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All the time.

2 (13.3%)

Sometimes.

9 (60%)

Only when there's a new release.

2 (13.3%)

Never. ((get out))

2 (13.3%)

Total Members Voted: 13

[PrivateNomad]

Oh boy
both sound really juicy...

[USEC_OFFICER]

Oh god

Angst

There's only one thing that can cure this

Super Robot Wars

_{or similar franchises. Patent pending}

First Thought: Aw yes, SWR. Awesome.

Second Thought: Steel Beowolf? Not what I would have gone with, but I suppose it fits, and those guitars...

weren't we going to refit Dalias ability do do a percentage oriented debuff?


like 10% for small, then 20%, 30%, 40% etc?

Yeah, but I'm still thinking about it. Plus I would love to debuff multiple stats at the same time. I was thinking about something like... 1 25%, 2 25%, 3 25% OR 1 50%, 4 25% OR 1 50% + 1 25%, etc.

[Rolepgeek]

*facepalm*

Guys were you not paying attention when I originally talked about this stuff?

He was the 'real' Zeus. And the 'real' Thor. He didn't just go off impersonating gods; he was worshipped as those gods.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Except those gods also exist and are independent from Manibasdfaskfdjsalfkjas;ldfjs;dlkfja;lsdfj;toolazytochecktherealspelling. They were in V2 and you can't really override that, sorry.

[PrivateNomad]

Except those gods also exist and are independent from Manibasdfaskfdjsalfkjas;ldfjs;dlkfja;lsdfj;toolazytochecktherealspelling. They were in V2 and you can't really override that, sorry.

[IamanElfCollaborator]

Except those gods also exist and are independent from Manibasdfaskfdjsalfkjas;ldfjs;dlkfja;lsdfj;toolazytochecktherealspelling. They were in V2 and you can't really override that, sorry.

[Akroma]

why does everything has to be divine anyway?


why can't Core be some alien technology, no, it's the god of nanomachines

[IamanElfCollaborator]

Because fuck sci-fi, everything is magical. Yes.

To be fair, even the ROBOTS are magical.

[Empiricist]

why does everything has to be divine anyway?


why can't Core be some alien technology, no, it's the god of nanomachines

Because no one here is remotely qualified to make actual, functional technology. Not to mention that statistically speaking, chances are that most forms of alien life are quite different, possibly not even recognizable as life let alone interested in creation of the same technology as humans. Calling it alien technology is far from the end of a discussion, it is merely the start of it. Furthermore, nanomachines have a significant issues and numerous considerations that have to be addressed:

Nanotechnology is often touted as a catch-all solution for everything. As with bio-technology, it undoubtedly has its uses, and those uses may have widespread and profound (some say dangerous) implications for society. But again, as with organics, nanotechnology is delicate and limited in many ways. That's not to say the idea is useless, but I've seen a lot of people with zero experience in manufacturing techniques making ludicrous pronouncements about how all manufacturing will eventually be based on nanotechnology. The word "conventional" seems to be synonymous with "primitive" and "inefficient" in the minds of many, and so we often hear about how we will someday transition from "conventional manufacturing techniques" to nanotechnology.

This idea comes from the fact that nanotech "grows" things, and it's related to the conceit that it's always better to grow than build (of course, since we grow, and we're supposedly the pinnacle of creation; see creationist conceit). In reality, manufacturing techniques based on growth rather than conventional fabrication suffer from many serious weaknesses, just as we do. Manufacturing rates are low, and tolerances are loose. For all the talk about the precision of the human body, its gross manufacturing tolerances leave something to be desired. In fact, most humans have one leg slightly longer than the other (along with other assorted imbalances), and one might not even realize that one has an imbalance until the length difference exceeds one inch!
Manufacturing Speed and Accuracy

Nanotechnology disciples tend to talk about the wonders of building something "molecule by molecule", as if this would make all manufacturing cheap and near-instantaneous. However, they never ask the looming question: what's so great about building something molecule by molecule? Do they realize that such microscopically incremental manufacturing techniques already exist?

