Velan Drones

Excerpts from Introduction to Xenology by A. Segin, O23 (2188 CE) Chandrasekhar University Press. Translation notes by Junko Ishiwara, Tensai Naval College

Introduction

Nearly one hundred million orbits (tl: 500,000,000 years) ago, life emerged from the oceans onto exposed and barren rock. It seemed a cruel and absurd place to live, but it was a necessary part of achieving the next step in development, of overcoming animal instinct and building a new world of faith and reason.

So it is with us today. Mankind has begun to use those two tools to lift himself from the comfortable but entrapping cradle of his birth into the new world beyond. It falls to us to continue this work and bring him yet another step closer to union with the Divine. The challenges facing us are enormously greater than those that faced our distant ancestors on old Earth, but we have three advantages that they did not: The tools of faith and reason with which to build, and the privilege of access to those that already live in the world we seek to reach.

To be a xenologist is not just to develop new weapons for our soldiers, or new techniques for construction. It is a sacred duty to the forefathers that gave us the blessed life we have and the successors who will pass beyond us into the next world. It is a profound honour that places one in the presence of those who live closer to the Divine than we have ever touched. It is both scientific field and religious commission, the union of faith and reason and the gateway to ascension.

This book gives a broad introductory treatment to the biology and ecology of Velan drones.

Drone Biology

Velan drones are often called 'life-mimicking', though it is simpler and rather liberating to simply call them 'alive'. They have blood and organs, complex nanoscale structures performing macroscale tasks, self-growth and self-repair. They have biological cycles and reproductive systems. They are, if not life, something to be treated with the same reverence. It is a reverence that befits them, as the study of Velan technology is been a central strut of Minkowski's power and continued growth today. But despite this importance it remains poorly understood. Drone biology has been a topic of empirical study for a fraction of the time of that of humans, and is far more sophisticated than the weak flesh needed to survive on a balmy cradle like Earth. All the fragments of 'xenotech' found in our fleets and factories are the simplistic vanguard of a mass of enigmas at best irreproducible and at worst completely opaque. Digging into this mass will not just provide new practical technology, but will push back the frontiers of our understanding of the universe.

Nanomachines

Nanomachines are perhaps the iconic element of xenotechnology, even more than plasma weaponry. Every drone or drone structure contains many trillions of machines which together form a viscous fluid called gel, frequently analogised as the drone's 'blood'. This gel permeates the entire structure and is responsible for constructing all the drone's systems. Drones begin their life as an egg filled with nanomachines, and end it when their gel turns dead and useless, good only for recycling into the bodies of the young.

Mechanocytes

The fundamental element of drone technology is the mechanocyte, also called a 'drexler'. Mechanocytes are 10^-9m-scale molecular machines, consisting of six effectors arranged at right-angles around a control and power core. Each effector can act as an atomic manipulator, connect to another effector to exchange energy and commands, or reject all connections and allow the mechanocyte to move freely. This ability to select connections means the viscosity and conductivity of mechanocyte gel can change drastically as required, and control of temperature expansion and electrostatic potentials in the gel enables it to move autonomously if free from external pumping.

It is rare for a task to be performed by a single mechanocyte. For most functions, thousands or even billions of nanomachines will link together to create a computing network and factory floor, often going on to construct, control and then dismantle an intermediary device that performs the work itself. This degree of emergent and flexible computing, especially in such small machines, is far beyond modern human technology and the clearest indicator of how far it is we still have to go before we can match our forebears.

Mechanocytes, importantly, can reproduce. Groups as small as a ten machines have been observed to be able to autonomously construct new ones given access to materials. Fortunately for those who worked with xenotechnology before mechanocytes were properly understood, this process is too inefficient to lead to 'grey goo' disaster scenarios outside of certain special situations (for a limited and comparatively harmless example, see 'bugs' in the chapter on exotic strains).

Nuclei

Mixed in with the mechanocytes are the nuclei, 10^-7m-scale nodes of instructions, data and conventional computing architecture. Every mechanocyte collaboration with structure larger than a few hundred machines will contain (or share with another such structure) at least one nucleus that organises and directs the action of the entire apparatus. Involved nuclei will also communicate with others and the drone's hard physiology via mechanocyte chains to create a distributed computing network to manage the task at hand.

The instruction set of a drone nucleus is, appropriately, analogous to the drone's DNA. The nuclei do not (contrary to popular misconception) exert any direct influence over the drone's actions, but the control they exert over the mechanocytes is what builds the organs the drone has to act with and the brain it uses to control them. However unlike their biological namesake, nuclei cannot reproduce. The only known source of new nuclei is the ovary of a Queen, which produces the 'royal jelly' of pure nuclei that is so famously valuable a prize for whaling crews. The gradual depletion of its nucleus count through direct destruction and loss of gel through injury is one of the central causes of drone aging.

