37 replies to this topic

[Masonicon]

What Happens if F-22 Raptor, RAH-66 Comanche, B-2 Spirit, Stryker, M1A2 Abrams, RQ-4 Global Hawk, V-22 Osprey, Foster-Miller TALON SWORDS, SR-X Aurora, RQ-1 Predator, etc are gets augmented with Nanotechnology?

[Jok3r]

What exactly do you mean by "Augmented with Nanotechnology"? Also, the B2, while advanced, is no longer what you can call cutting edge, nor is the Abrams.

[Masonicon]

Swimmer, on 23 Jun 2009, 11:02, said:

What exactly do you mean by "Augmented with Nanotechnology"? Also, the B2, while advanced, is no longer what you can call cutting edge, nor is the Abrams.

I mean Upgraded With Nanotechnology

[Jok3r]

What do you mean upgraded? Nanotechnology has so many applications, both military and civillian, its impossible to discern what way you're talking about "upgrading" these weapons.

[Masonicon]

Swimmer, on 23 Jun 2009, 11:35, said:

What do you mean upgraded? Nanotechnology has so many applications, both military and civillian, its impossible to discern what way you're talking about "upgrading" these weapons.

I mean These Military hardware created with Nanotechnology

[Dauth]

Hi Masonicon, welcome to the forums.

You're going to have to give more detail about nanotech before anyone really responds. What will it do, what will it replace?

[BeefJeRKy]

Masonicon, on 22 Jun 2009, 23:41, said:

Swimmer, on 23 Jun 2009, 11:35, said:

What do you mean upgraded? Nanotechnology has so many applications, both military and civillian, its impossible to discern what way you're talking about "upgrading" these weapons.

I mean These Military hardware created with Nanotechnology

What benefit would Nanotechnology bring? Faster build process? Higher efficiency? You tell us. Nanotechnology is still pretty much a theoretical field right now, so noone can tell you exactly what benefits it would bring.

[partyzanpaulzy]

They will be able to build 1 km tall scysraper in few days
or army brigade in few hours,
cure disease (AIDS, cancer, ebolla) or kill someone as artificial virus,
clean radioactive isotopes or amplify some Nuke leaving same level of radiation like without this twisted upgrade.

Imagine what they could do with human body, cellules, DNA... cure on aging?

On the other side terrorists (even just few people) would be able to get private army larger than that Chinese.

If they went mad, the Terminator series would be fairy tale in comparison
(however don't forget on EMP)
otherwise we all would be one step from the Golden Age.

It's positively affecting schools here:
Technical University in Liberec has famous Nanotechnology Faculty,
Engineering Faculty of Technical University in Brno will have nanotechnology specialization/branch (damn I mean those classes on one faculty of uni),
etc.

I would interest in this more if there were programmable nanites, however these will be very primitive for very long time,
because they are already near:


Project Chobotix:

-international team led by young Czech scientist Doc. František Štěpánek (33 yr old) from Chemical-technological University in Prague
began to work on creation of chemical robots acting like living cellules and capable of getting chemicals into specific place in the body,
so-called inteligent cleaning or distributed diagnosis.

This team consists of talented Czech students, Romanian student (young lady) and young scientists from India and Russia.

Štěpánek got 2 million € and 5 years on this ambitious project and his second Moulton's medal (nobody got two of them before,
he also got this year Philip Leverhulme's Award and Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award).

Google found these pages (I have watched it in TV News):

http://www.vscht.cz/chobotix/News.html

http://lib.bioinfo.p...jects/view/1601

http://erc.europa.eu/index.cfm?fuseaction=...amp;topicID=220

Edited by partyzanpaulzy, 23 June 2009 - 21:36.

[Shirou]

partyzanpaulzy, on 23 Jun 2009, 23:34, said:

... cure on aging?

Aging makes sure we keep our primary weapon against biological factors like disease up to date. ''Cure'' aging and you kill us all, how paradoxal that may be, aging is not a deficiency of the body, in fact your DNA has genes that actually make you age.

