Can a Commander build itself?

How did TA imply that nukes weren't lathed? It required a different facility (hence, it probably required a different lathing PROCESS), but that doesn't mean it wasn't lathed.

You couldn't assist a nuclear silo in TA, and with good reason.

Suggesting that the process the warhead needs to be constructed is beyond what a nano-lathe is capable of.

After all, nuclear material is probably harder to build with nanites then simple alloys and rocket fuel.

I don't see how one leads to the other. You're assuming that that nuke silo didn't have an internal nanolathe. Since we never see anyone or anything bring in uranium, we can only assume it was transferred the same way all material in TA was transfer. Then, it was lathed into a uranium core of a nuke.

This is only my own assumption, but I always thought that nuke creation required a "clean room" environment, hence it's closed environment. A special process, but in the end, it was still created with a nanolathe.

*I say all this besides the fact that un-assistable nukes was entirely a gameplay element.

I didn't try to assume that, what I mean is that, yes the nuke silo did have a Nano-lathe inside to build every part of the rocket, shell, warhead and payload.

But in the process to put the parts together, like the nuclear bomb would require a more delicate process that you can't just do with a nano-lathe.

So you nano-lathe all the parts, then build the delicate and volatile parts manually.

IMO, that doesn't make any more sense. How is putting it together "manually" more delicate than putting it together one nanite at a time? It would make sense if it was constructed in discrete steps though. Say, the uranium core is formed, then the rest is lathed around it from the inside out.

Well if your building it 1 nanite at a time, don't you think nuclear material is a bit...unstable?

My point is that you don't nanite build a nuke because of the problems you get with unstable uranium (I am not a nuclear scientist).

The injection of extra energy could set of the entire weapon inside of the silo.

But my last point is how you actually construct a nuclear weapon? It isn't an easy thing to do, even with 3d-printer guns, and surly you don't print out refined uranium without problems.

Uranium is stable.

Problem with nuclear bombs is not about "make uranium", it's about "clash uranium parts fast enough so they won't melt down". It's about very precise tech of making directed explosions (using normal explosives). Plutonium bomb is even more complex at tech involved.

Uranium itself, as a rock, will not go "boom". As two rocks, if you'll boot one into another, they will just melt down burning everything around, but again, no "boom".

And I shall remind you that plutonium bomb was made by USSR not known for very high tech production. So, making a nuclear warhead is more than possible with nano-technology/nano-lathing. You just need nanites-detonators precisely placed and massive uranium rock.

It's probably not easy (hence why I suppose the clean room environment). Doesn't mean that's not how they do it.

I guess my point in all this is this: everything in the game is nanolathed. Just because we stick a couple of things in a box, why would we assume that they're suddenly not being nanolathed?

The USSR was the first to put a remote control rover on the moon.

Long before the Americans were able to bid such a remote control device, so the technical skill of the USSR was equal to that of the USA.

And as I said, I am not a nuclear scientist, I don't know what process is needed to produce an atomic weapon, but I can bet you it takes more then detonating a uranium rock to split an atom.

I would say about the ability to assist or not would help define its complexity, as even the Krogath can be assist built, even if the suggested problem was primary a gameplay concern.

But in the end, neither of us can be right in such a hypothetical situation.

Ignoring some of the incredibly technical and philosophical view points being thrown around here (sorry flies a little over my head)..

Picture a Commander-class (Commander & Sub-Commander unit)

If machines have already long surpassed their creators it makes sense to hypothesise that Commanders can replicate perfectly within reason (1 commander per planet), so when you want a new commander, as part of the 'transport process' your commander is involved briefly to provide a commander replica for that world.

In order to provide multiple commanders on a planet, a sub-commander unit could be created. Sub-Commanders can only be created by a commander, they have all the abilities of a commander except the ability to create a commander-class units.


So why.. Well Commanders are special and are the 'tactical brain' of a campaign on a planet, there would be one providing orders to all others (machines work in a hierarchy per planet, maybe commanders are hive mind to explain your control of them all).
Secondly, it makes the Commander of a planet important, kill him and your opponent can't create more sub-commanders and has to transport another commander from another controlled planet to replace him which takes time. In the meantime the sub-commanders do the best they can but are a limited resource. aka protect your Commander!