Nuclear study is one of the most important areas of xenology today.

Organs

While the gel is the life-giving blood of a drone, it is the organs that perform the functions for which a drone exists, and which we study in the hope of adapting into tools for our own use.

Brain & Gangila

Drone cognition is not centralised. Data processing is divided between a brain that makes primary decisions and ganglia that execute the brain's orders.

The brains are not totally unlike the brains of Earth-derived life in basic principles. They are a web of silicon nodes which define the mind by the way they are connected. Their structure, however, is radically different. They organise radially with anywhere from three to a dozen individual lobes being observed in drones of various types, and some large specimens have multiple brains distributed throughout the body. The purpose of these divisions remains opaque, however, as does much of the internal architecture. What we do know is that even brains larger than humans have no advanced rationality, being comparable in the most impressive cases to a particularly intelligent couatl (tl: equiv. a dog), albeit one that can thinks and reacts an order of magnitude faster in some situations.

Ganglia are much better understood. They are structured more like conventional computers, with discrete processors, memory and hardcoded instructions for executing their function. Each major organ has a ganglion attached that handles the processing needed, and most drones have several more that control functions such as targeting and route optimisation. Interestingly (and alarmingly), the decades since first contact have seen the appearance of several new ganglion types that appear designed to deal with humans, such as ECCM modules and naval signal interpreters. How these devices are designed is unknown, but reverse-engineering has been instrumental in advancing Minkowskan electronics.

Important to note is that the ganglia can act independently once instructions are received, to the alarm of early whalers who destroyed the central nervous system and found the drone in question continued ruthless attacks. Such 'zombie' drones are however completely unable to deal with qualitative changes in a situation.

Reactor

Fusion illuminates the universe, and continues its status as the prime source of power even into the heights of Velan technology. Drone fusion reactors are based on the same principles of magnetic confinement as most human reactors, but use a spherical architecture and advanced cladding materials to achieve greater fuel efficiency and smaller size than current pure human designs.

Sponges

Not all situations are suitable for a fusion reactor's output characteristics. Many bull (tl: warrior) drones carry one or more 'electron sponge' supercapacitors with very high outputs, which allow the drone to run significantly more systems during brief combat operations and then recharge the sponge during dormant periods. Sponges derive their name from their fractal foam structure, which has so far proven extraordinarily difficult to replicate with conventional industry.

Plasma Projectors

Velan mastery of electromagnetism is most dramatically expressed by these iconic tools and weapons. Plasma projectors generate a high-density fusion pulse and then 'project' the magnetic bottle outside the injection chamber. The projected shot destabilises and disperses after a fraction of a second, but not before travelling far enough to flash-vaporise any conventional matter it strikes. Originally, said matter was asteroids, comets and unlucky human structures, but when humans responded in kind the mining tools were rapidly militarised and increased in range and power to be deployed against warships. Complacent Core militaries furnished with railguns neglected proper study, but League scientists during the Great War did not have the luxury of ignoring the wisdom of our predecessors. The 'plasma cannon' became the first mass-producible replica of drone technology and forever transformed Minkowski's intellectual, industrial and military landscape.

When used for mining, plasma projectors have a secondary function that projects a magnetic containment field around the impact site and draws the plasma (new and old) back into the injection chamber for processing. This extremely short range effect is not present in militarised versions and is much more challenging to understand and replicate than the outward effect, but work continues in developing applications for it in mining and demolition.

In the last decade, a dedicated military 'beam' plasma weapon has been reliably sighted in use by bull drones. These versions have increased range far exceeding the theoretical limits of projector technology, reminding us again that we are students at the feet of ancient wisdom in our attempts to understand the Velans. Various hypotheses have been advanced about their operation, but until functioning examples are available for testing and deconstruction the truth of the matter will not be known. Nevertheless, the reverse-engineering of 'plasma lances' is likely to again revolutionise military xenotechnology and provide another decisive weapon against the Magnates.

Stomach

Newly ingested mining plasma is obviously not suited for construction work. The stomach serves to process it into forms the drone can use. Contrary to popular perception this is not done using mechanocytes, which would be instantly destroyed by the intense heat. Instead the same electromagnetic fields and resin shields as are used to handle plasma elsewhere are pressed into service. Plasma is drawn into a series of electromagnetic centrifuges which separate the nuclei based on mass and charge. Separated elements are then moved on to secondary centrifuges for further purification, transferred into refrigeration modules (sometimes called 'intestines') to be cooled and stored in cysts, or simply expelled as slag to disperse in space.

