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Nanomachines: Difference between revisions
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* In ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'' nanomachines are almost omnipresent, and several Story Arcs have featured them heavily. Note that they generally are of very specific limited use and/or act as a part of large and complex systems. The types that can survive in the open at all still have heat capacity and resistance to radiation reasonable for their size - hardened ones are vacuum-capable but all are killed if anyone fires in their general direction anything from a powerful searchlight and up. Or if they run into "antiseptic", like [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2007-09-11 anti-nannotic film].
** "Nanny-cams", bugs that are dispensed from a squirt-gun. While devices on the scale of light wavelength obviously can't use ray optics, it's the right size for antenna arrays.
** Medical. Regeneration vats are awesome, but they include external control and support
** "Blood-nannies" - self-sustaining swarms of medical nanobots controlled by implanted microcomputers, sometimes interfaced to the user's brain, as explained [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2011-03-08 here]... of course, implanting stuff in the brain is made safer by using yet another nanobot system to do all the cable-work. Uncommon at best.
** Weaponized nanites - not much good for an open battle, but a very nasty assassination weapon. They are targeted (for example, eating their way along nerves to the victim's brain) and self-destructing in a little while. Variants [[Typhoid Mary|keeping a live carrier intact]] may be voluntarily controlled by the carrier or even themselves have limited control over one's body - for designs carried in humans, the all-time favorite delivery method is [[Vomit Indiscretion Shot|projectile vomiting]] once the stomach overflows with stuff lethal in mist-droplet quantities.▼
*** The "[[Super Soldier|soldier boosts]]"
▲** Weaponized nanites - not much good for an open battle, but a very nasty assassination weapon. They are targeted (for example, eating their way along nerves to the victim's brain, then make it non-recoverable) and self-destructing in a little while. Variants [[Typhoid Mary|keeping a live carrier intact]] may be voluntarily controlled by the carrier or even themselves have limited control over one's body - for designs carried in humans, the all-time favorite delivery method is [[Vomit Indiscretion Shot|projectile vomiting]] once the stomach overflows with stuff lethal in mist-droplet quantities.
** The "cloud AI" types stand out, but from what we have seen, given enough of time and challenges those are even more prone to evolving far out of parameters one way or another than conventional fixed-hardware AI.
** Also, one big and already metal-rich ecosystem seems to have co-evolved (over millions of years) into symbiosis with what is implied to be runaway nanobots, that formerly were used by the cyborgized sophonts who owned the place, and now electroplate bones and carapaces of local fauna (and at least one of these species also have developed sapience over this time).
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