NationStates Jolt Archive

The Federation has developed a new technology which was originally designed for ship repairs, but has been modified to be accomodated on Shipyards.

A beam constructs the ship, every single component, arom by atom. The necessary materials are atomized and stored for use by the beam. Travelling in a sweeping motion, many beams are able to construct vessels from a data file.

This process is likely to revolutionize shipbuilding, allowing ships to be completed in a matter of days, or even hours. Hundreds of AI/minimal crew vessels can be completed in a few weeks.

Naturally, the UFGZ Naval Command has ordered 200 ships constructed immediately.

I just want Mekanta to see this...

So pretty much, this thing is like an inkjet printer, except instead of spraying ink on paper, it sprays atoms on a ship, right?

Uh.... kinda... sorta.... but definately a stretch. Have you heard of that 3-D printer that some students at Caltech made? It's sorta like that.

You still have to start with raw matirels.

This would work for solid-state components, but not really for finished ships. Things would still have to be assembled; you can't create something with moving parts like this, because they would, in effect, all be fused together where they touched(and they have to touch; the beam needs a surface to deposit material on).

We've had similar technology for a long time, but it's not readily compatible with certain aspects of our materials technology, and so sees primarily civilian sector application.

That is why multiple beams are used. Using multiple beams, the atoms can be positioned in any way, elimintaing the need for a frame of any kind. As such, most of the ship can be built this way, and using tractor beams and and the said beams can be used to position the peices and to atomically fuse them together. The few parts that cannot be constructed atomically are put in manually, by automated and human crews.

-OOC-

I was going to do something like this until I developed my new armor and engineering method. Then Nanites just seemed like a better idea.

You know what this means for the UFGZ war effort, don't you?

-OOC-
More target practice for Neo-Mekanta.

Heh. More kills for GZ pilots

Hmmph. *Tags for somewhat useless yet intresting technology.*

Useless? It will revolutionize our fleet! Mekanta, this war will never be over if you don't post. So, I may start playing your fleet too... :)

-OOC-
You do and you'll be godmoding. ^_^

OOC: I dont know much about future tech and it's scewiffed physics, but isn't it slower to build ships atom by atom?

Huh, and how long does it take to build the ship? How much does it cost to build the ship? How much does it cost to build the machinery that builds the ship?

-OOC-
Each ship also requires an exponential increase in energy to be created using GZ's method, something I don't think he considered. Not to mention, given the arguement Kanuckistan made, it'll actually decrease efficiency because you STILL have to go in and do work.

Okay, first of all, by using this technology, vessels can be built in days/weeks/months, instead of months/years/decades. Even with the small amount of work needed to be done by robotic/manual means, it cuts the time used by traditional shipbuilding methods exponentially.

Costs are cut because there is not as much need for material processing, fabrication, or manual labor.

And, no. If you can do it quickly, buidling atom by atom is actually better...

.::tag::.

I'd think nanites would be a better option...

This is just as fast as nanites, if not somewhat faster.

Nanomachines versus this method would make for an interesting debate. Personally, I think nanites would be more effective simply because they'd be able to map out the ship first. Of course, you'd have to program that into them, but hell, I'm just guessing.

aquatic life'd get pretty pissed.

This method and nanites are both inferior to standard production. Arranging a ship atom by atom would be terribly slow and unbelievable hard to control. Both with nanites and this beam system. And nanites are so small they'd run out of fuel after doing hardly any work.

It'd be easier and faster just to cast your hull plates the normal way as with the rest of your vehicle parts.

You obviously don't understand how quickly nanites and my beams work. We're talking the technology to build a 600 foot ship in days. DAYS! Fighters can be built in HOURS.

Building vessels in that way can take months. Even years. And nanites don't run on conventional "fuel".

Taken from www.stardestroyers.net from it's Sci-Fi Myths page.

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:

1.

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?
2.

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?
3.

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?
4.

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?
5.

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?
6.

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!
7.

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!
8.

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?

People who propose one-stop "cure-all" solutions usually haven't thought clearly and thoroughly about them; in reality, there is no conceivable advantage in 99% of the applications where nanotechnology disciples would have us use it. Small robots are good for doing small things (eg- killing a cancer cell), but not for doing big things (eg- making an engine block). Moreover, accuracy is a serious problem with any atom-by-atom or molecule-by-molecule manufacturing scheme; whereas an engine block can be easily finished to within close tolerances with large CNC grinding tools, that same block would be nightmarishly difficult to manufacture to the same tolerance using nanobots (to say nothing of the staggering difference in speed and efficiency between casting the block and building it atom by atom with nanobots).

Most of those problems apply to your system too.