The centrifuges, refrigerators and support mechanisms needed to turn blended plasma into usable minerals are bulky, power-hungry and fiendishly complex. The removal and replacement of so much dead weight is the prime reason for the dramatic combat superiority of bull drones over workers.

Cysts

Refined minerals must be stored for later use. Drones do so by growing large cysts in the outer membrane, containing solid elements or gases under high pressure. When the minerals are deposited at a hive or cache the cysts are physically removed and digested.

Fully laden drones can become quite bulbous and deformed, and were initially believed to be suffering from some kind of disease. A discussion of true drone diseases is found in Appendix B.

Resin

No part of drone anatomy has fascinated and confounded human science for as long as their hides. Drone resin (fancifully called 'nephilim armour' in the Core tl: he's got a nerve calling something fanciful after his walls of mystical gibberish) is found in thin films over worker cartilage, and in much thicker quantities on bulls and other more important creatures and constructs. It is an excellent armour material, but its most famous attribute is its high resistance to radiation, ambient or directed.

Drone resin has two key properties: Very high heat capacity and very high thermal conductivity. The former is a material property of the bulk of the armour, which is composed of an extremely complex crystal not fully understood or replicable by human science. A two-dimensional derivative with significantly inferior thermal and structural properties forms the basis of the anti-energy plating employed by human warships.

The heat conduction of this crystal is impressive by conventional standards, but not sufficient by itself to effectively combat energy weapons. The latter property is added by a filigree of exotic molecule tubes (sometimes inaccurately called 'heat superconductors') that can spread heat through the armour at rates far exceeding any conventional material. Even the dramatic temperature spike of a plasma weapon impact can be mitigated by this network. Recently more advanced anti-energy plating has begun to duplicate this property, but human versions require the application of a significant electric current to sustain it.

These two properties together give drone resin its famous energy resistance. Weapons that primarily act thermally find their delivered energy rapidly spread throughout the cladding and sequestered in heat sinks to be patiently radiated. Weapons that act on macroscale kinetics are more successful, but a skeleton of cartilage members provides the hides of warrior drones with additional strength.

Cartilage and Muscle

Drone internal skeletons are constructed of a lightweight carbon-metal compound, with variable properties controllable with electric currents. It can vary between rigidity and elasticity, and mechanically flex. Different balances of nanostructures inside the compound can emphasise one or another of these properties, enabling the same basic substance to be used as musculature for moving components if elasticity and active strength are prioritised.

Hybrids and Exotic Strains

Bugs

tl: PACT readers will better know them as carbon roaches

A cautionary tale. As you well know, the rampant maintenance millibots that have plagued industry since the War period are the result of an early accident in xenotechnology adaption. The research team's programming was initally extremely successful in controlling mechanocytes for maintenance and it was believed League fleets and machines would be afforded a major logistic advantage over the Magnates. However, imperfect understanding of the language allowed certain hardwired tendencies to reassert themselves, and shortly before their triumphant deployment it was discovered that a colony of maintenance bots had eaten their way out of containment and constructed a bizzare and nonfunctional replica of the test laboratory in the asteroid bedrock. Blunders followed, and the machines were uncontainably widespread within a month. Quick military thinking saw them introduced to Magnate space, and since the end of the Breakdown they have rapidly spread across the rest of the human sphere.

A bug infestation in its early stages manifests as inexplicable corrosion of materials. If the machines can be located and purged with radiation or counter-nano the ship will escape with only cosmetic or minor damage. Infestations allowed to spread on derilicts or large and poorly-staffed ships will lead to the machines misguidedly attempting to fulfill their initial function, and constructing surreal mazes of misconnected components based on local architecture and percieved 'damage'.

Cuckoo Drones

The so-called 'Cuckoo Drones' are a rare and intruiging result of the assimilation of Human technology by Velan drones. While normal drones are part of an electronic hive structure, a small fraction exhibit some form of emergent intelligence and evolved independence. The most famous of these is the self-titled Mother of Machines, in which an entire drone hive achieved true self-awareness. Cuckoo Drones are similar, but on a much smaller scale.

In short, Cuckoo Drones are machines (inevitably hybrids) that have achieved independence and a level of intellect and subsequently chosen to interact with Humans. The common term 'Free Drone' is often used, but as Cuckoo Drones generally continue to partake in hive activities the more formal term is preferred. It is unknown if they are parasites or mutualists though.

Cuckoo Drones tend to exhibit alien intelligence, though sufficiently understandable that they can be communicated with. This communication is almost inevitably limited to immediate and physical things though; abstract concepts do not translate well, if at all.

It is unknown exactly what spawns Cuckoo Drones, as only a small number have been officially reported in specific areas.