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 Nano-disassembler Weapons Discussion
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| Vincent |
Posted on 20-11-2005 00:56
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 Posts: 10 Joined: November 20 2005 |
Hi everyone this is my first post not inslucind my intro post I read this whol discussion and about halfway my mind was full of ideas and then I got to Justin's post and only one or two ideas survived. I think "hacking" type nanobots would be great for covert or special operations missions and there would be more than one way to infect a capital ship. The first way is more obvious and feasible in a game scenario. This includes having a missle platform fire a salvo of missles [hopefully befores its completly destroyed] and these missles would be hull piercing types and if at least one survived would it would be enough to send in some nanobots to infiltrate. While inside the nanobots could either hack and wreak [not sure about spelling] havock inside the ships systems or even use the ships own transmitting capabilities and send out a distress beacon to the home fleet or even send vital information. The idea has its flaws but its possible in some way. My second idea would be more covert and the crew or captain wouldn't even think of checking systems [hopefully getting hit by armor piercing missles would warrant the idea of checking systems for any intrusions]. This idea is kind of a trap. Lets say you could somehow transport a small ball that in it has nanobots for hacking onto an asteriod and you put several of these on to many asteroids. Theoreticaly lets say you put some kind of sensors that would sense the presence of a harvester than push off the asteroid and attach itself to the harverster. The harvester would then go back to the capital ship and therefore bring in some nanobots that would somehow find their way to the ships electronic and hack into the system. Ok...that is too complicated but in a simpler purpose you could basically *posion* an asteroid field with these nanobots that would infect harvesters and disable them from the inside. So any harverster that comes to the asteroid field would automatically be disbled. Someone asked about how is it even possible to make electornic nanites. I read somewhere of sort of bacteria that was manipulated to take tiny gold particles and create shapes with the particles. They were controled to do this by some kind of emitter i really dotn know the details but basically they made a nano-sized object. What this basically means is you start of with bacteria making parts for nano-robots put them together somehow and voila you power them somehow and you feed them raw materials so that they can reproduce each other without the aid of bacteria. As an added note i realize i may be completly wrong about everything I said but I'm entitled to an opinion right? From just the trailers alone I've deduced that PDS is Homeworld 2 ON A 'FATAL' DOSE OF VIAGRA!!!!
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| Al-Qhirajh |
Posted on 20-04-2006 00:18
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Posts: 2 Joined: April 19 2006 |
This "poisoning" Vincent mentioned has some plausability, but really the only way it would work is if the nanites stayed on the outside of the harvester, because the only way in is via the collection facilities on the harvester whichwould dissasemble them, and due to the slow speed of nanites in general, I would think that it would not be useful, or would at least take far too much time as the only part that touches the asteroid are the collecting "arms" of the harvester. Don't forget that ships in general will always have a system running that checks every single part for errors and will report, if not correct, any errors before the nanites would have time to work through the programming, much less any hull plating. So as it is, leave the poor nanites alone to do what they do best, being mythical all-powerful wonder machines. |
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| Nerdfish |
Posted on 20-04-2006 00:34
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 Posts: 30 Joined: March 08 2006 |
The effectiveness of such weapon depends on the property of the disassembly reaction. If the disassembly is spontaneous, a small amount of disassemble could do a lot of damage, if not, then the weapon could only do as much damage its inherent energy. A spontaneous reaction is one that release free energy, or in other terms, the sum between heats of reaction minus his temperature time?s entropy change must be negative. This kind of reaction powers itself without external input of energy. This is important for Assembly based weapons because it will not be able to derive energy from an external source during operation. I am afraid most armor cannot be disassembled spontaneously. Armors that are not spontaneously formed require energy input to construct from their raw materials (because the reverse releases energy) and though would be more expensive then their functional equivalent. Note that pure metal or metal alloy armor cannot be disassembled chemically because most metal will go down energy state by binding with something, and usually eat up the assembly weapon in the process. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_reaction Edited by Nerdfish on 20-04-2006 00:34 To subjugate the enemy's army without doing battle is the highest of excellence. -Sun-Tzu
