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Scourge

Zakalwe

Inactive Member
Scourge

Scourge is a new series of weapons from NovaCorp and from Ephesus in particular. He was inspired by the most annoying of all creatures: Insects.

First: The first are a millimetre long, and half that tall. If you get them underneath a microscope they look like little metallic insects (an illusion, they are actually made entirely out of ceramics and non-metallic substances), with a thorax tipped with a vicious spike, and a head adorned with long, slender antennae and a sharp feeding tube. On its middle segment are gossamer wings, and underneath are six legs. The purpose of the spike and tube are not to damage by themselves, but to inject, usually Chaeron-1.

The First is made almost entirely out of advanced ceramics, and in place (such as the spike) Perfect diamond, and an advanced carbon-weave (or ‘diamond-weave’) makes the fabric of the wings. Its brain, situated in both its head and middle section, is limited but designed to behave just like a fly and to comprehend fairly complex orders and act on the data it recieves, and its head is equipped with a variety of advanced chemical sensors, especially capable of picking up the scent and pheromones of a certain race or individual, along with audio and visual sensors. Its small size, coupled with its manoeuvrability and speed means that the First is virtually impossible to hit physically (with a hand, bullet etc.) and hard to even see.

The First is designed to target unarmoured or lightly armoured people, since Chaeron-1 is not made for attacking armour. Its use for intelligence gathering is limited due to its size. Like most of the Plague, it works with others, usually communicating with radio or pheromones. There eyes are high powered camera’s, and can see into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum.

For an energy source the First uses a highly efficient battery core which is capable of providing power for 96 hours of flight. Howeer it uses virtually no energy when not moving and simply recording and can recharge its battery through tiny solar panels on its wings. The low surface area and effectivness of the solar panels mean that it regains one hour of fly time for every two hours spent resting with sufficient light. The battery gradually loses its efficiency and will fail altogether after a week an a half.

The First are usually stored in box measuring ten centimetres by five centimetres by five centimetres, which contains 25 First. Inside this box is a charging system which keeps the First fully charged untill their deployment. On the top of the box lies a small number pad for the insertion of a code, and after access is granted, allows the launching of the First and also giving them basic orders. This includes being able to 'paint' people with an infra-red laser that's built into the device and activated by pressing a small red button to one side and coming out one end. When activated the buckyball-anti-matter-magnetic cores are inserted and the First (how ever many have been called up), fly out of tiny millimeter sized holes in the side of the box.

Chaeron-1: The first of the Chaeron series, Chaeron-1 is an extremely potent anti-organic. It consists of a goo (self replicating nanobots), which are programmed only to ‘eat’ organic tissue. The process is very painful, reasonably quick (it takes around three horus all told), and fatal, leaving only a skeleton which itself is devoured. The speed of the goo increases greatly as time goes on, as more and more of the body is converted into goo that in turn can convert more biological matter. The goo then disassembles itself, leaving little evidence it was there. It powers itself primarily on Carbon as well as ambient body warmth and kinetic energy. The goo without exception disables itself within five hours of impacting organic tissue.

The goo rarely spreads to other organics, but touching someone who carries it has a risk (depending on how far the goo has spread) that they will catch it. It also carries a smaller quantity of nanobots that function like a nerve gas, disrupting certain vital enzymes, most notably Acetylcholinesterase needed for the nervous system to work, and through this causing quickly growing paralysis and eventually (within a around thirty seconds) death. It causes the contraction of all the involuntary muscles in the body, causing death.
 
Re: Plague

Zakalwe said:
The mutual repulsion of the matter and the anti-matter means that the anti-matter does not come into contact with the matter

I wasn't aware that anitmatter and matter repulsed each other. the buckyball storage is simply to isolate the anitmatter from the matter, not store them together, or have I misconstrewed you?

