Biotechnology for zerg, Na'vi etc types: tough sans titanium

[Meteorswarm]

Is there a known way to make CO? There's a bacterium that makes it from CO₂ and H₂, but that's the exact opposite of the reaction you just found.

[Idhan]

CO does seem like it'd be a limiting factor.

Hmm... maybe alternative routes for making H₂?

NADH + H⁺ --> NAD⁺ + H₂?

QH₂ --> Q + H₂?

FADH₂ --> FAD + H₂?

Anyone know the standard reduction potentials for all that?

[Meteorswarm]

CO does seem like it'd be a limiting factor.

Hmm... maybe alternative routes for making H₂?

NADH + H⁺ --> NAD⁺ + H₂?

QH₂ --> Q + H₂?

FADH₂ --> FAD + H₂?

Anyone know the standard reduction potentials for all that?

It'd probably be better to use the NADPH version, but that sounds like it could work.

[ikrase]

Dragons should not try to face jets on equal footing. THey do not have the strike based 'shoot or leave' problem and can recover from very minor damage much more easily. They also are VTOL and can move and hide on the ground.

... A few ideas for ranging:

-Chemical based biological laser? A bit far fetched

Gas guns, firing stones coated with goo? good.

-For healable rotating parts simply have a shroud which can close over the part and add cells. Or slip rings with blood vessels (low speed only, leaky)


-For air defense, massive swarms of small expendible things. These will be invulnerable to today's fighters as they use about 2-8 expensive missiles per plane.

Don't forget hermit crabs.

[broken_escalator]

-For air defense, massive swarms of small expendible things. These will be invulnerable to today's fighters as they use about 2-8 expensive missiles per plane.

Invulnerable to single target missiles you can explode from a safe distance maybe. But Gatling guns mounted on fighters are another story.

[Meteorswarm]

I don't really see a way to make rotating parts work well if they're to have blood flow. I don't know of any examples of biological wheels that actually rotate besides molecular-scale ones like flagellar motors and ATPase. You could probably solve the same solutions with reciprocating parts, though.

[ikrase]

Biological wheels are not usually very useful. Legs are much better than wheels for movement at moderate speeds on rough surfaces. Few other applications need them. Supersonic dragons are one of the few.



Fighter cannon: Roughly 9000 shells fired in a few seconds. Poor aiming ability. Few fighters. Always in offensive role.

Bird-things: Thousands of birds in diffuse swarm. Smaller than fighters, expendable, do not crash due to minor damage as much. Likely poor radar targets. Can take defensive role. Probably slower and more manueverable, need to get in the way of the fighters, not maneuver preciesely.

[Erl Kaarik]

How about an "ant colony" of dragons.

Y'no..

Momma Dragon(s),

Figter Dragons - Big , mean version. (Wings plus jets)
As the repair issue goes - how about they don't try to repair their engines mid-flight?
They should just need them for short, under half an hour, periods of time.
After that, they could turn their engines off and land - get refueled, have used engine parts swapped out and then repaired
maybe rest and eat.
They should also be able to use acid made by other dragons, then pumped in their bodies.

I don't know if you could mix some acid with fuel to make superfuel/superacid, but if you can then that too.

Fighter Dragons - Little, pesky 'n' deadly (Wings plus jets)
Would attack in zerg swarms, grow up fast.
Capable of using high pressure acid and napalm jets. These could also be single use - they'd perform their flight use their engines to the max,
waste all of their acid, and if broken too badly, they could just die. Especially if they are very small and easy to create.

And of course big, oh how big, plant and water consuming - alcohol/ether/napalm/hydrogen/acid making -
Refinery Dragons

And then of course worker dragons, who'd harvest plant matter, water, oxygen and other chemical componets, carry around shit,
start up dragon engines and fix engine blades (put them in their bellies and cover them in thin layers of something where needed)


I have no idea how they could sustain such production without destroying the environment but w.e.
There is also the problem of how to make very similar engine parts so they could be swapped easily.

You could also have artillery dragons, bomb-making dragons, bomb dragons etc.

[nehpest]

I'd just like to say that, thanks to this thread, I found this video about parasitic mind control bugs.

Thanks, guys. I officially won't be sleeping tonight.

[ikrase]

That's sounding good. I think, however, that the jet dragons might do best with ramjets for war speed only, and flapping wings for most flight. The latter are VERY efficnt. Also, the numerous tiny variety does not need to be constantly moving at extreme high speed.

I suspect that goo could be a good weapon against modern aircraft for the same reason that ice on the wings is really dangerous. Don't forget barrage ballon-like things.

[Technical Ben]

Biological wheels are not usually very useful. Legs are much better than wheels for movement at moderate speeds on rough surfaces. Few other applications need them. Supersonic dragons are one of the few.