Until your enemies decided they don't want to be subjugated any more - The fish |
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| JustinWick |
Posted on 22-06-2006 07:11
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 Posts: 18 Joined: September 24 2005 |
Quote Nerdfish wrote: The effectiveness of such weapon depends on the property of the disassembly reaction. If the disassembly is spontaneous, a small amount of disassemble could do a lot of damage, if not, then the weapon could only do as much damage its inherent energy. This is not strictly true - damage is defined to be the reduction of the functionality of something. Some systems only require very small changes to become nonfunctional. Quote A spontaneous reaction is one that release free energy, or in other terms, the sum between heats of reaction minus his temperature time?s entropy change must be negative. This kind of reaction powers itself without external input of energy. That's not strictly true, many spontaneous reactions require either the presence of a catalyst, or input energy to reach the "activation energy" of the reaction. Otherwise, what would prevent the reaction from occurring immediately? Quote This is important for Assembly based weapons because it will not be able to derive energy from an external source during operation. That is actually a good point, but not necessarily correct. It's theoretically possible that the nanites could gain energy from thermal/electrical/magnetic gradients (in both time and space), but practically speaking they would likely require an internal energy source, or some method of metabolizing ship material. Quote I am afraid most armor cannot be disassembled spontaneously. Armors that are not spontaneously formed require energy input to construct from their raw materials (because the reverse releases energy) and though would be more expensive then their functional equivalent. Quote Note that pure metal or metal alloy armor cannot be disassembled chemically because most metal will go down energy state by binding with something, and usually eat up the assembly weapon in the process. I think you're confused. Metals typically lose energy when they bind with something, however this is a net release of energy. This is the kind of thing nanites could thrive on, if they had a source of material to bind the metal with. Where to get this? Pure metals would not be used for armor of course, as they are extremely bad, but... the interesting thing about nanites is that they can be precision-targeted, unlike blast weapons, etc. Hairline fractures in armor are sufficient to destroy their usefulness. To be honest, I think nanites are probably awful for attacking armor directly, but systems inside the ship would be very vulnerable. An interesting thing about ships computers is that they could be designed to be cryptographically secure - incoming nanites could perform a denial of service attack, however all information could be kept "locally meaningless" - unable to be interpreted without knowing the state of other components in the system. Quote Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_reaction You may want to check that again. ===================================
Who would sup with the mighty must climb the path of daggers. |
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| Inert |
Posted on 22-06-2006 07:44
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 Posts: 388 Joined: September 08 2005 |
Though I'm not intending to speak for Nerdfish, I do believe this: "This is not strictly true - damage is defined to be the reduction of the functionality of something. Some systems only require very small changes to become nonfunctional." "That's not strictly true, many spontaneous reactions require either the presence of a catalyst, or input energy to reach the "activation energy" of the reaction. Otherwise, what would prevent the reaction from occurring immediately?" What he meant by this, I think, is that the nanites are the catalysts, as opposed to, say, being a physical cutting tool. I'm not sure on how this would work, but I'd imagine all you'd have to do is dislodge an electron or something. Feel free to point out how wrong I am, though. |
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| JustinWick |
Posted on 22-06-2006 18:20
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Posts: 18 Joined: September 24 2005 |
Quote Inert wrote: Though I'm not intending to speak for Nerdfish, I do believe this: What he meant by this, I think, is that the nanites are the catalysts, as opposed to, say, being a physical cutting tool. I'm not sure on how this would work, but I'd imagine all you'd have to do is dislodge an electron or something. Feel free to point out how wrong I am, though. To be honest, at the nanoscale things do work very, very differently. I'd imagine that nanobots that were trying to cut a path through material would work by altering the local energy levels of atoms nearby (as a catalyst does). I think the best metaphor (because I'm neither a nanotechnologist or a chemist, my training is physics and computer science) would be how catalytic proteins interact with things in cells. Obviously it's a bit different here, but you can (I hope) see the parallels. I really think that nanites are a bad idea for attacking the outermost hull of a ship - also I do not understand, if you can get a small amount of matter in *DIRECT* contact with the outside of the ship, why not use antimatter weapons to destroy the armor, or some kind of small devices that distort the shields so that they intersect the armor (for a microsecond), thus shorting them out and/or destroying armor? Also, femtosecond laser pulses might be good for making very, very small holes in armor (without heating the surrounding material) for injection of nanobots directly into the inside of the ship, where they are actually useful. Also, if you can get nanobots into the ship, you could use them to kill the crew and/or cause their hormones etc to go out of balance... imagine everyone PMSing in the middle of a battle. No, really. ===================================