Zakalwe said:
Chaeron-1: The first of the Chaeron series, Chaeron-1 is an extremely potent anti-organic. It consists of a goo (self replicating nanobots), which are programmed only to ‘eat’ organic tissue. The process is very painful, reasonably quick, and fatal, leaving only a skeleton which itself is devoured. The goo then disassembles itself, leaving little evidence it was there. The goo rarely spreads to other organics, but touching someone who carries it has a risk (depending on how far the goo has spread) that they will catch it. It also carries a smaller quantity of nanobots that function like a nerve gas, disrupting certain vital enzymes, most notably Acetylcholinesterase needed for the nervous system to work, and through this causing quickly growing paralysis and eventually (within a few minutes) death. It causes the contraction of all the involuntary muscles in the body, causing death.

This is the first of a series I'm working on. More will come.

Awesome. Make this offensive. Like, perhaps, in a spray can or grenade that can be launched/thrown into a bunker to clear it out. The nanobots could, for instance, shut down after 15 minutes, allowing the friendly troops to go in without worry of harm. Or maybe the friendly soldiers have a special chemical signature that identifies them as friends?

Building on this, each soldier could have a "cloud" of nanobots swriling around them, ready to combat enemy nanobots that might do them harm.

just some ideas, I don't mean to steal your thunder or anything.
 
The defensive kind is called blue goo, and will be developed when opponents begin to use nano-nots in a serious way.

Intresting points you have risen. Will give more thought when I feel more sane.
 
Zakalwe said:
The defensive kind is called blue goo, and will be developed when opponents begin to use nano-nots in a serious way.

Heh, yeah, can't have the antidote without the poison.

Zakalwe said:
Intresting points you have risen. Will give more thought when I feel more sane.

Err.. get sane soon? :\
 
Thanks.

It's a concept that's in a few places.

Anyway, there is a mutual repulsion between the matter. I'll do research soon.
 
It means roughly, that it has a sentience value rouhgly one tenth of that of a human. It is around a tenth as smart, although it can assimilate information as fast as a computer.

It's a way of valuing sentience:

AI 1.0 = Sentience equivelant to a human
AI 2.0 = Human Sentience squared.
AI 3.0 = 2.0 cubed

Etc.

Advanced AI's are far more intelligant than humans, and there perception of time is thousands of times slower, a second lasting a lifetime. However this is only a measily 0.10 (before 1 the power system is not in effect.)
 
SaltedFish said:
I wasn't aware that anitmatter and matter repulsed each other. the buckyball storage is simply to isolate the anitmatter from the matter, not store them together, or have I misconstrewed you?
Protons repel positrons (antielectrons) while electrons repel antiprotons. This makes for an inverse london force (Electrons pulling on antielectrons, protons pulling on antiprotons) which makes a buckminsterfullerene containment system unlikely to function; since buckyballs are made up of molecular carbon, they'll have a neutral charge on average, and thus will be more likely to attract the antimatter than to repel it, regardless if whether you are using only antiprotons or antielectrons (or even antineutrons). However, buckyballs in combination with a magnetic field could probably do the trick.

Also, what is the brain made of? Most ceramics are not very good at conducting electricity.
 
It means roughly, that it has a sentience value rouhgly one tenth of that of a human. It is around a tenth as smart, although it can assimilate information as fast as a computer.

It's a way of valuing sentience:

AI 1.0 = Sentience equivelant to a human
AI 2.0 = Human Sentience squared.
AI 3.0 = 2.0 cubed

Etc.

Advanced AI's are far more intelligant than humans, and there perception of time is thousands of times slower, a second lasting a lifetime. However this is only a measily 0.10 (before 1 the power system is not in effect.)

where in hell did you get this from? o_O

I originally told you the rating system, 4 is equivalent to a human and it goes to 10. 10 being something like MEGAMI, 1 being something with, say, an automomous pathfinding system that can follow patches of light or whatever (like a lot of the robots around today used in factories follow magnetic strips under the flooring, or painted lines). The AI systems here would be used to choose a path at a fork, for example... very basic.
 
Alright, under advise, it has a micro-magnetic generator inside it which keeps the anti-matter suspended inside the bucky-balls, but which allows the gradual interaction of the two. Thus releasing constant power.
 
Alright, the only problem that was brought up against this was the anti-matter power system, and this was tackled.

What is now stopping it being approved?
 