It would lead to some interesting dynamics and tactics, like try to kill the commander and you have a short time to dwindle their forces before back-up arrives.

Yeap, it wasn't exactly same level of tech as for nuclear bomb (in terms of size), but I agree with your point - when it was needed, USSR was able to do things beyond imagination.

Yeap, it's more about smashing one uranium rock with another uranium rock. But blindly fast - that's the problem. In case if plutonium, you can't smash it fast enough, so it should be placed under huge pressure to obtain critical mass, and for that perfect spherical explosion is required with absolutely accurate timings. Any mistake and bomb will just melt down without any explosion at all.

One may provide actually any explanation for this, as it's matter of particular building technology imperfection. But I think that making something unassistable is a bad idea (just for sake of similarity of everything).

But anyway, my point remains - ACU can replicate itself without errors (otherwise it's just dumb), but replication mechanics should be deliverable random to allow evolution of ACUs (that's why we are going to have many ACUs with single unit pool - all units are the same and they do not mutating, but ACUs are mutating).

Considering the speach at the beginning of the trailer, I would imagine that the troops presented to us are the best that the commanders are able to manufacture.

However if commanders could still modify themselves at such a level, we would probably see the use of commanders as the army.

Something else is needed to construct commanders, something that has possibly been lost in time.

Yes, it is very nice when an argument can go full circle and cover every angle. That's the entire premise of an argument. Thanks for noticing.

Who says those techniques are suitable for storing data?

A Commander is not just a robot with a bunch of blueprints. It is itself a blueprint for invasion. Every single feature is dedicated to the cause, from the armament to the stored schematics to down to the atomic scale of every single nanite at its disposal.

Why go through the effort of storing the information that is already there? It is a waste of mass, and the Comm has none to spare. How can you get more perfect than an atom-by-atom description of a Commander? More importantly, how can you store that information itself on an atomic level, without using more atoms than what you started with? (Because if you found a way, go collect your Nobel Prize).

A commander might carry blueprints for specialized fabrication plants. It might carry theories and formulas pertaining to its own design. But there is no better way to capture every single iteration, tweak, and custom detail that went into a Commander's creation than to simply stand in front of a mirror, scan itself, and put that design into the fab. If a Comm suffered atomic change in ANY WAY (radiation, repaired damage, bit decay), then it's going to be part of the new design.

It can't be helped. A Commander is very simply the perfect, no-detail-overlooked schematic for itself. Any change that can't be fixed by self repair is a scar lost to the Commander forever, and every new Comm is going to share that same scar.

Actually, the bulk of chip fabrication is no different than spray painting decals on a car. Saw a cool video on it once. You put a mask on the wafer and spray ions at it. They reflect off the mask and embed into the gaps, building up the entire package layer by layer. There is some redundancy, and small defects can be fixed by precision laser. But I wouldn't really call it a lathe.

The hardest part of a nuke is synthesizing the payload! This is a very difficult process (an entire war was based around it), because separating isotopes is not possible on a chemical level and very difficult on a physical level. The modern method involves using another element entirely, which decays to the exact isotope that we want.

It's reasonable that a difficult method for us would be very easy for a future killbot. But the key factors of a nuke remain the same- refining pure weapon's grade stuff. You can't just spray nanites at that problem, because a machine for making a bomb can not be feasibly made out of pure bomb. Another external device has to prepare the goods.

Nanites are also extremely small and would not be protected from radioactive decay. Exposure might cause them to malfunction or misbehave. Spraying a bunch of potential malfunctions at a nuclear payload just seems like a bad idea, once again making a pure lathing process unfeasible.

A nuclear silo has all the facilities it needs for the synthesis and assembly of a bomb. Anything can lathe a hollow shell and rocket fuel(which takes seconds), but only a nuke facility can synthesize, purify, and assemble the nuke. This has been pretty consistent across all games, and is even a necessary part of game balance.