Whoever wrote that really never did any research into nanotechnology.


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?

The problem is that he thinks of each nanobot as an autonomous being, instead of just the singular part of a whole that it is. Nanoconstruction would work like a computer, each nanobot being programmed with the end result and what it must do to achieve this.


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?

The human that programs the whole thing into the nanobots decides.


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?

You don't really need to, as the whole thing is programmed in at the beginning, but if you want to, you could run an electric current through them that allows for communication AND a power-supply.


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?

This guy forgets that Nanobots are small enough to climb on individual molecules to get around. They don't combat air currents, they use them when they want to.


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!

I already pointed out why air currents wouldn't effect nanobots, but you have to realize, static discharge will do very little to something that has an electric current running through it anyway.


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!

Need I mention the mighty ant?

Any properly built nanobot would be able to pick up something much smaller and much bigger than it without much effort or energy wasted. Remeber, it's manipulating AMAZINGLY tiny particles. Also, using his hypothetical situation, you could merely place a block of steel or whatever you want to make your ruler out of on the table, program the nanobots, and viola, you suddenly have a bunch of rulers manufactured. No need for carrying.


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?

Simple, it's programmed in beforehand.

Thank you, Industrial Experiment.

I still disagree. It would still be horribly slow to build/carve something atom by atom. You still need some way to tell which nano-bot to go where, they won't just decide on their own. They need to comunicate somehow to even enforce the nano-bot hive mind you describe. How do they get the instructions fromt he computer? How do they act on them once they get them?

I don't find it very plausible.

You don't want to understand is what. Have you heard of radio waves? electic currents in the surrounding air/gas/liquid/medium? Our Quantum Communications? Building atom by atom ensures no faults, no impurities, perfect constuction. The beams can sweep over hundreds of feet in minutes, laying rows of atoms. Nanites do the same thing. They can swing from atom to atom, and with billions of them working together, they can form anything. One nanite lays an atom, another walks over it and places an atom, it's one big wave. I know this sounds really really uncomplicated, but as I said, its late and my nuerons aren't firing properly.

Lets use the ruler example still. Lets say you want to make it out of titanium, and make it 1 molar mass, in the case of titanium about .0479 kg. It will contain 6.02x10^23 atoms.

Now lets say you have 50 trillion nanobots that can move 500,000 atoms to their proper spot, attach them, then return to get more atoms in 1 second.

This means it would take (6.02x10^23 atoms)/((500000 x 50x10^12) atoms/second) to build. We do the math and get 24080 seconds or 6.7 hours to make a 47.9 gram ruler. Why not just stamp it onto a metal rod, that would take under a second, not 6.7 hours.

And I'm being generous. If we have a 10 nanometer diameter sphere as our nanite, with the density of carbon each one masses approx. 1.20x10^-18 g. In this example each on carries 500,000 atoms of titanium, for a mass of 3.98x10^-17 g ((#atoms/atoms in mole) x molar mass).
This means each nanite is carrying 33 times it's own mass. It also means it has the ability to carry 500,000 atoms which is unlikely, have the energy to place them all which is also unlikely, and is fast enough to go grap the new resources go the the site for each of the 500,000 atoms and attach them all in 1 second. I'm being extremely generous here. In real life it would be much much slower and hideously expensive. It's just not worth it.

Two or more beams position thousands/hundreds of thousands of atoms per second. Using hundreds of beams and the already molecularized construction materials, vessels can be built much faster than plasma welding, positioning, etc., which traditional construction methods use.

*edited to fix math*

Two or more beams position thousands/hundreds of thousands of atoms per second

How do you keep the atoms where you put them? If it's in an atmosphere they'll be moved by air currents, they are atoms after all. In a vacuum you don't have that problem, but what about photon radiation, magnetic and electric fields? It'd be amazingly hard to keep those atoms from moving.

And lets look at your setup. Lets say you have 1000 beams depositing 1 million atoms/second. It would take 6.02x10^14 seconds, or 1.67x10^11 hours, or 19,089 millenia to build 1 mole of said material. In the case of Titanium, 47.9 grams. That's tens ofl orders of magnitude slower than the nanites.

Lets take it further and make a 600 foot long ship. If it's a rectangle of 600x200x150 feet, is made of iron, and is 10% solid it will contain approximately 115,973,393.6 moles, 6.982x10^31 atoms. Using the same beams as before we get a time of 6.982x10^22 seconds or 2.21 million billion years.

You call that faster than standard construction methods?

*bump* I want to see GZ's response.

