Re: Nanotechnology [increasingly OT]

At 7:48 AM +0100 12/6/01, K.H.Ranitzsch wrote:
>Tanks and powered armor would
>  > quickly become irrelevant; one man with some utility fog
>>  (http://www.wildirisdesign.com/nano/ufog.html) would be close to
>>  invulnerable to anything Dirtside has to offer short of a direct
>>  nuclear strike, and would be able to singlehandedly level a sizeable
>>  city.  This is just one example.
>
>To make a whole city you still need a lot of material that oyu have to
get
>from somewhere.

Note that I said level (i.e., destroy) a city, not create... but if 
you want to build a city using nanotech, the material is there to be 
used (assuming you're on the surface of a planet or asteroid).	And I 
should probably specify that a man with utility fog could destroy a 
city built with modern or near-future construction techniques; a city 
built with nanotech would be a bit more difficult.

>And the proverbial "Speeding Bullet" would pack enough
>energy to make a sizeable hole in a U-fog "Solid".

Not if there was enough U-fog.	Say you have a sizeable volume of the 
fog, maybe a 30-meter-radius sphere of it.  Assuming you stand in the 
center of it at all times, that's thirty meters of material that can 
become harder than steel instantaneously, surrounding you on all 
sides.	I'd imagine that would stop most speeding bullets, as long as 
those bullets weren't fitted with countermeasures of some sort.  And 
a military-grade utility fog would probably be a lot larger, denser, 
and more resistant to countermeasures than the average civilian 
variety.

Mind you, this is purely speculation on my part.  I imagine even the 
experts will have a hard time saying for certain what utility fog 
will or won't be capable of doing until someone actually creates 
some, if anyone ever does.  And not being any sort of expert myself, 
I'm not going to argue what will and will not be possible with 
nanotechnology.  My point throughout this thread is that 
nanotechnology, as most of the experts describe it, is outside the 
scope of GZG's games; you'd be better off using Champions or 
something like that.

-- 
I am Shig the Unmentionable	   Peace and Justice	  
      and I have spoken.