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What exotic materials.

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Sun, 2013-09-15 12:03

thezombiekat thezombiekat's picture

What exotic materials.

What exotic materials. I am hoping soon to be running an EP game and it occurs to me that sometimes I may want to limit the ability to make some powerful items. The books point out that some nanofabrication plans need elements that are rare, dangerous or restricted. It doesn’t however include a lot of examples. I could really use some examples of rare materials and the kinds of objects that might really need them. Something on the level of a nuclear battery asking for uranium but you could get by with any similarly radioactive material, shame they are all rare, dangerous and restricted. Unfortunately I just cant think of many examples. And when I play this card I don’t want to be puling fake elements out of my ass or just saying “you need something rare”. So I ask if people could give some good, realistic examples of specialised feed stock and the projects that might require them.

Sun, 2013-09-15 18:07

UnitOmega

Transhuman mentions some rare

[i]Transhuman[/i] mentions some rare fabricator materials and how to get them on p 175. It mentions Antimatter, Fissionables, Rare Heavy Metals, Uncommon Radioisotopes and Water. If you want the specific stuff (Other than, y'know, Antimatter and Water which are fairly self-explanatory), it mentions Platinum, Tungsten and depleted Uranium, and for Radioisotopes; Radium and Thorium.

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Mon, 2013-09-16 07:25

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

And let's not forget obscure

And let's not forget obscure elements. "Out of thulium error" is a standing joke in my gaming group. Normally nobody cares about scandium, except when that is the essential element for a nifty kind of metamaterial used in the design. Nuclear isomers like tantalum 180m might matter in some nuclear applications. As do some isotopes - have you stocked up on carbon 13 recently? Absolutely necessary for the high-precision qubit storage. And always remember energy conservation: nanofacturing a bomb requires more energy than it will eventually release.

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Mon, 2013-09-16 10:01

MirrorField MirrorField's picture

UnitOmega wrote:

UnitOmega wrote:
If you want the specific stuff (Other than, y'know, Antimatter and Water which are fairly self-explanatory), it mentions Platinum, Tungsten and depleted Uranium, and for Radioisotopes; Radium and Thorium.

I'd start straight out by reading the ol' periodic table and thinking about it, with principle that if you have the elements, you can always synthesize more complex compounds with appropriate nanofabber. Also, IMHO one of the reasons (though somewhat old one in AF 10) for restricting nanofabbers is that you can ridiculously easily refine and enrich uranium in one. As in "fab your own crude fission bomb from some scrap and few tons of pitchblende". You can't use one to refine plutonium, though. Also, I'd personally call "depleted uranium" something of an old-fashioned concept in AF 10. Just call it U-238, which does have it's uses in nonmilitary applications. Radiation is also a smaller bogeyman, with healing vats and people being more familiar with it.

Mon, 2013-09-16 15:54

LatwPIAT

Arenamontanus wrote:Nuclear

Arenamontanus wrote:
Nuclear isomers like tantalum 180m might matter in some nuclear applications. As do some isotopes - have you stocked up on carbon 13 recently? Absolutely necessary for the high-precision qubit storage.

Ooooooooh, does C13 really have qubit-storage-applications, or did you just make that up?

Arenamontanus wrote:
And always remember energy conservation: nanofacturing a bomb requires more energy than it will eventually release.

Unless your nanomanufacturing of the bomb consists of tossing together chemicals that already have the chemical potential energy stored in them; but then, we're talking about explosives. Unless they're so complex you need nanoscale precision to manufacture them, I'd really just recommend taking your Space-Winnebago and some glassware out into the Martian outback and let normal macroscale chemical processes do the job; it'll probably be faster and cheaper.

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Mon, 2013-09-16 16:22

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

LatwPIAT wrote:Arenamontanus

LatwPIAT wrote:
Arenamontanus wrote:
Nuclear isomers like tantalum 180m might matter in some nuclear applications. As do some isotopes - have you stocked up on carbon 13 recently? Absolutely necessary for the high-precision qubit storage.
Ooooooooh, does C13 really have qubit-storage-applications, or did you just make that up?

I made it up, but it turns out that I was right: http://qdev.nbi.ku.dk/research/solid-state_qubits/ C12 doesn't have spin, but C13 does. So it can be used for interfacing with diamond qubits.

Quote:
Arenamontanus wrote:
And always remember energy conservation: nanofacturing a bomb requires more energy than it will eventually release.
Unless your nanomanufacturing of the bomb consists of tossing together chemicals that already have the chemical potential energy stored in them; but then, we're talking about explosives. Unless they're so complex you need nanoscale precision to manufacture them, I'd really just recommend taking your Space-Winnebago and some glassware out into the Martian outback and let normal macroscale chemical processes do the job; it'll probably be faster and cheaper.

Well, some things like octanitrocubane will likely not come about from normal chemistry but have to be assembled molecule by molecule by a fabbed specialty-synthesizer. (There is of course all the weird and horrifying chemistry in Things I Won't Work With by Derek Lowe... some of which might be doable with EP-tech and exhuman levels of foolhardiness.)

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