-OOC-
Kee hee... So do I. ^_^

See, this is why for half my tech I just prefer to say 'it works', so long as I'm not putting said tech on a scale where it'd be ridiculous... basic explanations for most things, but I don't personally think it's entirely necessary to go into excrutiating detail on everything I do, normally.

However, one would assume that if he's going to build a ship, and he's using these lasers to do it, he's gonna have a whole lot more than 1,000 of them. If the lasers are operating at a scale that they hit atoms individually to place them, or however it works, then a normal pen-sized laser pointer is going to end up being thousands of times thicker than the lasers used by this process.

Still, I look forward to seeing the answer to this myself...

Did I say seconds? I meant nanoseconds... And, due to composite materials, molecules are positioned also. Your calculations are off, btw :D. Here:

Ateos Prime Orbital Shipbuilding Yards:

300 Sealed Bays
1000 Open Bays

The Beams work in pairs, positioning the atoms and bonding them together (thereyby being unable to "move" away) to form vessel components. 2 beams, being able to position thousands of atoms/molecules per ns, thousands of beams working in unison may produce 30 ft fighters to 2,000 ft vessels much, much more expediently then traditional methods such as this:

The ore/metals/raw materials are mined/produced on planetary bodies. They are then taken to processing facilities, planetary or orbital, and refined and purified. This process may take days to months. Parts must then be fabricated, taking from hours to months. A workforce must be assembled, taking from days to weeks. Parts must be positioned, welded (whatever); systems must be integrated, checks must be performed, taking months to years.

Full time to build a ship: 2-3months to a year or more.

Each bay being equipped with 4,000 emitters, each emitter producing multiple beams, lets say 4, equals 16,000 beams. 16,000x10^8 equals 1 trillion 600 billion atoms per nano second. Going with the Ruler thing, the bay can produce one ruler in 376.25 seconds, or roughly 6 minutes. Much faster than melting the titanium, forming it into a block, and then pressing it in the shape of a ruler, then etching the measurements, etc. Now, if I get it as fast as a attosecond, which is 10^-18 of a second, the ruler could be finished in .00000037625 seconds, being much faster than anything out there.

We all know that Nanotech is much faster than anything else, so why are we even discussing this? The beams do the same things as nanites, positioning atoms. I think Xessmithia is just trying to tear down on my tech... Jealous, are we? :D

Oh, Xessmithia, in case you don't know,

A nanosecond (ns or nsec) is one billionth (10^-9) of a second.

A millisecond (ms or msec) is one thousandth of a second.

A microsecond is one millionth (10^-6) of a second.

A picosecond is one trillionth (10^-12) of a second, or one millionth of a microsecond.

A femtosecond is one millionth of a nanosecond or 10^-15 of a second.

An attosecond is one quintillionth (10^-18) of a second.

-OOC-
Sounds suspiciously like you just changed your story as soon as you heard that.

Maybe he/she/whatever just sees that something like this has a little too much godmoding potential.


And yes, nanites are better if used properly. Mekantan ships are "grown" in a nanite bath. The process is fast, reletively speaking given how much work and time is required to create something as complex as a Mekantan warship. (The only reason Mekanta doesn't lose the arms race is because of the naturally occurring Temporal Expansion of the Nexus. The new Behemoth class Commandship takes roughly 3670 Jazuras, the Mekantan equivalent to a year, to build. But I digress...)

GZ, at least you spell decently and have okay grammar, unlike TFU. It makes it easier to read your post. But something like this will take too much energy to be feasable in the method you're giving.


You're a Treknology nation, kinda, aren't you? Well do something Trekkies rarely do. THINK.

Make parts individually. Now, see, there's this thing called a TRACTOR BEAM. Use it. If you don't have it, trade for it or steal it. Assemble everything that way. Build from the inside out (which you would have to do anyway, more or less,) and materialize parts around the ship, put them in place, and have drones do thier thing.

You'll cut your conventional work time, but you won't seem to be douching it up with tech that seems you're constantly changing whenever a problem comes up with it, and has questionable logic and merit as an idea.

I don't want to seem like an asshole, mate, but you seem like you're trying too hard to match the strength of nations bigger and meaner than you. (IC meaner, that is. I try to be nice OOC, unless the person I'm talking to is being a douche.) You're by no means small, but you have to keep in mind nations like Mekanta, Corpsac, and Central Facehuggeria are really militaristic. CF and Mekanta sacrifice thousands of thier people in the name of progress. (CF for unsafe conditions, and Mekanta because of some systems used in Mekantan ships. It isn't necessary to kill them, it just makes mass production of Enzyme possible.)

Strong Economy, less than a billion. Give it some time, mate.

