Kind of a High End Gift Shop II

561 is 3×11×17. Speculative material culture thoughts.

• Was reading a thing, for sci-fi writers, about how cell phones now can do stuff most personal electronics in science fiction can't do. But one of the examples was cloud-based translation in real time.
  
  Two problems; first, of course, is that machine translation doesn't really work yet (and add in voice recognition and you're making things even harder). Second is that having your conversations translated in real-time is basically asking your service-provider to record all your conversations.
  
  Now, on the one hand this is great, because it means I don't have to rewrite anything. On the other hand, why do so many people not seem to realize that "the cloud" knows where they are at all times?
• I think, from my research, that the way you're going to build houses in the future both will and will not change. What will change is how the walls are put up; what won't, is what the walls are usually made of. See, how you'll put the wall up in the future will be with a 3D-printed nylon matrix, but once it's up, you're pretty much going to add the normal foam insulation you do now. Then, you'll use the matrix as a support-structure for plaster and concrete (interior and exterior walls, respectively), only sprayed on rather than poured.
  
  Another thing people might do with drywall is install it the old-fashioned way, pre-fabbed, but with the drywall, though still fundamentally basically gypsum plaster, modified to be a phase-change material. The way that works is, when heated or cooled past a certain point, part of the drywall changes from solid to liquid, or vice-versa, changing its physical properties; this gives it improved thermal characteristics (both retention and transfer, depending on the phase) compared to regular drywall. The best way to do it seems to be using polyethylene pellets saturated with paraffin and mixed into the gypsum before it's pressed into drywall sheets; the two alternatives, soaking the drywall sheets in either paraffin or a fat, seem to be a fire hazard.
• With regard to the zled spring-powered lasers, I decided to do them with carbon nanotube springs. The zled long laser is 9,991 joules per shot, and hold enough charge for 48 shots. That means its total charge is 479,568 joules. Given the energy densities of carbon nanotube springs of .3 megajoules per kilogram and 3.4 megajoules per liter, you wind up with a CNT spring that masses 1,598.56 grams, and has a volume of 141.05 cubic centimeters. The hand laser's shots are 3,197 joules each and it holds 16 shots, for a total of 51,152 joules; that means a spring that masses 170.51 grams and has a volume of 15.04 cubic centimeters.
  
  If we go with a spring cartridge that's the same diameter as the lens of the hand laser, which is 3.2175 centimeters (exactly one-quarter bãgh), the spring for the hand laser is only 1.85 centimeters thick. The one for the long laser, meanwhile, if it's the same diameter as the hand laser's spring (maybe make 'em usable on either?), is 17.35 centimeters (almost seven inches). If I don't feel like worrying about that, well, the long laser's lens is twice the diameter of the hand one, for a spring 4.34 centimeters thick. (Maybe you can still use the long-laser cartridges on the hand laser, it just looks dorky, like a "snail-shell" magazine for a handgun.) Think I'll go with the first one; the long-laser spring-cartridge just sticks out the back real far, used in the hand-laser.
  
  One thing I'm getting rid of is the break-action; now the lasers have the circular hand-guard, and the end of the laser sticks past it in back. Thinking instead of the grip being part of the circle, the grip is a post inside the circle, that has an adjustable angle (I think made of memory-material, to mold to your hand). I had worried that would make the thumb-trigger unworkable, but it can be on the side instead of the back. That'd probably give you a firmer grip anyway.
• The total weight of an average VAJRA trooper in armor is, as mentioned, 104.5 kilos (the VAJRA troopers are both male and female). Add in the weight of 1000 rounds of 13-millimeter HEIAP plus polymer-linked belt (43.5 kiograms) and you get 148 kilos. And then the weight of a three-barrel Gatling gun (I use the 20-millimeter M197 rather .50 BMG GAU-19 because it has to deal with that level of muzzle-energy and recoil) is another 60 kilograms, bringing the total to 208 kilograms.
  
  The average recoil force on the M197 when fired at 1500 rounds per minute is 5.8 kilonewtons, which might actually still be enough to knock a VAJRA trooper over. On the other hand, though, the canceled XM301 cannon from the equally canceled RAH-66 Comanche attack helicopter had a recoil force of 3.5 kilonewtons.
  
  Since it requires 2.7 kilonewtons to knock down a 113-kilogram basketball player, it would (assuming it scales linearly with weight) require 4.97 kilonewtons to knock over a 208 kilogram VAJRA trooper. (Actually it'd take more than that, because the VAJRA trooper has the center-of-gravity of a 166.5-centimeter average human, not a basketball player.) So 3.5 kilonewtons is not enough recoil-force to knock over the VAJRA troopers! (But 5.8 would be.)
• I had had transport aircraft (not fighter-planes) propelled by all-electric jet engines. Only, there's probably no way to do that; you might be able to heat the air electrically before sucking it through your fans, but it'd be incredibly inefficient. It'd be much more efficient to just use superconducting ducted fans, like those Airbus is working on for their VoltAir concept.
  
  Indeed, you might not need superconductors; we've already demonstrated an electric plane, the E-Fan, with performance comparable to other ultralight planes like the Cessna 162 in everything but range. With the kind of battery technology my setting has, the range issue would go away. Then again you might need superconductors for the kind of performance big ducted fans do, I'm not sure.
• There's a type of battery called "Cambridge crude" which, while not particularly impressive in terms of energy-density (1.08-1.8 megajoules/liter, 0.468-0.9 megajoules/kilogram, compared to gasoline's 32.4 and 44.4, respectively), has the interesting property of being a liquid. Okay a sludge, hence its name.
  
  What's important about that is, you can pump it in and out of cars relatively quickly, or simply swap your tanks in or out (also proposed with the batteries of the VoltAir). I imagine that that (possibly the second one) might be what drivers do with the silicon-air batteries my setting uses; metal-air batteries normally involve liquids, and one probably doesn't want to wait while they charge. They have comparable energy density to gasoline (actually better—51.223 megajoules/kilogram, 75.924 megajoules/liter), and it can be time-consuming to charge metal-air batteries.
• It seems like the "blood" of my androids won't be a polyacrylonitrile gel after all. Silicon-air batteries apparently work by dissolving silicon in an "ionic liquid" composed of oligofluorohydrogenate (a flourine salt) and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium (an imidazole derivative).
  
  Then again, apparently ionic liquids are fairly viscous, so maybe it'd still behave something like a gel; they might also add something to it to let it "clot", so your $450 million android doesn't bleed to death. (And that's just the price for his brain, his body probably costs a pretty penny too—though a drop in the bucket compared to the AI and the hardware to run it.)
  
  They also, as I think I've mentioned, have a dye in it, to make leaks noticeable (since I think it's clear, on its own).
• I've mentioned zledo perfume their clothes. Actually their military has clothes lined with odor-absorbing resins; it's a bad idea for your enemy to smell you coming (some Asian cuisines are just a straight-up liability), and their enemy for most of their history certainly could. They probably had activated charcoal centuries before we did, and not just because they didn't take a century or two off for retro cosplay.
  
  So it occurred to me, their cops and soldiers (actually their cops are soldiers...like France's are), if married to civilians, probably kiss their spouse goodbye (well, you know, the zled equivalent), and then spray down with an odor-eliminating spray. Probably they do that at work, rather than "say goodbye, spray down" on their own doorsteps, that'd just be weird. I imagine there's probably some kind of spray-dispenser in the locker-room.
  
  If the spouse of a soldier or cop is one of their professional hunters, they probably don't have to bother about that, since the professional hunters also have to worry about being smelled.