This is completely contradictory. Either a Commander can make a perfect copy of itself or it can not. I've already provided at least half a dozen reasons it just wouldn't make sense for a Comm go lathe itself. While a facility might be able to produce an exact copy (and no better), there are a large number of reasons why the process can be very involved and slow. Lastly, this is happening in a universe where the solution to anything potentially game changing is to blow the planet up. Comm synthesis(and its mere existence) is the highest threat on that list.

A lot of time and effort, probably. So it could not be done until you find out very resourceful system and conquered it without exhausting. But once you've done it, you should choose between replicating and jumping to other system. If you replicated - your chances for victory doubled, but if enemy find out pure system while that - you chances decreased.

So, I think that it won't lead to ever increasing army of commanders - in 40 players battle only few will survive, so... If there is no replicating, than war would not be endless.

Well it is a galaxy.....and you can recycle.

This is too wrong to let go unchallenged (and considering some of the claims in this thread that's really saying something). The most advanced microprocessors in production today are on 22nm process, not 12, and the production process is nothing like 'layering atoms one by one'. It's called photolithography and involves etching entire 300mm silicon wafers at a time. The smallest features may be measurable in atom counts, but that doesn't mean that's how we build them. We are capable of placing individual atoms (using an atomic force microscope typically, though you could argue some self assembly methods qualify if you want to stretch the definition a little) but it is not in any way a viable method of manufacturing anything beyond stupendously expensive one off technology demonstrations.

On the nuclear weapon question the difficulty is precision. Given that we can produce them with centrifuges and CNC machines build entirely on the macro scale, it's a little bit hard to credit hyper-advanced molecular manufacturing technology being less precise. Though the spontaneous fission of U235 or P239 atoms could make the whole process a little more difficult. Hardening nanites against neutron emission could be rather challenging. And no, weapons grade uranium and plutonium are not in any way stable on the atomic scale - their half-lives are both quite long, but when you're talking about the number of atoms involved in any kind of macroscopic object many of them will decay every second. Still, we just kind of ignore the gradual degradation of the fuels in our nuclear weapons. I can't see any real reason you couldn't do the same when assembling it with molecular manufacturing systems. It'd still work well enough as the amount that would be non-fissile wouldn't be enough to disrupt the chain reaction.

The idea that the product of that sort of technology would be littered with the corpses of the nanites used to construct it is also a bit odd. Do we just embed bulldozers and cranes into our bridges and highways as we go? Admittedly, the nanoscale is different, and as a rapid prototyping system it might not be ridiculous depending on your assumptions (that's always the problem with this sort of discussion, 'depending on your assumptions' you can justify damn near anything). But it seems like it would result in dramatically worse results than if built out of materials actually designed for purpose - and that's just assuming simple materials rather than nanostructured 'active' systems which could offer really incredible new capabilities. Whether the construction speed benefit could ever compensate sufficiently to justify such an approach for producing front line combat units is pretty well unknowable.

TL;DR: We're talking sufficiently soft SF and sufficiently distant time scales from out technology that there's no fluff reason to push Uber in any particular direction. Pretty much any option can be justified well enough if they really want. More likely they'll make decisions on this sort of stuff based on gameplay and not bother providing any explanation close to this detailed.

Samsung is producing 10-nm memory chips (RAM) already.

Photolithography is only first step and even it require placing resisting cover over wafer, which should be done with huge precision - on level of few atoms. Further steps, like ion implanting require even more precise placing of atoms into silicon grid. It's also done by "cheating" (by temperature), yes, but that only says that complex task could be done by simple means sometimes.

Obtaining war-grade uranium/plutonium is an easiest step. And yes, it wasn't always so easy - centrifuges are USSR invention (by Kurchatov, afaik). USA were using very complex and expensive chemical and electrical processes for that.

"Instability" != ("is not equal") "activity". They are active as any other heavy element, but not unstable as some other elements. Both process result in atom destruction, but first one is more "normal" - it's just atom lifetime, while instability is destruction prior atom lifetime. Unstable uranium is a chain reaction.

Yup. That's why restriction for nuclear tests is a bad thing.