Unsafe conditions! Pah! Just because we have catwalks that go over open molten steel containers without any form of guardrail doesn't mean our people work in unsafe conditions! :D

Well, if the idea has problems, fix it. So, that's what I did. As soon as I realized how off my previous estimate was, I changed it. However, the whole Idea isn't too horribly off... Simple gravitiational and electical fields can be used in the positioning and bonding of the atoms.

Granted, we don't sacrafice our people for anything other than the survival of the Federation, but over 4,000 people dedicated their lives to research for the UFGZ. Good researchers. Not slaves.

I guess I just don't want to be easily crushed, or too teribly technologically behind the other nations.

BTW, we build from the inside out anyway.

All I hope to get out of this technology is the ability to disband my fleet during times of peace, and then when war approaches, we crank out 800 ships in a month. There are 7 shipyards the same or smaller size as Atheos Prime... They aren't fully military installations...

And, I'm close to a billion...

I do think. Would I have come up with this?

Did I say seconds? I meant nanoseconds...
Suuuuure you did :rolleyes: :p

Anyway I fixed the math on my previous post, it now only takes 2.21 million billion years rather than 133.1 million billion to build that 600x200x150 foot ship.

The ore/metals/raw materials are mined/produced on planetary bodies. They are then taken to processing facilities, planetary or orbital, and refined and purified. This process may take days to months.


Your beams can't make atoms themselves you know. You'd still need to do all of that to get the raw materials for your ships. Didn't you realize that?

Each bay being equipped with 4,000 emitters, each emitter producing multiple beams, lets say 4, equals 16,000 beams. 16,000x10^8 equals 1 trillion 600 billion atoms per nano second. Going with the Ruler thing, the bay can produce one ruler in 376.25 seconds, or roughly 6 minutes

When I did the math I got 37.625 seconds.
My math:

4beams/ emitter * 4000 emmitters = 16,000 beams
16,000 beams * 10^8 atoms/ nanosecond = 1.6x10^13 atoms/nanosecond
1.6x10^13 atoms * 1,000,000,000 ns/s = 1.6x10^22 atoms/second
6.02x10^23/ 1.6x10^22 = 37.625 s/mol

I then figured out the aforementioned 600x200x150 foot ship again.
My math:

600x200x150 feet
18288x6096x4572 cm = 5.097x10^11 cm^3
5.097x10^11 * .1 = 5.097x10^10 cm^3
5.097x10^10/ 7.87g/cm^3 =6,476,534,163 g
6476534163 g / 55.845 g/mol = 115,973,393.6 mol
115,973,393.6 mol * 6.02x10^23 atoms/mol = 6.982x10^31 atoms

As you can see this means the ship contaims 6.982x10^31 atoms. Using your specs we get:
My math:

6.982x10^31 / 1.6x10^22 = 4,363,750,000 seconds


4,363,750,000 seconds to build said ship. This works out to:

My math:

4,363,750,000s / 3600 / 24 / 356 = 138.37 years.



It would take 138.37 years to buld the 600x200x150 foot ship using your stats.

If we use attoseconds instead of nanoseconds we get a time of:

My math:

1.6x10^13 atoms/attosecond
1.6x10^13 x 1x10^18 = 1.6x10^31 atoms/second
6.02x10^23 / 1.6x10^31 = 3.7625x10^-8 seconds/mol
6.982x10^31 / 1.6x10^31 = 4.36375 seconds


A time of 4.3675 seconds to build a 600x200x150 foot 10% solid iron ship. And that as I'm sure you can see is most definately a godmod.

I'm afraid it just won't work.

My math:

4,363,750,000s / 3600 / 24 / 356 = 138.37 years.

Should be

My math:

4,363,750,000s / 3600 / 24 / 365 = 138.37 years.

*bump* again. I really like this topic now :D

Yes, Xessmithia, we still mine. But with beams :D.

Can you figure out the time in Picoseconds? That may be more feasible...

Oh, btw, I guess we'll be adding another 4,000 emitters to each bay...

In my last long post my math was off by an order of magnitude. To fix it just mulitply every final answer by 10 or look at my fixed math below

My Math:

Nanosecond fixed
4beams/ emitter * 4000 emmitters = 16,000 beams
16,000 beams * 10^8 atoms/ nanosecond = 1.6x10^12 atoms/nanosecond
1.6x10^12 atoms * 1,000,000,000 ns/s = 1.6x10^21 atoms/second
6.02x10^23/ 1.6x10^21 = 376.25 s/mol
6.982x10^31/1.6x10^21 = 4.36375x10^10 seconds = 1383.7 years

Attosecond fixed
1.6x10^12 atoms/attosecond
1.6x10^12 x 1x10^18 = 1.6x10^30 atoms/second
6.02x10^23 / 1.6x10^30 = 3.7625x10^-7 seconds/mol
6.982x10^31 / 1.6x10^30 = 43.6375 seconds






Yes, Xessmithia, we still mine. But with beams :D.

