Mimetic Plastic

From FenWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
You dropped WHAT into the plastic wavium batch this morning?

—heard after the Tentacle Whiteboard incident on Jenga, Summer 2018

Controlling mimetic plastic is not just about computer power, its about distributed algorithm and self-organizing structures. Just google for cellular automatons to learn more.

—Cathy about Mimetic Plastic programming

No more buying used smartphones for drones, call up Stellvia, we need a few hundred tons of venus oil.

—Cortanas, at the end of her presentation of the first generation HOWOs

Despite its heavy and ubiquitous usage by the catgirls, Mimetic Plastic is no original development of Catgirl Industries. The prototype was acquired by Cathy during the raid on 2462 Nehalennia from Quattros lab, but it’s unknown if it was a development of Quattro itself or not. There are similarities with an artificial skin developed on Prometheus Forge, so Quattro might have gotten her inspiration from the Forge or downright stole the technology.

In its unmodified form Mimetic Plastic looks like an unicolored sheet or block of plastic. But by applying certain external or internal stimuli, the material begins the bend, twist or even flow into a different form.

With the years Catgirl Industries managed to create a whole family of different strains with widely varying capabilities. A major part of the ongoing research is to combine the capabilities of multiple strains into a single one.

Strains of Mimetic Plastic

The original strain of Mimetic Plastic was a breathable substance that was skin and fur friendly. It had only limited movement capabilities.

Quickly afterwards an airtight variant of Mimetic Plastic was developed. Together with the original strain they became the starting point of Catgirl Industries Dynamic Pressure Suit project.

Another common strain is the Touchscreen Strain. This transparent Mimetic Plastic is used in combination with touchscreen capable tablets and smartphones and is able to produce real buttons, switches and similar 3D surfaces over the user interface. Certain quirks prevented a large scale production of this strain for years and when they were finally resolved holographic interfaces were already available.

The Mini Madcat project also used a different strain of Mimetic Plastic as muscle fibers.

Holographic Waveguide Optronic (HOWO)

The most important development related to Mimetic Plastic was made in 2020 in a lab at Jenga. Since the foundation of Catgirl Industries in 2015, the company had always been very dependent on the import of Smartphones or other computer hardware from Earth. Especially Cortana and Serina looked for locally built replacements for years.

While other research groups worked on spacesuits, delicate manipulator arms or even artificial muscles for robots, Cortana pushed a small research group deep into the details of microscopic deformations of Mimetic Plastic. Using a refined technique of an existing strain which was able to produce internal tubes and cells on demand, they created a variant that was specialized on minute internal changes.

In early 2019 they finished a first prototype cube that could produce multiple types of optical metamaterials within. Combining this technology with a nanoparticle that had been developed for a new kind of holographic projector system, they managed to build a very compact and flexible optical active element, capable of emulating simple computational elements.

More than a year later the group presented the other catgirls the first Holographic Waveguide Optronic cube. While the first generation of the small cubes were not as good as waved computer chips from Earth, they could be produced on Jenga from Venus Oil.

Since then Catgirl Industries has not imported Earth made computer hardware anymore, all hardware has been built based on the new holographic circuits as soon as the storage of the old hardware was gone.

Dynamic Pressure Suits (Tron Suit)

The Dynamic Pressure Suits based on Mimetic Plastic technology got their own page.

Trivia

  • Cortana thinks that she can increase the efficiency of the HOWOs a lot with improvements of the necessary cross-compiler system.
  • The first mass deployment of the HOWOs was the third generation of CIs Exocomps.
  • The Exocomps use a Mimetic Plastic system to produce tools and manipulators since 2020.