetics.

It's night, and I'm wearing shades: Suffers extreme headaches if he spends too long without wearing sunglasses or tinted visors, especially at night.

Robots drink oil, right?: Suffers system degradation if he doesn't regularly eat fried food, or at least something sizzling in its own grease.

[HRogge]

I am pretty sure that Earth has no nanotech in 2012... building generic nanobot assemblers out of graphite dust sounds a little bit too much.

Handwavium does not create things from nothing.

[Dartz]

Where did the nanobots come from? Nanotech is a rare thing in FS. Rare to non-existant, and specifically so for. Unwaved Nano's are hoarded. I don't know what mechatronics degree you did but the one I was on had nothing at all to do with nanotechnology. Having a college engineering degree does not make you any better at SCIENCE! than most fen... especially without actual experience. (This is roughly where Jet enters at, and has just enough ability to bash something together in a shed using a lot of wave.... and spectacularly botch).

I'm careful about nixing other people's high-power stuff because of some of the things I've gotten away with with Jet.... but I suggest you sit back and rethink things very hard. Jet had a concept in mind beyond just being big-honking smart and powerful, and a lot of Jet's abilities come about as natural consequences of being able to fulfill that concept, then sort of mutated along through stories as things that were one line in the original bio get expanded and other things fall into the background. The original concept just sort of fell back behind as other interesting things happened....

It's not a case of needs more quirks either. More quirks does not fix things.

Reading this just makes me want to see this guy hit by a tazer. Repeatedly. Also.. Mnemosynes honey self-injected into the brain..... That's the sort of hubris god's really dislike. Or love because it gives them a chance to be malicious to the silly mortal again while everyone agrees it was utterly deserved.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Black Aeronaut]

in the meantime, he tinkered with his nanobots

Okay, this breaks the setting.  Severely.  No one has nanotech.  The only plot-device-material present is handwavium itself.  Otherwise you're working with the tech-level of real world given the time frame.
At some time in the far-flung future, nanotech will become available.  You could write your character as being one of the first fen to work on it.  (It'll also spur Noah into opening that particular part of the Catalog.)  But nothing too soon.  At the very soonest, we's say sometime like in the 2020's, maybe later.  And even then this is only basic, handwavium assisted nanotech.  You'll basically start out growing stuff in vats.  And there will be quirks.
As years pass, your character can refine things, either to use less handwavium or to improve the end product.  Either/Or.  Can't have both, unless you draw the curve out longer.
Otherwise... Well... just work on the origin.

[nick012000]

Yeah, but it does alter existing structures quite easily, by doing things like turning car engines into anti-gravity drives. The full process he used was something along the lines of "Take Handwavium, add burned Deus Ex CDs and CDs full of Transhuman Space PDFs, academic papers, and Orion's Arm pages, add finely powdered Solids, pour on a bucket full of powdered graphite and play techno music". Really, all the hardtech base does is provide the foundation for the handwavium to do its thing; it's probably riding right down the line between "making handwavium tech" and "making a very specialized breed of handwavium"; at a macro level, there's little difference. Power? Handwavium. Mobility? Handwavium. Communication and coordination? Handwavium.

[Dartz]

It's still got to start from somewhere beyond inanimate matter.

What you want to wave has to have something to do with what you want to get out of it. You're going to need to pit itty-bitty little tiny bits of technology onto those things. As established in the setting, all that'll you've done there will give you is a really funky mix of handwavium.... not a bucket full of nano's.

Just think. The worst episodes of Star Trek were the ones where they handwaved away the problem with technobabble, right? Well, handwavium exists to make a plot or concept work.... it doesn't exist to completely dissolve the plot entirely. Overrusing the stuff just ruins the story.

And you're still missing an interesting core concept that makes your character worth reading about. Handwavium enables the concept.... but it's not *the* concept. Without a concept to back up the handwaved power..... you're just grabbing power for power's sake. There're plenty of characters who can get by without having the power to break the setting.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[nick012000]

When you get down to it, handwavium is the magic that makes the stuff in the setting go. I mean, Element Zero is Handwavium in Fenspace; why not Nanotech? They both fill the same sort of role. They're the magic that lets the high-tech stuff work. I mean, if a two Fen make Healing Potions, does it matter that one's some sort of Handwavium-powered chemical concoction, and one is Handwavium-powered nanobots in a saline solution? If two Fen make General Assemblers, does it matter that one is a 'Waved microwave-turned-Replicator that builds things with teleporters and energy fields, and the other is a 'Waved Washing Machine that contains a swarm of nanobots that build things? Either way, they're both just as magic as the other; they just use different aesthetics to accomplish that magic.

As for needing to assemble things first, well, firstly, that's not technically true; the folks at Grover's Corners 'waved the ground for enhanced solidity just fine before they lifted off. Second, he did use ultrafine graphite particles for a reason. The structures were already there; they just needed to be molded and animated. It'd be like pouring it onto a mass of clay and carbon fibres with a couple googly-eyes stuck on; you'd probably wind up a Carbosilicate Amorph from Schlock Mercenary, and quite possibly the good Sergeant himself.

[Dartz]

You're still missing the big issue.

It's not just about the power your character has.... there's no justification in the concept or plot for it, beyond having that power and wouldn't it be cool. That's not a good foundation to build a character upon.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[robkelk]

Folks, there are setting limitations, and then there are imagination limitations... Let's not be too hasty in saying "no." I have to go to work now, so I'll post more on this this evening.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[nick012000]

Looking forward to it. I mean, this is a setting where you can get solar panels by painting a wooden panels with handwavium. Making nanobots with

As for the story? A guy who lived on Earth, interacted with the Fen, and eventually moved somewhere the setting hasn't developed much, but which is covered in resources that can be easily exploited with proper tools, while also showing that those Fen who remained on Earth had done worthwhile things as well. Like inventing very soft nanotech or resurrecting the Tasmanian Tiger.