Spoiler:

Fighter cannon: Roughly 9000 shells fired in a few seconds. Poor aiming ability. Few fighters. Always in offensive role.

Bird-things: Thousands of birds in diffuse swarm. Smaller than fighters, expendable, do not crash due to minor damage as much. Likely poor radar targets. Can take defensive role. Probably slower and more manueverable, need to get in the way of the fighters, not maneuver preciesely

.

Your missing the point. It's supersonic. To quote the famous Scientist Emmett Brown*.

Where we're going, we don't need [wheels].

Your dragon can just have a scram-jet. So no moving parts needed. It can use the same fuel as it does for it's fire breath. Squirt some of that down a custom grown tube, and you have a scram/ram jet of some sort. Even better, you can gain efficiency if it is flexible and can change it's shape. Then the dragon can use it at any altitude or speed. Perhaps mix the DNA from a Cephalopoda and a Dragon for a really deadly mix of supersonic-subaquatic-dragonopus.


^{*Ok, I know none of that is correct, but this is the fictional science board. I'm being fictitious.}
[edit]
Oops. Just seen you notice that yourself. Got carried away there. Now to draw some supersonic/subsonic flying dragons!

[Quizatzhaderac]

I'd say that this type warfare should be asymmetrical, both for technical and aesthetic reasons. Instead of artillery or jet fighter substitutes, they bio side should lack these and have things the mecha side doesn't.

Environment - The bio side could be adapted to, or produce an environment antagonistic to humans and machinery. Weak acids could be in rain, making exposed metal rot in weeks. Emulsifiers could be in the swaps, dissolving the oils needed to lubricate moving parts. Line of sight (and line of fire) could both be very short, reducing the advantage of ranged weapons.Flora could progressively damage buildings. The bio side might look, sound, and smell like everything else around.

The bio side could also be much better at detecting the mecha than visa-versa. Metal reflects sound strongly. Gun power, soap, oil, something the mecha side uses has a unique sent. Natural pattern recognition is better than automatic

The bio side could spit acids to dissolve metal, bases to dissolve flesh, or some kind of napalm, though poison is just more efficient. If straight forward poisons and diseases are too boring they can always do unusual things: make a person blindly aggressive/ passive/ dance till they collapse of exhaustion/ whatever.

[Ephemeron]

Fighter cannon: Roughly 9000 shells fired in a few seconds.

What, 9000?! There's no way that can be right!

Spoiler:

[Angua]

Is there a known way to make CO? There's a bacterium that makes it from CO₂ and H₂, but that's the exact opposite of the reaction you just found.

Yes. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16402911

[WarDaft]

Hmm, is there any way for an insect to store chlorine trifluoride? If so, there's basically no way that anything like a modern military force could stand against them.

[idobox]

My favorite biological "technology" is nuclear. We know some mushrooms can feed on gamma ray, and animals or plants could very well capture uranium and enrich it with enzymes that ave different kinetics depending on atomic weight. They could also produce heavy water quite easily.

On a warfare point of view, this can allow highly radioactive bugs or vines rending areas unhabitable, plants using atomic bombs as a way to disperse seeds/spores, a variety of steam powered things, like guns, nuclear rocket-propelled dragons, creatures thriving in extremly cold environements.
Creature able to survive for periods of times in a vaccuum.
Nuclear rocket powered dragons in SPACE, or at least in suborbital flights.

Hmm, is there any way for an insect to store chlorine trifluoride? If so, there's basically no way that anything like a modern military force could stand against them.

I suppose a bug could secrete some highly fluorinated goo to coat a storage pouch, but I'm not sure they would be able to produce chlorine trifluoride without the glands dissolving.
But I love the idea of kamikaze bumblebees splattering against jet fighters and setting them on fire.
I also love the idea of metal rounds shot in a swarm of such bugs, and the ensuing rain of acid fire death.

[Sandor]

If you want your fire breathing dragons to stand a chance against a prepared human military, they're going to have to take on jet fighters. Which is why you need supersonic dragons. And flapping your wings is only going to get you so far. I recommend that you have two types of dragons (perhaps different genders, perhaps 2 symbiotic species) one of which acts like an oil refinery, using some biochemical process to produce some kind of hydrocarbon fuel. The supersonic dragons refuel appropriately, and then use a jet turbine made out of very hard bone-like structures which were secreted during childhood. As children, the engine parts are encased in flesh to hold them together during assembly. As adults, the flesh recedes, leaving jet engines. Or the supersonic dragons could skip the high rpm mechanical parts and use some sort of pulse detonation engine. Whichever.

In any case, the supersonic dragons will need something with a higher energy concentration than your typical fatty tissue, and a higher power to weight ratio than muscle.

