Edeski wrote:

Evening all - just a couple of questions...if my martian nomad character Latifa hacks her PC fabber successfully, can she get it to make nanoswarms?

In principle, yes. The nanohive argument is valid: the efficiency and precision of what you can build depends on the manufacturing machine. Food fabbers don't have the resolution to make nanomachines, desktop CMs can but are optimized for bigger objects, hives are good only for swarms but efficient at making them. Swarms themselves are actually rather inefficient for manufacturing, since they don't get the same economies of scale you get with a fabber.

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She wants to get cracking with some terraforming, and wants to write blueprints for a variety of nanotech (i.e. modified engineering swarms) that will look for buried water (or CO2) ice and crack it to release O2, and use the C and H2 to build organic molecules as a byproduct.

Where do you get the energy from? Cracking water and CO2 requires energy, and it is not plentiful underground.

Hapax Legomenon wrote:

I love the idea of nanomoss or nanotrees. That's just a pretty cool way of terraforming. So that would be the sort of thing a protean swarm could build?

In principle. As I have mentioned above (and below), protean swarms are not the most efficient way of making things; they make sense mostly for seeding. A self-replicating nanomoss is likely better (essentially, it has the protean function built in). Except that most people do not like fully replicating nanosystems - you can trust biology not to get out of hand worse than Australia, while fully replicating nanomoss could be another Quarantine Zone if it gets subverted by something nasty.

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I've been working on a Martian terraformer character who works alone and uses nanoswarms to build small ecostations or whatnot (he hits smaller deposits than the regular nomad groups, but since he's alone it's still economical, I'd guess) and I've been kind of wondering how he'd go about it.

Using nanoswarms sounds like an expensive method of doing it. I think the average terraformer has a cornucopia machine they feed with local material and then produce flat-pack ecostations (some assembly required).

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I imagined just using engineering swarms to dig down to the ice deposit and attach heating rods to bring meltwater up for some plants or lichen. Could the engineering swarm build a pressure dome/greenhouse for food-producing plants or would that be a protean swarm or fabber?

I assume proteans are much better at making things than engineers. But again, consider the efficiency loss! A swarm is always going to be much weaker, slower, inefficient and fragile than a proper construction device. Swarms only have the advantage that they can place a nanomachine close to each point in a volume. They do not transport material well, they run out of energy quickly (the nanites only have a limited amount of on-board storage, then they need to refuel), they do not get the economies of scale a hierarchical CM can get, and so on. If swarms were as good, there would be no reason (except fear of subversion) for Red Eden not to cover Mars with a giant swarm and remake the planet overnight. Swarms are *cool*, but it is a bit like building cars using mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are great for infiltrating, injecting, scanning, sabotaging and doing small scale manipulations. But for a car you like an assembly line. Note that a nanomoss *is* a kind of assembly line. Indeed, ordinary or biotech enhanced moss is also an assembly line.

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Speaking of 'meltwater', I remember reading a throw-away mention there about a 'nanotech penetrator' to do some demolition work - would that pretty much be a nano-based cousin of the plasma torch?

I think I originated it. I was thinking more of a root or drill. The discussion about drilling in this thread lead to some ideas for how they might work. Not so much a hot torch as a flexible, telescoping diamond drill. Still, sometimes a plasma torch works just as well - especially if you want to drill through materials held together by ice. No doubt terraformers have a big toolbox and plenty of cool jargon about what they do. "Son, don't use the plasma fiver over there. That is a sandstone overhang on the aquifer, you're bound to get a flood in the hole with the plasma. Do as I do, use the ultrasound fracter instead."

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And how does a terraformer make money? There was another throwaway line in Meltwater about being paid according to biomass produced - how would that be assessed? And who would be paying them, the TTO? How's that profitable? I'm guessing some sort of cousin to the old Homesteading act - if you 'work the land', you get ownership of the land, with 'working' being related to some function of biomass produced or terrestrial ecosystem established. Does that sound right?

Something like that. As I guess it works, you claim a parcel and demonstrate that you produce terraforming goods - released water and other volatiles, biomass, working ecosystems services - and then the TTO inspectors check, and you get paid. There is a NPC inspector in the Meltwater thread. Expect plenty of haggling over quality and pricing ("Only 4 credits per hectare crabgrass?! It is a robbery! I would get more if I just sold the surface gravel to roadworks!" "Heh. Try finding a road within a thousand klicks from here. You know as well as I do that low-tropic climax vegetation is on pay schedule B.")

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Last question, I promise, related to OP. Fabbers. The main book mentions that there are tons of different types of them that can make all kinds of stuff - tools, medical stuff, etc. What's the etc? What are some kinds of fabbers that you've seen in-game or make sense to you? Spare parts fabbers? Architectural fabbers that make building panels? Fabbers that can make any sort of grenade?

Architectural fabbers are discussed in the gatecrashing thread I mentioned above. The smaller just make sections for buildings, the bigger ones extrude buildings (think erecting a frame that acts as a 3D printer; see some of the pictures here). Medical fabbers are special because they make medical grade stuff - you do not want contamination, and often they have special restrictions on who can use them and what blueprints they can do (or rather, these are the only ones in the PC allowed to print certain risky or dangerous medical substances and nanomachines - you can imagine the mischief people could do with medical microbots!) Spare parts, tools etc can likely be done with a normal fabber. Standard fabbers just make dumb objects and have limits on how much smart materials, metamaterials and other exotic stuff they can do. The thing is again efficiency. A general-purpose fabber can make anything, but it will not be great at any particular thing. Most stuff you want doesn't have to be specified on the nanoscale - a chair needs to look and feel in a certain way, you do not care about the interior materials - so it can be made of standardized "lego pieces" from the feedstock that can be rapidly assembled into normal stuff. A basic fabber likely just does this, and will not be able to make the trickier things. A high quality fabber can do that too, although it takes a lot more time to make the finicky smart materials. And of course, active nanotech typically requires certification that the fabber and user are OK to make it, in the PC. Making explosives might require special fabbers simply because you want to make energetic chemicals in bulk (remember, energy conservation: all the energy in the final explosion has to be fed into the fabber in the form of electricity or chemical energy). Normal fabbers likely refuse to do it, not just because of legal restriction but because of safety and the energy demands: if you get them to do it anyway it is not unlikely that the manufacturing process, not tuned to the special demands, might set off the explosives. Same thing for fabbing nuclear batteries for weapons and morphs: you don't want to handle radioactives with the same fabber that makes your clothes or your food. No doubt there are hundreds of other fabber types. Military hardware fabbers for making space warfare disposables before a battle. Toy fabbers for kids. Biotech fabbers for putting together cells that are then cultured into proper organs, pods or morphs. Ice fabbers in the outer system for making ice objects. High temperature fabbers for tools on Venus. Experimental femtotech fabbers for making exotic nuclei. Secure fabbers that can be audited.