[Dauth]

partyzanpaulzy, on 23 Jun 2009, 22:34, said:

They will be able to build 1 km tall scysraper in few days

Really? How? What is the energy source, you still need to get the masonry there. Nanotech isn't the holy grail you know.

[CommanderJB]

The military application of nanotechnology is far too far in the future for us to make any informed projections about it. It is much more likely to see use in the medical sector before all others; using micro-machines to affect changes on a micro level is an awful lot more feasible, and will remain so for the forseeable future, than using them to affect changes to a macro world. It's one of those technologies that has applications we can barely guess at, so to try and make them fit onto military vehicles is a flawed idea at best.
You're probably imagining nanomachines magically repairing damage to a vehicle or absorbing enemy fire (e.g. the Empire of the Rising Sun's support powers in Red Alert 3). You're probably also imagining them assembling things. They won't. You've totally failed to understand the scale on which nanomachines work - it's small. In fact, small is a macro-size understatement. It is so small that the quantity of nanomachines required to build something as simple as a rifle would probably be more than the grains of sand on the Earth's beaches (this is a total guesstimate, but you must understand that at this point the zeroes blend into one another). It's unlikely they'll be able to do this anyway, given that they'd all need to be either connected to a controlling central computer with more processing power than probably the entire Internet combined (and thus all need transmitters and recievers, the wavelength and power of which would be too small for anything to work), or be programmed with memory (too small) and sensors (too small), as well as a method of locomotion (they'll need to be immersed in liquid) and a source of power (electricity? They could grasp electrons - well, all right, no they couldn't, but you get the idea that a battery and a PCB aren't going to cut it). They also need the actual method for manipulating the material involved - if you had a billion nanomachines working at a rate of one molecule a second, you might make a bullet or something in a week. And, as Dauth has already pointed out, they can't just build things out of nothing - all the matter composing the rifle must already exist, and the nanomachines must be able to find, identify, and transport it, and then report its location in any other environment than a manufacturing plant where it's pre-ordered into buckets. The scales - both impossibly small and mind-bogglingly huge - involved are effectively impossible for a human to comprehend, but understand that micro machines will only affect change in a micro world.
If we ever overcome the currently completely insurmountable challenge of making a set of nanomachines that can coordinate to build something, we may see nano-paste or some other substance that can make changes that we can see. But by that time, every single thing on your list will be ancient history.

Edited by CommanderJB, 24 June 2009 - 01:42.

[Masonicon]

How About F-22 Raptor, RAH-66 Comanche, F-35 Lightning II, Stryker, Hovertank, RQ-4 Global Hawk, V-22 Osprey, Foster-Miller TALON SWORDS, SR-X Aurora, RQ-1 Predator, etc?

[Rayburn]

Why are you posting the same enumeration of military vehicles for the third time, buddy? (twice here, once on SWR)
CmdrJB put it best: By the time nanotechnology will have any serious impact, all the Raptors, Lightnings and Strykers will be museum pieces.

Edited by Rayburn, 24 June 2009 - 07:14.

[Dauth]

Rayburn, on 24 Jun 2009, 8:00, said:

Why are you posting the same enumeration of military vehicles for the third time, buddy? (twice here, once on SWR)
CmdrJB put it best: By the time nanotechnology will have any serious impact, all the Raptors, Lightnings and Strykers will be museum pieces.

Maybe did a tl:dr on JB?

Though JB is right in this case. Also more bot like behaviour will see me treat you like a bot.

[Masonicon]

The Nanotechnology that mentioned here refers to anything but Molecular Nanotechnology!.

[Dauth]

The rules of physics still apply.

At a molecular level all you have are molecules, the best you have at that level is an enzyme. Which while very useful, don't go about making tanks or rearming missiles. They turn one biological substance into another. Perhaps one could produce a bio-acid but we're a bit beyond acid warfare.

[CommanderJB]

Dauth, on 24 Jun 2009, 17:30, said:

Rayburn, on 24 Jun 2009, 8:00, said:

Why are you posting the same enumeration of military vehicles for the third time, buddy? (twice here, once on SWR)
CmdrJB put it best: By the time nanotechnology will have any serious impact, all the Raptors, Lightnings and Strykers will be museum pieces.

