Inside Crysis: Be the Ghoul

Peter Watts, author of Crysis: Legion takes us behind the scenes of the novel and game to expose the science behind the N2, a super-powerful, hyper-technical battle suit. Part 2 of 4. You can read Part 1 (Be Strong, Be Fast) here and Part 2 (Be Invisible) here. Also, check out this free 50-page excerpt of Crysis: Legion.

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The Crysis Legionaire’s Online Backstage Nanosuit Grand Tour, Part Three: Be the Ghoul

We’ve been throwing around some pretty weighty superpowers over the past couple of instalments: the strength to outsprint a cheetah and kick a car like a soccer ball, the power to virtually disappear from the visible spectrum. Not to mention some of the nanosuit’s other features, like a flexible piezoelectric epidermis that instantaneously hardens into bulletproof armor. Let’s take a look at some of the actual advertising copy for this baby:

Leap Taller Buildings in a Single Bound.
Start with a honeycombed coltan/titanium exoskeleton, for 32% greater strength than the N1 at half the weight. Wrap it in CryNet’s patented artificial muscle: an armored carbon-nanofiber composite storing elastic energies of up to 20 J/cm3¬, with electromechanical coupling that exceeds 70% under most battlefield conditions. Sheath it all in a flexible doped-ceramic epidermis and a Faraday weave that shields against EMPs while still supporting telemetric throughput of up to 15 TB/sec. Put it all together and you have a combat chassis that laughs at almost anything short of a direct hit with a battlefield nuke. (In fact, in three out of five simulations, the N2 even withstood the point-blank detonation of a Lockheed AAF 212 Circuit-Breaker™!)

What’s missing from all the gosh-wow discussion so far has been any mention of how exactly we power all this stuff. To date, conventional robotics have served up an endless series of pathetic weaklings gilded in chrome: battery-powered humanoids that dance or play the trumpet, but keel over when you hand them a 5-kg barbell. ASIMO, the jogging robot from Honda, squeezes every last drop out of its 34 servos (google “harmonic drive”), and still can barely lift a kilogram. Oh, and have I mentioned battery life? ASIMO runs dry after an hour.

The industrial robots of automotive assembly lines don’t have to worry about strength issues, but then again they’re plugged directly into the grid; that’s not a well your average battlefield grunt is going to be able to drink from. Boston Dynamics’ “Big Dog” is a marvel, and can hump 150kg of kit over rough terrain, but is powered by internal combustion. There’s nothing inherently ridiculous about combustion engines (they give you twenty times more energy-per-unit-mass than batteries), but once you factor in the size of engine blocks and gas tanks, you’re not talking about something you can wear: you’re talking about something you climb into and drive.

To some extent we can expect that future tech will be less gluttonous in terms of its energy needs; those carbon nanotubes we were talking about last time are a perfect example. Not only is their efficiency orders of magnitude beyond any of the other approaches we’ve looked at, but mechanically they’re simplicity itself: no gears, pistons, magnets or hydraulics. Just fibre bundles, stretching and contracting for all the world like real muscle (albeit with greater strength). That lack of moving parts means less mechanical wear, of course; but it also means less mass to carry around. Getting a decent amount of work out of a given jolt of electricity is still an issue; the current state-of-the-art returns electromechanical coupling of about 1%, compared to the 70% advertised in the nanosuit brochure. But unlike the other approaches I’ve mentioned, this is relatively new tech that’s just starting to attract attention. It’s nowhere near ready for prime time, but given the efficiency of other technologies (combustion engines weigh in at about 30%), it’s a pretty safe bet that carbon nanotubes will ultimately give us a much bigger bang for the buck. Which means we’ll need to spend far fewer bucks powering the N2 than we would if we’d gone the Aliens-loader route.

Even so. Short of one of Tony Stark’s arc reactors, it’s doubtful that any one of these technologies will be sufficient to power the nanosuit in all its glory. So when writing up the brochure, I decided to throw in a whole bunch of ‘em:

And what fuels this unmatched combination of power and protection? Virtually anything. While the N2’s primary coupling is compatible with any BVN-series hydrogen cell, the suit also acquires and stores energy automatically from a wide range of ambient sources: kinetic motion, passive solar/thermal, and atmospheric microwave to name but a few. The standard-issue universal adaptor allows recharging from virtually any hardline electrical source, domestic or military— and with CryNet’s optional Necro-Organic Metabolites plug-in (NOM), the N2 can even extract usable energy from battlefield carrion!

I haven’t seen Hydrogen-cell technology applied to robots yet — hell, given recent funding cutbacks we’re not even seeing it applied to cars on anything close to the scale it could be — but I remain hopeful (and perhaps too optimistic that we can shrink such things down to a size that might fit between Alcatraz’s shoulder blades). As for that last option, it doesn’t actually appear in the game so far as I know — but since I managed to sneak it into the official canon, I might as well make use of it in the novel. I’ll let Alcatraz explain:

Excerpt from Crysis: Legion by Peter Watts
On Sale 3/22/2011 from Del Rey Books

What? You think this thing powers itself?

You think I can leap between rooftops, roll Bulldogs single-handed, throw CELL drones around like kittens without draining the batteries? Have you even read the damn specs?

Everything about this suit is a tradeoff. You can crank the armor so tight you’re pretty much invincible, but only for a few seconds and you cut your speed in half. You can disappear entirely, just fade right out of the visible spectrum, but the lensing field sucks so much juice the capacitors run dry before you’re halfway down the block. And don’t even talk to me about trying to do any of those things at the same time.

They don’t mention any of that in the ad copy, of course. To hear the brochure tell it, you just put on the N2 and hit the ground at sixty, invisible and invulnerable, world without end a-fucking-men. But all those bells and whistles take power—and the suit may be a hundred years ahead of its time, but the batteries? Let me tell you, sometimes it feels like this thing’s running on a couple of triple-As.

They say it keeps you going under normal conditions for almost a week without a recharge. I don’t have to tell you conditions are anything but normal out there. I tapped into the grid on those rare occasions when I could find a grid to tap into. Even then, it was even money whether I’d be able to suck up a decent charge before the extra load blew the breakers over ten city blocks.

The suit’s got a NOM option to metabolize carrion on the battlefield. Cellular ATP gives you almost sixty kilojoules per mole, and that’s not even counting bomb-cal content of the raw meat. So, yeah. I used it once or twice, to keep myself going. I fed off the dead like a fucking tick, and I’m not proud of it.

Still, you can’t deny it makes sense. The grid may go down, clouds may cut you off from your solar sats—but the one thing you’ll never run out of down here is bodies.

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Here’s some video of the N2 in action:

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Peter Watts is the author of Crysis: Legion, official novelization of the highly anticipated Crysis 2 from developer Crytek. Peter will be back on Thursday, March 31 to give you more behind-the-scenes insight into the N2.