[Dartz]

It's not really the nanotech that I've an objection to. With the right quirks and the right limits it could work as a story point. Like everything really.

It's just.... something don't feel right.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[HRogge]

Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what nanotech you had in mind. I assumed the worst because different scifi settings have different stuff filed under the name "nanotech".

That goes from "custom made virus constructs to modify DNA" or "organic based self assembly" (both sometimes called 'wet' nanotech) to tiny remote controlled machines that slowly grow stuff in a box with controlled environment to "nano von neumann machine which eats up planet if you are not careful" (both sometimes called 'dry' nanotech).

Some of these would fit well into Fenspace, the later might just break the scenario.

[Rakhasa]

Since the raw, original graphite only was able to create action figures, perharps the nanomachines need a template for more complex items.

First, you could need to create (with either wave of hardtech), a prototipe of the end product -carbon sheets, drone hands, gun scopes, microprocessors- You cover it with the base for the nanos , and wave it again, to get the final nanomachines -wich will onyl make the prototipe. New nanomachines need to be build for a different product.

I would build a tank, where the prototipe is placed. The tank, of course, should be big, with lots of open walkways lacking a handrail, and glowing an ominous green.

Then, you fill the tank with the nano goo: I suggest a mixture of molten iron and graphite, plus distilled water, and handwavium (gelled grey, black? different strains for different products?). Add some extra chemicals, and/or some traces or rare metals, for the more complex nanofabbers. Some electricty, mad laughter while shouting "It Lives! IT LIVES!", and presto, you have a bunch of nanos ready.

The nano construction itself will need raw materials, of course, so maybe it also needs some wavium as extra material (the wavium also helps to change the, for instance, iron into crystalline steel, so you don't need the exact raw materials, an approximation is good enough)

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)

[robkelk]

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).

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.

I'm a bit worried about this bit in the original writeup:

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...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[nick012000]

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.

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.

I'm a bit worried about this bit in the original writeup:

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).

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.

[Dartz]

Weapons design is a complex as it is weird. It's governed as much by the rule of cool as it is by what better way to exploit loopholes and build something that turns everyone into ashes. Death rays might dazzle or stun for a second. (Which is useful in and of itself. A chocolate grenade to blind and bind followed by a spray of conventional bullets is a nice one-two) While your industrial laser will have trouble scorching the paint of a moving target even with a handwaved power supply.

Although action-figure based biomods brings to mind one horrible hilarious quirk. Considering most action figures are designed for consumption by children.... and there're things we can't have children seeing. >..>.

I'm still curious what sort of stories you're planning to write with this stuff, or what you're planning to do with it. I mean, automated, reasonably stable, make someone superhuman goop? There're a lot of people who'll want that. A whole group of people actively researching it, actually. Is there any risk involved? What're the drawbacks to being nano'd? (Beyond a slight problem with electric currents). Catgirls get a nice 'feature-set' too, but at the same time the big drawback is that they also become a highly-visible, highly strange catgirl with some oddall requirements (If they're lucky). Jet has a good set of abilities.... with a few quite obvious problems that take years to work off, if at all.

And the thoughts of someone deliberately jamming something in through their own eye-socket to inject nano's into their brain along with a shot of Honey through their eye socket.... that's just creepy. Then again, it's a common trope that villains tend to seek power, while heroes just sort of fall into it. Maybe that's what's setting off my alarm bells.

And yes. Yuku is an absolute... well.... joke.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[M Fnord]

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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?

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.

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.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Black Aeronaut]

Yeah, everything that Mal said.
And also...

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.

Uh, dude...  That may not be how things work in reality, but Handwavium likes to slap physics to the ground while yelling, "Bitch!  This is how -I- roll!"  It can definitely make some Mind Storms machines into nanobots, especially if it was accidentally done.

[Ace Dreamer]

A really silly idea...

What would happen if your nanobots unionised, and started threatening strike action unless they got better pay and working conditions?

Or, started getting into demarkation disputes with other groups of nanobots...

Having to negotiate with the (just) sub-human hive intelligence in your nanobots, to actually get them to do anything for you could be ... unfortunate.

Also, pity if your nanotech decides all that body mass you're using is a waste of good carbon, and you should be uploaded into a nice safe virtual environment, so it could all be recycled to better use... Followed by the rest of the population of the planet...  I recommend Charles Stross's "Accelerando".

If you're messing with nanotech, you'd better hope that you have a really Friendly AI (FAI) that drives it for you.
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind

[HRogge]

Luckily for everyone Fenspace has a lot more friendly AIs than nanotech.

[robkelk]

A really silly idea...
What would happen if your nanobots unionised, and started threatening strike action unless they got better pay and working conditions?

This is why the StellviaCorp AIs are all shareholders...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[nick012000]

A really silly idea...

What would happen if your nanobots unionised, and started threatening strike action unless they got better pay and working conditions?

He'd do the same thing he'd do if he had any other group of workers start to unionize: he'd find a paper-thin-but-legal excuse to fire them all, and then hire/build non-unionized labor in their place. He hates labor unions with a passion.

[Rakhasa]

So we are to expect nanobot pickets outside the comany headquarters?

And, given they are nanobots... will someone notice they are picketing before they get stepped on?

[robkelk]

Pile up enough sand and you get a mountain. Pile up enough nanobots and you get ... um... a man-sized pile of nanobots.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[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.