A Thought About "Greybots"
Posted: September 19th, 2011, 10:02 am
I've been thinking a bit about the robodrones in Metrobay, the so-called "greybots" (or "graybot", take your pick). While different artists have different takes on the basic style, they're all pretty much the same (which is kind of the point, but bear with me here). We don't even have the differentiation in color like we did in the early days.
While the basic technology used to make one would be the same, I'd like to suggest that Max being the inveterate tinker and control freak that he is wouldn't settle for his girls looking like Sentius'. They're HIS, dammit and should be recognizable as such.
To that end, I've thought of a couple of details that could mark one kind from the other:
1) Boots vs no boots: If Sentius is making a drone's covering out of nano-goo, putting extra detail in like making discrete foot coverings is a bit silly. Heels are a bit illogical too but if they're really needed/desirable a spike or platforms could be molded or grown from the back of the foot and attached to the underside without making a whole piece of footwear.
2) Collar vs. no collar: Likewise, since all of the machinery making one of Sentius' bots is internal by nanotechnology, a collar should be unnecessary. It'd be just an ornament. If you have to have something that electrical cables plug into, a couple of sockets on the neck (or even better, the back of the head ala The Matrix trilogy) should suffice.
3) Identification marks: On the APEX side of things, humans don't innately have the ability to recognize a particular bot via its tracking signals, em emmissions, etc...so for convenience sake they might have visual ID codes (their model numbers, not the nicknames like "Gingerbot" and such) somewhere on their bodies. Tags would be inefficient (too small to be read at a distance) but perhaps branding on the forearm, the breast, or an ass cheek would do.
4) Again, perhaps one of the biggest things would be branding for a businessman like Max. Making them look unique as an entity unto themselves would probably be a thought on his mind. A notion that springs to mind is that they could all be pink, to feed into his Pink Pussycat mania. Another idea is that they could get their hands on one of Ring Mistress' nanodolls, reverse engineer it, and making a glossy transparent latex coating. Perhaps they could even have an option to "censor" the nipples and pussy of a bot by making a skin colored patch over the "offending" naughty bits.
Anyway, just thought I'd throw a couple of ideas out there to make things a bit more interesting visually (and challenging for the artists. ). I'd be interested to know what others would think.
While the basic technology used to make one would be the same, I'd like to suggest that Max being the inveterate tinker and control freak that he is wouldn't settle for his girls looking like Sentius'. They're HIS, dammit and should be recognizable as such.
To that end, I've thought of a couple of details that could mark one kind from the other:
1) Boots vs no boots: If Sentius is making a drone's covering out of nano-goo, putting extra detail in like making discrete foot coverings is a bit silly. Heels are a bit illogical too but if they're really needed/desirable a spike or platforms could be molded or grown from the back of the foot and attached to the underside without making a whole piece of footwear.
2) Collar vs. no collar: Likewise, since all of the machinery making one of Sentius' bots is internal by nanotechnology, a collar should be unnecessary. It'd be just an ornament. If you have to have something that electrical cables plug into, a couple of sockets on the neck (or even better, the back of the head ala The Matrix trilogy) should suffice.
3) Identification marks: On the APEX side of things, humans don't innately have the ability to recognize a particular bot via its tracking signals, em emmissions, etc...so for convenience sake they might have visual ID codes (their model numbers, not the nicknames like "Gingerbot" and such) somewhere on their bodies. Tags would be inefficient (too small to be read at a distance) but perhaps branding on the forearm, the breast, or an ass cheek would do.
4) Again, perhaps one of the biggest things would be branding for a businessman like Max. Making them look unique as an entity unto themselves would probably be a thought on his mind. A notion that springs to mind is that they could all be pink, to feed into his Pink Pussycat mania. Another idea is that they could get their hands on one of Ring Mistress' nanodolls, reverse engineer it, and making a glossy transparent latex coating. Perhaps they could even have an option to "censor" the nipples and pussy of a bot by making a skin colored patch over the "offending" naughty bits.
Anyway, just thought I'd throw a couple of ideas out there to make things a bit more interesting visually (and challenging for the artists. ). I'd be interested to know what others would think.