I'm surprised no ones mentioned the dragons from Terry Pratchet's Strata. These firebreathing dragons flew normally at low speed, but tucked their wings in and exhaled (for want of a better word) for high speed backwards flight.

Spoiler:

They had some kind of nuclear furnace burried in their guts. It turns out they weren't actually evolved beings at all, they were constructs grown in a vat.

The book's a fun read if you like Terry Pratchet, and is mainly set in a kind of proto discworld (it's scifi, not a discworld novel, and was written before them).

[Whelan]

Then there's the dragons in actual discworld, that fart methane jets and have a tendency to explode given the wrong diet and too much excitement.

[idobox]

They are also small, smelly, ugly, and so inadapted to any environment, it's a surprise they haven't disapeared. You can always count on Terry Pratchett to turn any stapple of fantasy/sci-fi upside-down.

Metal eating critters would be a pain in the ass for any civilization, and could make some sense (you can actually get energy by oxydizing metal), but they would need to have evolved in a place where unoxydized metal can be found.
An other use for metal could be to grow metalic structures. Bioelectricity would be a rather simple way to reduce metallic ions, and a sheat of insulating cells could direct the growth of the structure as well as filter the ionic species, to make sure only the right metals would be included. Once you have critters with metallic parts, you can make a lot of interresting things, armors and antennas for example.

For wheels, you don't need it to be live tissue. It could grown inside the body, and then detached. Of course, it wouldn't be self repairing anymore.

[Izawwlgood]

For wheels, you don't need it to be live tissue. It could grown inside the body, and then detached. Of course, it wouldn't be self repairing anymore.

Is there a biological precedent for this for of adaptation? The closest thing I can think of is horns/antlers/teeth/claws, but that's a far cry from 'keratinous wheel' that an animal somehow attaches to.

[Xanthir]

Your eye lens. It's made of dead cells which have emptied themselves of their internal contents to become transparent.

[Izawwlgood]

No, it's not. It's made of crystallin, an excreted protein which forms a lens. It's more similar to, say, hair or nails in terms of 'protein mass excreted by cells'. There are accessory cells within the lens, but they more for maintenance and structure. Cells in the eye do enucleate, but they don't then become the lens proper.

[idobox]

Many animals with exoskeletons will discard the old one to grow. There must be at least one species that found something useful to do with it's own discarded shell. Or maybe hatchlings using the egg shell.

Two variations on the same concept:
The creature that produce the wheel, and the one that use it don't need to be the same. Real life example: hermit crab
The wheel can be a live symbiote, possibly of the same species (younger form, ant-like specialization). The "host" could feed it form time to time, through some kind of mouth. that way, you wouldn't need constant connection between the two.

[Angua]

How about the wheel is a seed from a tree that happens to be hollow, and the creature has a long nail that acts as the axle.

Oh, wait....

[Xanthir]

No, it's not. It's made of crystallin, an excreted protein which forms a lens. It's more similar to, say, hair or nails in terms of 'protein mass excreted by cells'. There are accessory cells within the lens, but they more for maintenance and structure. Cells in the eye do enucleate, but they don't then become the lens proper.

Huh. Then some popular science publication lied to me. I was led to believe the lens itself was cells.

Well, good to know that it's a little bit more subtle than that.

[Izawwlgood]

Xanthir, there are most certainly cells in the lens. But the protein that makes up the lens itself is secreted by cells and arranged into a lens. What you may be thinking of, which I posted above, is that some cells undergo a sort of cell death and become support structures within the lens itself.

How about the wheel is a seed from a tree that happens to be hollow, and the creature has a long nail that acts as the axle.

Baroo?

Many animals with exoskeletons will discard the old one to grow. There must be at least one species that found something useful to do with it's own discarded shell. Or maybe hatchlings using the egg shell.

I think just about all have; they eat it.
But... I dunno, your other examples are pretty sci-fi sounding.

[idobox]

But... I dunno, your other examples are pretty sci-fi sounding.

Many structures in the real world kinda look like wheels. Vertebra, for example. Having an animal collect them, and use them is not that sci-fi. Evolving naturally to use them as wheels, on the other hand, seems pretty difficult.
For the second, larvae are often very different morphologically from the adult form. A species with a larval state looking like a woodlouse would have wheels available. Same thing for evolving into using them as wheels.

[WarDaft]

How about the wheel is a seed from a tree that happens to be hollow, and the creature has a long nail that acts as the axle.

Baroo?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Races_and_ ... als#Mulefa

[ikrase]

Radioactivity is a bit of a problem since it does so much damage to biological stuff. However there are some SUPER radiation resistant bacteria.

Idea: Expendable, sessile breeder reactor organism (the neutrons kill it), motile uranium-absorbtion-heavy-water-purifying animals, and then plants that use RTGs made from the results of the breeder reactor? Live in a very cold environ?