Who would sup with the mighty must climb the path of daggers. |
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| Inert |
Posted on 22-06-2006 22:05
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Posts: 388 Joined: September 08 2005 |
Not attacking the hull itself, perhaps, but the weapons? Someone suggested subsystems; weapon subsystems are sometimes external (actually, in PDS, it's all external.  ). I'd imagine about a couple million nanites and we could pretty much disable all external weaponry. |
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| TelQuessir |
Posted on 23-06-2006 09:13
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 Posts: 2598 Joined: August 30 2005 |
Well we've come to the age-old observation that its easier to just blow the damn target ship up with (insert destructive device here) than to design a nanite/acid/whatever payload to decompose it. I would like to see a sci-fi story that uses nannites to say, perform industrial sabotage, but using them as a tactical, immediate effect weapon seems counterproductive given the tech level and prospective cost of nannite weapons. |
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| raze |
Posted on 01-08-2006 21:35
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Posts: 4 Joined: August 01 2006 |
personally i think its a wicked idea but ther is the fact of seeing these nanotech weaponry systems and the fact of how we could defend our fleets from these thiny little critters !? and will somone plz tell me how i can get the mods out of those zips im geting really and i mean really  off :upsetw: |
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| Thorin |
Posted on 04-08-2006 20:16
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 Posts: 414 Joined: September 02 2005 |
Calm down. Post in the right forum. Also, this discussion has pretty much been resolved. Nanodisassemblers are simply too exotic, and frighteningly hard to control. I'm sure they could have their utility in sabotage and other black ops, but I can't imagine it being a warfare weapon. |
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| death_ab |
Posted on 05-08-2006 02:22
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Posts: 33 Joined: October 29 2005 |
Tel, theres a british sci-fi writer that does has a good stab at it. though i, i cant remember the name right now but theres a series that he writes. Ive got a few books of it hanging around. If i remember i'll shoot you the name of the writer and series when i get back home. |
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| TelQuessir |
Posted on 05-08-2006 08:02
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Posts: 2598 Joined: August 30 2005 |
Not Iain M. Banks I hope. He's my favourite |
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| death_ab |
Posted on 07-08-2006 11:59
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Posts: 33 Joined: October 29 2005 |
Nope it's Alastair Reynolds... Its quite an odd series with quite a few diffrent cultures poking around. From Norms to well all sorts... Not sure if they are in order... Turquoise Days Redemption Ark Revelation Space Chasm City Revelation Space |
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| TelQuessir |
Posted on 10-08-2006 10:46
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Posts: 2598 Joined: August 30 2005 |
I'm presently stuck in Iain Bank's Excession. Bloody hilarious stuff which is what I need these days. |
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| Heimdall |
Posted on 17-08-2006 07:11
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Posts: 10 Joined: August 15 2006 |
What happened to the subtopic of non-nanorobotic nanotechnology? Nanoscale fibers and other sorts of things could be useful, I particularly liked the suggestion that it could be possible to incorperate mild NBC protection into standard uniforms, though I'd imagine only radiation protection (incase there were a radiation leak of some type) would be practical, since I don't see any reason why enemy marines wouldn't simply use personal weapons to dispatch resistance, instead of flooding the ship with chemicals or viruses. Rather, I would see that sort of thing being useful in increasing survivability. As far as materials technology goes, would something along the lines of nanoscale shielding for electronics be too far-fetched? Not really anything exotic, I just mean thinner electronic shielding, which would make things lighter and more compact. Then again, maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part. If not, it could mean thinner data cables, thus thinner data..uh...tubes...required for them to be run through. And using less space on a starship hull isn't a bad thing. Medically...while I don't see nanotechnology as being terribly practical in most instances, what about microscopic trancievers? I'm not talking about anything insanely