When I started brainstorming this tech, I was considering if I might also try and create femptomachines and stuff for the Keiretsu instead of nanotech -- though as I considered it, I found the tech a little hard to justify to myself as it seems as though they're something bordering on mystical voodoo.
We're talking about machines able to reorder matter that are probably no bigger in size than an individual atom themselves; thus they couldn't be made of normal atoms. You'd need to use sub-atomic particles and probably exotic-matter particles of similar size, with properties that don't really exist in reality to create something like a femtomachine. I mean, how would they communicate, store information, break down matter, or even move in a controllable fashion? :lol: Stuff like that is pretty hard to even justify for nanomachines, and they're exponentially larger.
You'd probably have to have them manipulate individual gravitons or something to move, maybe even possibly communicate by gravity pulses; though those would be lightspeed and not FTL. Maybe they could use a bound aether particle -- which seems to have the ability to break down matter when used as a weapon -- to manipulate the nuclear bonds between atoms. I have no clue at the moment how I'd try to get them to store information though. I might still try to make femtomachines for the keiretsu later, if I can throw together a reasonable way to make the tech work in my own mind.
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As for having FTL in nanomachines; the reason I wanted to was as a way to justify having incredible processing speed -- not really to communicate over long distances.
Having nano-scale FTL would depend on how small we want such communications tech to be able to be built. I mean, in reality we have no idea how small such a technology, if it were even possible at all, could be.
It could have been done perhaps via quantum entaglement -- though I didn't want to use that tech because it technically has no distance limitation, which would make these nodes able to communicate with one another possibly from anywhere - which seems a little OP to me
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Anywhosit; thanks for the approval, Nash!