Novus Labs: Advancements in Mad Science!

As you may have noticed, I like to put little title tags on most of my Gather articles. For one, it makes them much easier to sort through, and for two, it's kinda fun. Novus Labs is a recurring concept that I occasionally use in gaming as a source of good or evil, but always focused on the advance of science. In the pursuit of gaming, and as a result of many hours spent thinking of interesting concepts to use in gaming, I have come up with a very wide assortment of wonderful gadgets that just might exist in a distant (or not-so-distant) future. And Novus Labs will be my title tag for these odd little babbles.

So, I present an example concept - the NanoCapacitor Cellular Grid. Power consumption is a pressing concern for machines of any size, and with more advanced and smaller machines must come more advanced methods of power supply. As might be expected, the NCCG is a nanomolecular grid of minute capacitors that hold and release a charge when necessary. A secondary rechargeable battery system is used to control the system and regulate power flow in and out ofit. The NCCG is designed to best be used in applications that require instantaneous charge/release times (as opposed to the steady drain provided by normal batteries, but can also handle less strenuous duty cycles; it is also capable of being designed into the structure of another object, or as a removable tab or cell, as specific implementation circumstances allow.

The concept requires nanomolecular circuit design, and by inference reliable superconductors that do not give off significant waste heat; it could serve as one solution to the problem of powering nanomolecular machinery, as well as providing lightweight power to most any object. Potential problems would include dead cells (capacitors wearing out over the course of the NCCG's lifespan, gradually reducing the maximum power of the cell); shoddy or third-party versions might emit significant waste heat (leading to more rapid cell degeneration, among other things), fail to include internal regulators (mechanisms to maintain desired power levels, surge suppressors to prevent unwanted discharges, heat dissipation systems to prevent burnout, etc), or have limited user control or internal diagnostc functions. Considering modern power supplies, an acceptable NCCG system would be required to suffer no greater than a 5% loss in maximum capacity per 100 power cycles.

(If you use this somewhere - as an idea for your game, for example, or even better, as an idea for something you actually build - please let me know about it, and give me some credit if it really does inspire you. If you actually invent this, make it work, and make ungodly amounts of money, send some my way! If you have ideas on how to improve the basic concept, or just want to give some feedback, leave me a comment!)

Edit for research: If these nanocapacitors actually can survive millions of charge-discharge cycles as this Wikipedia article claims that bigger ones can, I don't think that note on the % loss will be relevant... but it might be. Depends on how well nanotech works!