Maybe did a tl:dr on JB?

Though JB is right in this case. Also more bot like behaviour will see me treat you like a bot.

While I wouldn't blame him if that was right, Dauth, I rather suspect that he found the list somewhere and is using it because he thinks it makes him look like he knows a lot about military technology.

[Zeke]

they would be able to cut through space and time with their cutting edge

[Golan]

Aren't they using nano-technology these days anyways? It's not exactly exotic to have nano-particles and nano-enhanced (is that a proper word?) materials used on all kinds of stuff.

[Masonicon]

Golan, on 25 Jun 2009, 0:56, said:

Aren't they using nano-technology these days anyways? It's not exactly exotic to have nano-particles and nano-enhanced (is that a proper word?) materials used on all kinds of stuff.

All of these fighting machines are Nano-Enhanced.

[CommanderJB]

Masonicon, on 25 Jun 2009, 10:30, said:

Golan, on 25 Jun 2009, 0:56, said:

Aren't they using nano-technology these days anyways? It's not exactly exotic to have nano-particles and nano-enhanced (is that a proper word?) materials used on all kinds of stuff.

All of these fighting machines are Nano-Enhanced.

They aren't and won't be. End of story.

[tank50us]

Nanotechnology, while both possible, and practical, are still 20+ years from ever being implemented into modern tech. Currently, there is research into adaptive armor which changes it's density in milliseconds to stop incoming rounds from penetrating, however this is still in the lab phase as they are trying to work out all of the bugs in the system. Planned applications include the next generation tanks, enabling much lighter tanks to be built with the armor to withstand direct hits from current and projected AT Weapons. However, Adaptive Armor has it's limits, for example: getting hit from multiple directions can considerably weaken the armor, and make the tank more vulnerable to attack, however this can be solved by including an Active Defense System (like ARENA and TROPHY) as standard equipment in order to shoot these projectiles down. Another limitation is with Directed Energy Weapons, which are currently being researched for missile defense, but could be deployed in an Anti-tank role. Lasers would simply cut through the armor, and no matter how dense it becomes, it will not be enough to stop the laser from cutting the tank apart. Also, with Rail-Cannons being researched, Adaptive armor will not react fast enough to stop the round, and even if it did, the kinetic energy alone would cause severe damage to the tank, and severely injure the crew. Remember, the tech tree flows like this...
Measure-> and Counter Measure.

In simple English, it translates to that when someone creates a new weapon (say a new kind of Tank Buster Aircraft), the other side will try to develop a way to kill it (like a new SPAAW, or a better Fighter). So, by the time that someone does implement nanotechnology into the armor of a main battle tank for the purposes of self repair, the other guys will likely find a way to either over load the system (IE, shooting the tank enough times), or disabling the Nanites (EMP).

My two cents

[Golan]

Are you guys talking about nano-machines only? Like nano-bots and the like?

[CommanderJB]

I personally was, yes, as this is the classic interpretation of 'nanotechnology'. It's become something of a buzzword for marketing, and we do have the power to change things precisely and controllably on a minuscule scale (and have ever since the invention of the scanning electron micrograph, and probably earlier), but nothing that I'm aware of that has the tag nanotechnology attached is yet pieces of technology shrunken to a scale of nano- or even micrometres. The vast majority of uses of the prefix 'nano' have nothing to do with an actual nanometric scale, that's for sure.
As for adaptive armour, to the best of my knowledge this has nothing to do with nanomachines or nanotechnology whatsoever; I was always under the impression that it's an application of electrochemistry. Actual nanotechnology is much further than 20 years away from seeing a military application by my best estimate.

[Masonicon]

Again, How About F-22 Raptor, RAH-66 Comanche, F-35 Lightning II, Stryker, Hovertank, RQ-4 Global Hawk, V-22 Osprey, Foster-Miller TALON SWORDS, SR-X Aurora, RQ-1 Predator, etc?