Printable Version of Topic

Click here to view this topic in its original format

Dumpshock Forums _ Shadowrun _ It's too bad he didn't call it ruthenium

Posted by: TheCat Jun 14 2004, 11:56 AM

Someone made an http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3791795.stm.

Posted by: Neon Tiger Jun 14 2004, 01:18 PM

So we've got ruthenium, monofilament line, dikote, pocket secretaries and stealth ships. What's next?´Datajacks? (Yay, let's plug our brain's to electric equipment!) Hell, I'll just wait to 2011 and see if I happen to Awaken. ;D

Posted by: BitBasher Jun 14 2004, 03:51 PM

It's BS and faked. it only works from one specific angle, and uses a camera to take the picture that's overlayed on the suit. Read the fine print, it's not even close to the same thing functionally.

Posted by: Misfit Toy Jun 14 2004, 04:05 PM

Except that's close to what Ruthenium does. The only major differences are that 1) ruthenium treatments come with a minimum of four cameras while his only has one and 2) ruthenium is a color-shifting material, not a television screen-like material.

I remember reading an article a couple of years ago about how a (I think it was) ruthenium-osmium composite allowed for color-shifting. The only problem was that it was slow (photovoltaic chameleon paint-slow) and that it would take remarkable processing power and electronic know-how to get the proper electric charge to each segment of such a material in order to allow for intricate patterns to be formed.

I guess the latter is the reason the stuff is so bloody expensive in the game.

Posted by: BitBasher Jun 14 2004, 04:11 PM

Actually no, Ruth Poly works in real time from any angle impossibly distorting perspective to work from wherever you happen to be standing, even if you move. It looks the same in the samply movie but in reality Ruth Poly is infinitely more complex. In fact, Ruth Poly cannot really work as presented in the book, but people tend to ignore that.

Posted by: Misfit Toy Jun 14 2004, 04:16 PM

Once again, no. It's just a more intricate form of what the guy has up above; multiple cameras projecting through multiple layers of the same material. If you only had one camera on a ruthenium suit, you're TN to be spotted would only increase by +1, easily reflecting the fact that it's only working from one angle. The more cameras you add, the more angles are covered as the display becomes more complex.

If you take ruthenium-osmium, this guy's conecpt, and blend both of them together with the concept used in those cheesy holographic cards that shift when you change your angle, then advance it by 60 years of technology which also included major advancements in nanotechnology, you wind up with ruthenium polymers.

Sure, there's no way it would beat invisibility in "the real world" (even though ruthenium trumps even total darkness by imposing up to a +12 TN penalty -- go figure), but it's not as outrageous as a lot of other things in the setting.

Posted by: Adarael Jun 15 2004, 10:05 PM

To say that something 'cannot work' is to suggest that the power of human ingenuity is somehow limited to the imagination of one individual.

200 years ago, human flight was 'impossible.'
100 years ago, travelling faster than 60 miles per hour was 'impossible.'
50 years ago, having a pocket computer was 'impossible.'
10 years ago, altering the speed of light was 'impossible.'

Impossibility is merely a measurement of insufficiently advanced thinking and execution.

Posted by: Method Jun 15 2004, 11:07 PM

QUOTE (Neon Tiger)

What's next? Datajacks? (Yay, let's plug our brain's to electric equipment!)

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/fun.games/06/15/video.mindgames.reut/index.html

Posted by: chronophasiac Jun 15 2004, 11:09 PM

QUOTE (Adarael)

10 years ago, altering the speed of light was 'impossible.'

Impossibility is merely a measurement of insufficiently advanced thinking and execution.

Hmm...actually the speed of light has been known to be variable since the late 1800's. Every time you look throught water or any kind of refractive matter you're seeing distortion because light is being slowed down. It was theorized and later confirmed in the 1800's that the speed of light is dependant upon its medium. The commonly quoted speed of 186,000 miles per second is the speed of light in *vacuum*. In air or water or glass it is measurably slower (about 1/3 slower). In a Bose-Einstein condensate (I think this is what you're mistakenly referring to), it is almost a standstill (38 mph).

Regarding invisibility, there was a very good article in a recent Scientific American about how active camouflage can work. In a nutshell, the most primitive way to achieve a level of invisibility is a responsive display surface and camera mounted on opposite sides of a fairly regular solid. This seems closest to what ruthenium is described as. The problems are: 1. humans are *not* fairly regular solids. *at all*. 2. you can only camouflage yourself from one point of view at a time. 3. If this is built into clothing, how do you take wrinkles and creases into consideration? Clothes are constantly changing position relative to the wearer.

A more advanced system would use billions of microscopic fish-eye lenses connected to equally small projectors to display the corrected image. This makes the active camouflage effective against more than one viewer at a time. A *much* more advanced system, not mentioned in the article, could consist of molecular nanotech-based lasers, each smaller than a skin cell, covering the surface of a user. Such an array of lasers could realtime-holograph a corrected image, painting the picture of the scenery opposite that laser wavefront by wavefront, a few photons at a time. This systems has the added bonus that you *don't even cast a shadow*.

Regardless of the active camouflage scheme, there are a couple of big problems they all have in common. The brightness of a midday sun is incredibly intense. To mimick this luminousity, an active camo display would have to dissipate huge quantities of energy. Consider the difference between an electric arc lamp and the sun. Clearly the camouflage would have to burn even hotter than the arc lamp to generate sufficient luminousity. You're also going to run into computational problems, again you're dissipating too much energy. The end result is a cloak that is nearly transparent in the visible spectrum but is incredibly bright to IR imagers. Very advanced molecular nanotechnology may lessen these problems considerably. However, thermodynamics states that active camo will always be dissipating more energy than the background in one wavelength or another. No matter how advanced your tech is, the only fix to this problem is temporary at best: a big 'ol heatsink to store the energy for later dissipation.

Posted by: snowRaven Jun 15 2004, 11:38 PM

QUOTE (Method @ Jun 16 2004, 01:07 AM)

QUOTE (Neon Tiger)

What's next? Datajacks? (Yay, let's plug our brain's to electric equipment!)

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/fun.games/06/15/video.mindgames.reut/index.html

Actually, that would be a halfway between a trode-rig and a datajack, more or less. http://www.kevinwarwick.com has the 'real stuff' and has done all kinds of stuff with it (basically, his implant is something of a combination datajack/vcr/simlink - all on the experimental level, of course)

Posted by: Adarael Jun 15 2004, 11:44 PM

QUOTE

I could've sworn it was 32.7 miles per hour, but I'm not a physicist, so hey.

I didn't mean 'impossible' to science - there's always someone who thinks it's probably possible, eventually. I meant by conventional wisdom and the science that the average citizen believes in.

Posted by: Panzergeist Jun 16 2004, 12:15 PM

Scientists have actually frozen light coompletely in place within the last few years. They got light to stay put in a cloud of Sodium ions. Also, it is possible to alter the speed of light in a vacuum. In fact, according to string theory, all physical "constants" are actually variable, so you could change the gravitational constant, Planck length, or any other thing.

Posted by: KarmaInferno Jun 16 2004, 03:46 PM

You too can make a invisibility cloak!

Get a projector, a camera, and a white shirt.

Stand in front of projector.

Hold camera on side of you opposite of projector.

Run signal from camera to projector.

Invisibility for everyone!

The only new thing is he came up with a better cloth material to display the projected image on.

-np