complicated, just a small amount injected into crew members, probably to help keep track of them (I'd think knowing where your crew are at all times would be useful, as would keeping track of your Marines on an enemy ship.). Naturally, this sort of thing wouldn't be used in situations where you'd want the subject to be stealthy, in the same vein that having an active locator beacon on a ship isn't exactly stealthy either. But Marines are hardly "covert", and I'd assume they're transmitting radio communications allready anyway. This would just be a secondary thing in that instance, since I'd assume their armor would have locator transcievers as well. But backups never hurt. As for power, I wonder if it's possible they could run off of the body's bioelectric field, since they're not doing anything drastically complicated (And the human body can make for a wonderful antenna). Basically my point is, while nanotechnology is clearly impractical as a weapon (offense or defense), or a "magic surgeon", what about using nanotechnology (not nanoscale-robots!) for miniturization of things? Certainly being able to pack more electronics into a hull isn't a bad thing? Hell, maybe even some weapon componants could be made smaller (not many, and not -alot- smaller, but even if it's 3% smaller, hey, that's less mass!)... Ahem. At any rate. Fascinating topic. Also, I'll have to watch for those books, sounds interesting. Edited by Heimdall on 17-08-2006 07:18 |
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| TelQuessir |
Posted on 17-08-2006 10:12
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Posts: 2598 Joined: August 30 2005 |
Very good new direction of discussion Heimdall, I don't know where you come from but thanks for stopping by. Minaturisation of existing technology using nanoscale engineering is definitely viable given the present course of RL electronics. We have 3.2 GHz processors today because of just such minaturisation. For the topic of computers though, we seem to have reached a practical limit of speed in CPUs - scientists are looking at other methods of computing including optical and whatnot, to circumvent the limit of cramming more circuit components into something the size of a microprocessor. (The problem being heat efficiency) |
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| Heimdall |
Posted on 17-08-2006 20:18
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Posts: 10 Joined: August 15 2006 |
Well, until more unconventional methods are made reliable and suitable for mass production and use by the general public... I would assume that in the meantime cooling technologies would be where alot of growth will be seen, as a temporary method of advancement. Liquid cooling certainly has room for improvement as far as stability/reliability both are concerned. And making more efficient, faster, and quieter fans, as well as more efficient heat sinks, are other avenues of advancement in the meantime. Actually, I'm wondering if nanotechnology could be applied to materials in those sorts of things...perhaps more efficient heat sinks by providing better thermal conducting materials? Making moving parts in general more reliable and efficient could be possible as well, using nanotech materials, right? Or is this just wishful thinking? Personally, I believe the greatest boons to us as a society from nanotechnology will be in materials technology (such as carbon nanotube televisions and RAM), I'm just not sure how far outside of the field of electronics that it could find purchase. |
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| JustinWick |
Posted on 23-10-2006 05:14
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Posts: 18 Joined: September 24 2005 |
Just thought I'd pipe in and mention that while it's true that non-robotic "nanotech" (sorry, that term is abused quite often) is very promising and will likely be ubiquitous around the time of the industrialization of the solar system, the laws of physics are very different on very small scales (quantum effects, breakdown of the continuum properties of fluids due to granularization, higher order forces like Van Der Waals, etc). Thus most non-robotic nanotechnologies to perform a specific function will likely not resemble its macroscopic counterparts. Also, future computers will be insanely parallel (see quantum and optical computation), which will solve many problem efficiently (except those of inherently serial nature), so even if we hit a wall with speed, increasing the number of computing units, shared memory technology, and better massively parallel algorithms should continue to increase the effective speed of computers long into the future. Combining this with the use physical systems (both classical and quantum) to solve specific problems, such as period finding (breaking asymmetric encryption ala Shor's algorithm) or Discrete Fourier Transform (used in signal analysis, image and audio compression, and even target tracking) and database querying (holographic memory should help with this), future computers are sure to be a mash of multiple computing paradigms each optimized for a specific subspace of possible computational problems. Nanotech will play a big role in that, as many of the systems required to perform these calculations will have to be manufactured with ridiculously low tolerance for errors. ===================================
Who would sup with the mighty must climb the path of daggers. |
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