Molecular manufacturing systems are actually even more suited for nuclear bomb production.

Idea is that "nanites" are constructing material. It's just small "robots" flying into space, melding with each other and, gotcha, you got the product. Like assembling buildings from pre-manufactured panels. Quite reasonable idea, IMO - you manufacture nanites into safe closed environment and then using them to assemble something into the field.

It's perfect for constructing crude things like tanks and other. Bombs are too, actually - you may assemble a shell and then fill it with uranium.

But discussing such topics is fun . Also, if there is a lot of such ideas (and there is) than you may just pick up matching one for your gameplay decision as explanation.

It's possible the commander is powered by some kind of unobtainium generator gotten from a metal world.

Its also possible that this generator is once of the few things in the galaxy tat can initiate a FTL jump (Thus the reason there aren't space fleet's flying around), this could support the idea that the technology at the disposal of the commanders isn't particularly advanced at all, but is the maximum possible by such technology.

as in, they don't have the tech to build unobtainium generators, but their fusion power plant represent a ultimate and final state of refinement of possible technology.

This also poses the question once the commanders start to learn the tech on metal worlds, how long would the rest of the war last?

Has this came close to happening before?

Did the commanders unite to prevent another from claiming the technology?

No, they just started production on 10nm NAND flash eMMC cards last month. Flash is not RAM, and neither of them are microprocessors. Flash is also easier to manufacture than either, (regular grids of floating gate caps rather than billions of transistors hooked up in an incredibly complicated way to form a multitude of different logic units) which is why the process size is smaller.

Photolithography is the general term for the full process, from cleaning through photoresist application, exposure, developing, etching and photoresist removal. These steps will be repeated many times, and in fact doping via ion implantation is typically controlled by photolithography. But regardless, none of this changes the fact that we do not place anything atom by atom in any form of mass manufacturing. Near atomic precision? Yes. Atom-by-atom deposition? Hell no.

Uh, no, refining weapons grade uranium is actually rather hard. Iran have been trying for years now without success despite having obtained centrifuges which are capable of doing the job. Once you have that a simple gun-style dirty bomb is relatively easy. Going from there to a implosion based plutonium core tritium boosted uranium shell fission-fusion-fission bomb is damn hard, but a basic, low-yield/high-fallout nuclear explosion is easy enough.

Once again, no. Radioactivity is a characteristic of certain unstable isotopes. Atoms of radioactive isotopes (like U235 and P239) spontaneously fission, emitting various subatomic particles as they do which carry away some of their binding energy (E=MC^2 and all that). Not all isotopes of heavy elements are radioactive unless you're defining 'heavy' as only bismuth and higher - calling lead, osmium and gold 'light' seems an odd definition. Talking about the 'lifetime' of an atom makes no sense. If it's not radioactive its lifetime is effectively unlimited unless the electron proves unstable or something similar. If it is radioactive its lifetime is completely unpredictable according to current physics and there are reasons to suspect it is fundamentally unknowable. It can only be estimated in bulk material by statistical methods - that's what a halflife is, the average time it takes for half the atoms in a bulk sample of one specific isotope to decay.

Yeah... We should be free to detonate nuclear weapons just to test...

... That was sort of my point.

Yes yes, I get that, which is why I said it might make sense as a rapid prototyping system depending on your assumptions (you have to assume general purpose assemblers are either incredibly slow or non-viable outside cleanroom environments, but that these 'component' nanites don't suffer from the general purpose assemblers disadvantages - it's not impossible, but it is a bit odd). However no matter your assumptions, you would get vastly superior results by using purpose designed materials, preferably nanostructured 'active' materials, but even passive nanostructured materials should be massively superior to any conventional bulk material.

This is assuming you don't mind your tanks being slower, heavier, less efficient, flimsier, and generally a bit crap compared with what your technology is actually capable of achieving.

As I said, I expect Uber to make these sort of decisions based on gameplay, not speculation about far distant technologies.

Personally I don't see the point on discussing the potential viability of technologies in a distant-future, alternate reality, fantasy universe. Unless the point is to derail what was once an actually interesting and relevant thread. Looking at you nightnord.