Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

I guess it depends on how much sun they block out, and whether or not you want what that sun is putting out. Even our own benevolent day star puts out all kinds of nasty radiation.

The entire planet has a cloud of nano-machines surrounding it? On the one hand, the fact of continuous 24 hour surveillance everywhere must have some interesting social and political implications. Although I am skeptical that a network that immense could be managed from a central location, so that means it's a decentralized system, like the internet. Extracting real time information from it would be a challenging exercise in data mining. Someone will try hacking it almost immediately.

But putting all that aside, I wonder about the environmental implications. The manufacturing capacity to produce and replace so many nano-bots wouldn't be insignificant. When these things fail, as they must be doing continuously, the materials they are made out of get added to the soil. And then what about the waste heat they produce? There are some interesting systems design issues involved here.

Putting aside the fact that "true" nanomachines don't work like that, something that small couldn't possibly act as a wifi relay, radar or what have you. An antenna needs to be as long (within an order of magnitude) as the wavelength of whatever it's supposed to receive and emit, and radio waves start at 1 mm. Wifi uses the 6 cm and 12 cm bands, radars have even longer wavelengths.

Well that's a bummer. Is there an ideas as to how that might be gotten around in the future?

that is a good question, is there any way to network nanites then?

Link them together like spiderwebs? If the material is spread thinly enough, maybe they'll float.

edited 22nd Sep '16 12:17:12 PM by ManInGray

I mean in general myself, for things like medical use, since I dont't thinky ou could contain an entire medical program in each nanite.

Reminds me of a discussion we had a ways back about my idea of ships taking on a certain formation to make a tranceiver array that could communicate farther than one ship's comm rig could manage. Though I don't know if it would work for sending, maybe the nanites could create similar arrays for various purposes, at least to pick up signals?

Incidentally, if you had a literal cloud of these things layered over the entire sky, they could aid communication just by bouncing the radio signals much as ionized layers of the atmosphere do for radio communication today. Also, the moon, meteor showers, a large number of little metal rods the Air Force launched into space on a rocket, the ISS, and possibly sections of the sky that the Air Force intends to attack with plasma bombs to create aforementioned ionized atmospheric conditions.

Aeotol: Since we are using soft sci-fi nano machines just have them make the antennae with themselves. If you have that kind of nano tech you could in theory use them to form just about anything which is why I suggested the VDA(Very Dangerous Array) type approach earlier.

If they could aggregate their individually tiny storage capabilities to form a large storage array, you could literally store data in the Cloud.

Thats the idea, but they need to comunicate for that.

And I dont think you could just have them form antena like sugested inside a human body.

Immy: If you can instruct them to do anything they can communicate with each other. He was also asking about the type of sci-fi nano that floats around the air.

edited 22nd Sep '16 12:43:27 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I was asking myself due to related issues.

When you go soft sci-fi the simpler answer is usually better. Realistically we use them in a fluid to swim around and direct them through magnetic fields or I shit you not light.

Nano radios are a thing

You've never had a late night with low sleep interrupted by it and been all "Begone cursed demon of nuclear light! Begone from my face!"

Either that or you've never been out in the Sun right after a fresh thick snow where suddenly everything is turned into a blinding burning mirror of DEATH.

I live in Canada. Southern Canada. That shit of blinding snow is a reality every winter.

But I never get the whole "blocking out the sun" plan, while it does do nasty stuff, it is vital for our survival.

Well, the sun will get hotter with time, to the point that some scientist predicts that our ocean will be turned into desert. But at that point, we might more worried on Chaos Incursion.

Well, yeah, our sun does vital stuff, but maybe the hypothetical sun in this alien star system we're speaking of just bathes the planet in gamma radiation or something.

If you can do things like adjust the amount of sunlight falling on a planets surface that could possibly be used as part of artificial climate control.

For alien worlds, fine. For our own planet?

In the words of Dr. Insano, "Oh yes that terrible evil life giving sun!"

Who wants to institute a global ice age anyways?

For reducing the heat of certain desert regions possibly allowing them to be slowly developed into arable regions. The amount of heat the sun delivers to the desert floor pretty much makes that almost impossible.

edited 24th Sep '16 10:09:52 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Nanomachines: Delivering Wi Fi and weather at your convenience!

Since global warming is a major concern, building nanomachines son ^TM could be a desired solution to some of our problems.

edited 24th Sep '16 11:37:19 AM by AngelusNox

I am actually pleased to hear that as a idea.

Usually when I hear blocking out the sun with nanoclouds I go right to the Matrix and how dumb of a idea that was.