It’s so sad seeing a ship go to the breakers. Sad, but necessary. Modern commercial ships are built around their engines (big frackin’ diesel, one each), and when that engine cannot be maintained in-place, it makes economic sense to scrap the ship and build a new one.

What if a ship could repair itself like biological organisms do? What if they could extract from seawater the elements they need to synthesize repair material? Even farther out, what if they could extract from seawater the fuel for their reactors?

What about a ship that wandered the oceans harvesting the debris of human technology, rendering it back to usable feedstocks? Microfibers and microspheres could be reaped along with the plastic from the (semi-mythical) Pacific whirlpool.

What kind of main propulsion engine could be built that incorporated nanotech repair bots in its lubricant stream, and what kind of indicators could be built into the wearing surfaces that the nanobots could recognize and respond to?

Posted by: thornharp at 06:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 163 words, total size 1 kb.