Alright Wes, you said that the one thing holding this up was the anti-matter system which functioned on a fault principle. However with the introduction of micro-magnetic generators I countered this problem.

As such what is stopping its approval? Why is it yet to be approved?
 
"First" Insect things:

First thing; you have not changed the original to note these generators. Also, if magnetic fields are used to contain the fuel, do these fields interfere with whatever myomer system is used, given the tiny size of the construct?

Second: how do you intend to go about capturing very high-energy gamma-rays in such a short distance? Lead has a half-value thickness of ~1.5 cm for 2 MeV gamma rays; but the HVT for the gamma ray produced from a matter-antimatter annihilation reaction would likely be significantly higher, since the gamma rays produced have energies in the range of 665 MeV; over 300 times the energy the above HVT was derived for.


Chaeron-1 "goo"

Lets open this with one of those quotes that can but make you feel all warm inside, what with that juicy slab of fact with a nice side of supported commentary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
It is unclear whether the hypothetical molecular nanotechnology, if ever realized, would be capable of creating grey goo at all. Among other common refutations, theorists suggest that the very size of nanoparticles inhibits them from moving very quickly. While the biological matter that composes life releases significant amounts of energy when oxidised, and other sources of energy such as sunlight are available, this energy might not be sufficient for the putative nanorobots to out-compete existing organic life that already uses those resources, especially considering how much energy nanorobots would use for locomotion. If the nanomachine was itself composed of organic molecules, then it might even find itself being preyed upon by preexisting bacteria and other natural life forms.
If nanorobots were built of inorganic compounds or made much use of elements that are not generally found in living matter, then they would need to use much of their metabolic output for fighting entropy as they purified (reduce sand to silicon, for instance) and synthesized the necessary building blocks. There would be little chemical energy available from inorganic matter such as rocks because, aside from a few exceptions (coal, for example) it's mostly well-oxidized and sitting in a free-energy minimum."

Mmm-mmm. Now, wasn't that tasty?

Beyond the above quotes comment on organic-based nanotech being consumed by preexisting bacteria and inorganic ones great difficulty in getting power, there exists the ever present problem of irradiation. As I have said on god knows how many other occasions, any form of nanomachine (to be differentiated from nanotech as a whole) is hugely vulnerable to damage from incident radiation. This can, of course, be reduced with the introduction of redundancies, but with the omnipresent believe of "smaller, SMALLER, SMALLER!" being best in all things that is not a option as it would necessitate quite a large increase in size for the machines (for ones with the capabilities of something like these Chaeron bots this increase would be huge due to all of the components necessary).

Also to be considered is the fact that they would fry in normal sunlight due to how fast they would absorb it (and there inability to shed it) and due to there tiny mass, which would utterly fail to buffer there temperature for any length of time.

So, in summary, the nanomachines would have huge difficulty replicating in the wild and could very well suffer serious losses due to native bacterial life, would suffer terminal ionization in short order in normal sunlight, and would fry like side of fish in a oil cooker.
 
My primary argument against your repeated conjuring of this whole 'nano-bots cook in sunlight' will not be use of figures, which are not my forte, but simply pointing to a highly important part of the Star Army's technology - PANTHEON. PANTHEON consists of femto-machines or something of that order, several orders of magnitude smaller than goo, and yet they function in lighted circumstance. Given their smaller size, the effect should be far far worse, and yet it is not. Then clearly, due to the precident, nano-bots can function in light without being destroyed.

As for that 'tasty' quote of yours, I should point out it is from Wikipedia, and despite from how incredibly useful that site is, it is open for anyone to write in. As such its words cannot really be taken as cannon, especially on a subject so speculative as that of nano-technology.

Even so, your quote does not seem particuarly decisive in any case. It starts with "Unclear", which suggests that the entire thing is only a possiblity, and actually give credibility to the idea it is possible. Then their is the 'suggestion' which is all so decisive. Then there is repeated use of 'might'.

Simply put, goo has already been approved. It was actually approved with my Onslaught ship a while back, and this is simply an aplication of it. Nano-technology is a large part of SA, and some of it is far smaller and more complex than this. If PANTHEON can exist, then this easily can do.
 
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