Most of the good stuff is already done plausibly by what is nominally cyberware (eg toxin extractors, etc), or done far more efficiently by bioware.[/QUOTE]
Arguably the best thing about nanites is you do not have to worry about rejection or side effects. They would fit really well into mass production manufacturing, which means a low cost and availability.
Actually, you would. Nanites are around the same size as bacteria or virii, and your body certainly has an immune reaction against them. In many cases it's not a toxin produced by the bacteria that kills you, but rather the hyperactive immune response of your body. Think about a mis-matched blood transfusion. Same too with splinters and transplanted organs on a larger scale.
The immune system rejection problem is one of the things that's taken as tacitly accomplished in order for nanites to work.... but because it's tacitly assumed in the game world doesn't mean it's not a problem.
[QUOTE]What book? [/QUOTE]
Man and Machine
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The latter was put in deliberately to discourage future authors from writing (more) nanotech that was stupidly over-powerful.[/QUOTE]
the pessimist in me finds this extremely ironic, when you have immortal elves and dragons that level cities. [/QUOTE]
...and Artificial Intelligence....and Mana Storms... and world altering Ghost Dance magic.
Heh, point taken.
Speaking personally though, I would have liked to see a bit less of that in times past.. and have seen a few IEs and Dragons get vapped, if nothing else to clear the landscape from all the clutter.
I could get into a big philosophical discussion about it all (Shadowrun isn't about invulnerability and draconic politics, IMHO), but really it comes down to taste and style: Some people want to play characters that struggle against oppression, other people want ultra powerful Move-by-Wire chromed to the eyeballs Troll Sammies and initiate Elven Physical Mages. The latter outweigh the former, in writing as well as playing.
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Self replication is emphatically 'out'. Even if it was possible - power and raw materials are huge limitations, it's not something I'd want to see in any cyberpunk game. Too easy to die and not enough on the human scale.[/QUOTE]
The resources are readily available, both in the host and in nature. It would probably mean that the host would wind up consuming a great deal more iron, sugars, carbon and other raw materials, but they are definitely available. [/QUOTE]
Your body goes to an immense amount of effort to try and screen out metals. It's possible, to get heavy metal poisoning from buildup of things like Zinc and Iron, which
do find a use in the body in things like Haemoglobin and Cytochrome oxidase. Usually it happens via genetic defect - things like Wilsons disease and hyper-thalassemia. Metals make up about 1 thousandth of a percent of body mass, and
all the stuff that is there is all bound up in enzymes as their catalytic centers.
You could theoretically overcome that with something that picks up iron and other metals from the digestive system, but it's going to have to do something other than put it into the bloodstream because it'd poison you.
The big limitation is energy. Changing Aluminium to Aluminium Oxide liberates a hell-of-a-lot of energy - It's the basis of the Thermite reaction. Changing it back requires just as much....they build entire power stations specifically to do that: Bauxite to Aluminium. That's what synthesis is about; breaking and forming chemical bonds. The same happens with carbon: Graphite and diamond are allotropes, but to change on to the other usually requires thousands of atmospheres of pressure and furnace temperatures.
Things like buckytubes and diamond and pure metals are what nanites are all about. Pure metals oxidise (corrode or rust) - with the sole exception of gold. Carbon for building nanites would start from as close to the finished product as possible; buckytubes rather than methanol. It's construction and assembly rather than synthesis, really.
It is theoretically possible to build any chemical in the world from methanol via a sequence of snythetic steps...but we don't, for the simple reason that the energy costs are so damned prohibitive. There is simply no way you could feasibly get enough energy to run a nanite synthesis factory in the body starting from things like sugars. You'd need about fifty dedicated and specialised synthetic steps to make whatever chemical you needed, most of them requiring high pressure, and the energy cost would be so great that you'd find it unsustainable.
Or you use biological enzymes... but no enzyme in the world is going to churn out bucktubes or graphitic carbon sheets.
By the way, there is a nanite synethesis factory in the body, of a sort: It's called bone marrow, testes / ovaries, etc etc etc. These things all produce functional autonomous units of a sort, but they don't do it in the same way as nanites are described. It's biology and biochemistry. In all probability the most feasible way that nanotech will be actually realised is by hijacking some array of biological processes... but that means you don't have the convenient boxes to describe things with like 'genetech' or 'cyberware' or 'bioware'.
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The biggest thing to keep in mind about Nanotech is that it should be freakishly expensive. Cutters exist (grudingly), but if the corporation you're running against is willing to plough 20K into a dose to maybe kill you, then you're sure as hell playing in the big leagues.[/QUOTE]
For game balance reasons? I think after gameplay everything scales to the GM's desire. Money, availability, etc. If more nanites were introduced into gameplay, they could be post chargen.[QUOTE]
True enough. You can do whatever you want in the game.... people run all kinds of house rules, some of which I'd never want to see introduced into the main game for balance reasons.
My main argument about hyper-nanotech is suspension of disbelief - a critical factor in effective storytelling, in movies and books alike. Basically, for me, the test 'it it plausible or rationalisable' is a big thing.
(Which makes it all the more ironic in a game that fuses magic and technology

)