Electroplate growth manufacturing techniques are real. They build items atom by atom, and the result has exceptional chemical and microstructural purity as well as the ability to produce highly accurate and complex shapes (on one side; the other side looks like hell). However, they are ridiculously slow, which makes them ridiculously expensive (I still remember the first time I picked up a piece; it was smaller than a tape measure and its price tag was in the tens of thousands of dollars). This is not a problem which will magically go away; many years of development have not resulted in significant improvements in speed. Similarly, nickel-vapour deposition technology constructs a metallic form atom by atom by depositing nickel carbonyl vapour onto heated tooling, and again, the principal drawback is low speed and lousy accuracy on the side opposite the tooling (not to mention inapplicability to other base metals and some annoying geometric constraints which I won't bore you with; just trust me when I say that from my experience, it can be a real pain in the ass). The same is true of laser-based rapid-prototyping technologies, which are not only slow and expensive but also limited to weak plastic items.

Nanobots would most likely be even slower than the aforementioned technologies; electroplating and nickel vapour deposition pour on atoms as quickly as they can bond to the underlying material, and nanobots would only add complexity to this process. Accuracy is also a serious problem. Let's say you have a 100,000 nanobots, and you want to make a six-inch metallic ruler. Nothing complicated, right? A simple ruler, with the usual hatch marks for length measurement. Obviously, you want it to be flat and square. Now, you turn your nanobots loose. Presto, they whip up a perfect ruler for you, right? Because they grow it molecule by molecule, it's really slow but it's easy and it's dimensionally perfect, right? Ummmm ...

OK, let's look at this from the perspective of nanobot #1. Just to be generous, let's visualize the nanobot as a tiny little worker spacecraft that you control, so it has your human intelligence (rather optimistic for a nanobot, but I am trying to be generous). Your objective is to help the other 99,999 nanobots build a ruler, but from your perspective (inside a 10 micron wide nanobot, so you've been shrunk to roughly 1/200000 your original size), this six inch ruler is more than thirty kilometres long! Worse yet, there are some serious logistical problems to work out:

    How do you co-ordinate your activities with the pilots of the other nanobots? Is there a commander nanobot? Are there middle manager nanobots? Who assigns nanobots to which part of the ruler?

    How do you know where to start, ie- how do you decide where one end of the ruler is going to be, and where the other end is going to be?

    How do you communicate with the other nanobots? Radio transmissions? How do you communicate clearly with tens of thousands of other nanobots simultaneously? How do you align your movements with theirs? How do you plan?

    How much fuel do you carry? That little nanobot vehicle of yours doesn't run on the power of positive thinking, so how much work can it do on a full tank? Where and how do you refuel? How long does it take you to refuel?

    What is your propulsion system? You're not getting a free ride in someone's bloodstream like the sort of nanobot which looks for cancerous cells (a more sensible application of nanotechnology), so how do you maneuver about on the manufacturing table in order to help assemble this ruler? How do you jet up into the air to get on top of it if you need to? How much power do you have to combat gravity and air currents?

    How do you deal with lost nanobots? In a normal manufacturing environment, air currents, static discharge, and other environmental disturbances could easily blow a nanobot out of the group or seriously damage it. Does the plan adjust automatically for worker turnover? Or must this ruler be manufactured in a vacuum-sealed clean-room environment? This is rapidly shaping up to be a ridiculously expensive ruler!

    How much payload can you carry? If you're grabbing molecules or tiny particles and attaching them to this ruler, where do you get them from? How many can you carry per trip? How much energy does it take to weld each chunk of metal to the ruler? Do you realize that if you use larger particles per trip, the resulting ruler will have greater porosity? What are you going to do, weld molten metal into the gaps? Consider the energy costs of doing that!

    How do you assure dimensional accuracy of the overall ruler? The nanobot working on the other end of the ruler is (as far as you're concerned) more than 30 kilometres away, remember? How do you know he's not higher than you are? Do you set up a laser-based perimeter system in order to confine your activities within simple geometric bounds? If so, how do you make more complex shapes than a flat ruler? Do you use tooling in order to confine your activities? If so, what conceivable advantage does this process have over simple die-casting?

