Smokeskin wrote:

Cutting the brakes on a space elevator might be subtle, but the deceleration at the end of the ride won't be :)

Undocking wrote:

I had an idea for explosions. What if you turned a nanowarm into a thermobalic grenade? Each bot of the swarm has high pressure hydrocarbons. Disperse them over a couple thousand cubic meters and you would have quite the fireball. You wouldn't destroy a habitat with it, but all the squishes inside would be in a rough shape.

Quote:

Fuel air explosive nanoswarm Thermobaric explosives can produce magnificently destructive explosions: long blast overpressure that really breaks fragile things like morphs, and they do amazing damage in confined environments. They are unfortunately also somewhat temperamental, since you need to disperse the fuel evenly and get it to ignite simultaneously everywhere (often you get just a subsonic conflagration). I guess it is no surprise that nanotechnology allows you do improve them. This dust is essentially a kind of respirocytes: sapphire spheres containing hydrocarbon fuel under very high pressure. If you spread it around it will disperse in the air (you can tell it to adhere loosely to surfaces or spread out, or just trust it to get everywhere in a low-gravity environment). When triggered the spheres simply open a hole and shoot off like microscopic balloons, leaving a trail of fuel a meter long. A few milliseconds later they all ignite simultaneously. This particular batch is merely the “hand grenade” version. Real military forces have rough equivalents as battlefield weapons (or had, given that most battlefields these days have a notable lack of oxygen). One trick you can use this dust for is to set up ambushes. Just pouring fuel into the air tends to set of chemical alarms, but the dust is harder to detect. When your enemy is in the area, tell the swarm to detonate. It should be noted that most well built habitats will not be ruptured by internal use of these explosives most of the time. The overpressure this swarm gives is a few megapascal, and bulkheads and walls are usually designed to handle more than a megapascal – if you want to deliberately breach a habitat, use a high explosive. But this kind of explosion tends to make joints break, jerk fullerene cables, crash life support systems, open fissures in beehive asteroids and shatter diamondoid windows. On smaller habitats the destruction can be very unpredictable and it is usually a good idea to get away soon. Besides, if you detonate one of these you have definitely outstayed your welcome. [ The nanoswarm works like a thermobaric grenade, having AP -10, doing 3d10+5 DV and is resisted by E armor. It will completely fill 1,000 cubic meters of space with maximal strength damage, but can be spread out further doing 1 point less for every extra 1,000 cubic meters up to a 6,000 cubic meter volume where it merely does 3d10 damage. Damage is uniform within the volume, decreasing by -1 per meter outside. Cost: High.