Can you figure out the time in Picoseconds? That may be more feasible...

Sure

My math:

Picosecond w 4000 emitters
1.6x10^12 atoms/picosecond
1.6x10^12 * 1x10^12 = 1.6x10^24 atoms/second
6.02x10^23 / 1.6x10^24 = 3.7625x10^-1 sconds/mol
6.982x10^31/ 1.6x10^24 = 43,637,500 seconds
43,637,500 / 3600 / 24 / 365 = 1.38 years

It's about the same length of time as standard production. But would be horribly more energy intensive and horribly more expensive. I'll do the energy calculations later, they're much more complicated than the time ones.

I also did the math for 8000 emitters.

My math:

Nanosecond w 8000 emitters
4 * 8000 = 32,000 beams
32,000 * 1x10^8 = 3.2x10^12 atoms/nanosecond
3.2x10^12 * 1x10^9 = 3.2x10^21 atoms/second
6.02x10^23 / 3.2x10^21 = 188.125 seconds/mol
6.982x10^31 / 3.2x10^21 = 2.182x10^10 seconds
2.182x10^10 / 3600 / 24 / 365 = 691.87 years

Picosecond w 8000 emitters
3.2x10^12 * 1x10^12 = 3.2x10^24 atoms/second
6.02x10^23 / 3.2x10^24 = .188125 secinds/mol
6.982x10^31 / 3.2x10^24 = 21,818,750 seconds
21,818,750 / 3600 / 24 = 252.53 days


I say that the 8000 emitter picosecond is faster, but is a borderline godmod and you'd be better off not using it to be on the safe side.

I really don't understand... there must be some fundamental flaw in your math somewhere... I'll ask Indra Prime next time he's on... I know this technology should be faster...

I really don't understand... there must be some fundamental flaw in your math somewhere... I'll ask Indra Prime next time he's on... I know this technology should be faster...


That'd be good. I'm not perfect and will gladly admit to any mistakes in my math. Like I've done twice so far already :D .


And to see if I can explain this I'll use legos as an example.

I don't know if it still exists but there is/was this lego offshoot for toddlers calle Duplo. It had huge blocks rather than tiny ones. The blocks were varied but I'm going to use the single "bump" pieces from it and lego to compare. These duplo blocks were about 2 inches high and an inch wide. The small flat lego blocks are a lot smaller.

In this example the duplo represents convential pieces like pre-manufactured hull plates, while the lego represents atoms.

Now lets say you want to build a wall 5 inches long, 4 inches high. This would take 10 of the big duplo blocks(prefab hull plates)but hundreds of the small legos (atoms).

As such it would be fast and easy to put the duplo wall together. But it would be a lot harder and slower to but the lego wall together. Even though they're both the same size wall. The advantage of duplo is it's ease and speed, the advantage of lego is that you get it more accurate.

So finishing this, for big things like space ships the duplo(prefab parts) are the better option. While for small things, like microchips, the lego(atoms) are the better option.

Does that make it clearer?

A skilled Lego builder can build a wall very fast. Imagine it as being 8,000 skilled, fast constructors.

And someone equally skilled with Duplo could build even faster. Prefabs would be liked skilled duplo users (I doubt they exist.)

By the way Xessmithia, nice analogy. *hands you a sweet cuppin' cake, and readies ten extra points if you know where I stole that from*

I don't think nanospray works. It worked in total annihilation, but that's a game. As is this.... but it was less realistic.

A skilled Lego builder can build a wall very fast. Imagine it as being 8,000 skilled, fast constructors.

Then you need to pay each constructor, feed them and so on. Which vastly increases the cost to build it and the amounts of energy needed. You can do it, but it won't be cheap.

And someone equally skilled with Duplo could build even faster. Prefabs would be liked skilled duplo users (I doubt they exist.)

By the way Xessmithia, nice analogy. *hands you a sweet cuppin' cake, and readies ten extra points if you know where I stole that from*

I don't think nanospray works. It worked in total annihilation, but that's a game. As is this.... but it was less realistic.

Thanks :) And no Ii don't know where you stole that from :p

...Medival ages were so less complicated....

W/e btw I think that one atom at a time is kind of unnnesesary(sp?). To make things faster you should have it like 20-100 atoms at a time. 20-100 atoms is still barely visable

Germanische Zustande, how far away from the "build site" are your emitters in meters?