Hmmm ... a bit more complicated than we thought, eh? And this starts from the assumption that each nanobot is as intelligent as a human being, which is ridiculously optimistic. Now let's compare this to the "primitive" conventional method of making a flat ruler. Pour some metal into a die, wait for it to cool, and you're done. Alternatively, take a strip of metal, put into a stamping press, hit the green button and BANG! One stamped-steel ruler. Do you still think all manufacturing will be replaced by nanotechnology once we work the bugs out?

"But humans are grown, and that works, so you're making it sound harder than it is!" some may protest. But they would be missing the point. As mentioned previously, our manufacturing accuracy leaves something to be desired, and is well below the standards expected of machined parts. A $1 compact disc is manufactured with tighter tolerances than the human body, which can't even make two arms, two legs, two eyes, or two of anything which match to within what a typical manufacturer would consider tight tolerances. Moreover, initial growth stages must take place in a special environment (the womb), so the process doesn't work on a table in the middle of a factory. A constant stream of nutrients (ie- fuel) must be fed into the body so it can grow itself. And what about speed? It takes approximately 16-18 years to manufacture a mature human being, remember? If it took that long to make a car, would you wait? What about waste? A human being will emit more than 1E10 joules of waste heat before it is mature, in addition to producing some 5,000 litres of urine and several hundred kilograms of feces (dry weight), all while consuming enormous amounts of both solid and liquid nutrients and burning them at 25% efficiency. Is this really a manufacturing model that we want to emulate for industry?

...

How much energy (ie- fuel) does it take for a nanobot to manufacture a duplicate of itself? What special tools would it require in order to do this, and how would the inclusion of those tools increase its expense and size? How would they affect its ability to perform its primary function? Remember that unlike a bacterium, it's not made from organic materials. It needs refined metals and other specialized raw materials, but where is it going to find them? How much travelling would it have to do in search of those materials, and how much energy will this take? How is it going to fuel up the nanobot that it just made, given that it probably used up its reserves in order to build it? Is it going to replenish from solar power? If so, how will it work at night, indoors, on overcast days, or inside a human body? How long will it last under increased ultraviolet radiation (which does more than merely cause skin cancer; it actually breaks up chemical bonds over time, which is why it bleaches paint and destroys plastic) if it must remain exposed to direct sunlight in order to function? Do you remember the effect of microscopic size on vulnerability to radiation?

Moreover, the idea of nanobot self-replication also opens up a huge can of worms from a safety perspective, and I think it highly unlikely that any reasonable person would take the risk. Anything less than 100% perfect replication opens up the possibility of evolution over multiple generations, and I don't think I need to explain the dangers inherent in an evolving species of nanobot, not only to its victims but also potentially to its inventors.

Artistic license being applied to that to ignore such issues would be tantamount to artistic license allowing cancer to be safely cured via a flaming chainsaw to the head.

[Akroma]

tl;dr

[IamanElfCollaborator]

Nanotech is serious voodoo nobody really understands or cares about enough to research for the purpose of an RP, except if it's truly essential (ER), which, as it's a magical girl RP, doesn't really apply to RotMG.

[Empiricist]

Correct, but why even bother then? Why masquerade under some utterly pathetic pretense of science fiction if fantasy explanations do exist? It is clearly fantasy, so why not just allow it to take it's place in that by designating CORE as some sort of supernatural entity?

[IamanElfCollaborator]

*shrug* I don't know, I didn't make that character.

[Empiricist]

*shrug* I don't know, I didn't make that character.

Actually my point was to answer @Akroma and to indicate that @SmufingtonTheThird is doing precisely that since he's saying that CORE is a god thereby removing all the messy details of alien nanotech

[Akroma]

my problem was not "why is core and maberius supernatural" but "divine"

why do they have to be gods? PCs should not be gods