Lucky wrote: Mr. Oragahn wrote: Star Wars EU has notes of nano technology. For example some references found in the Lando book I quoted recently.
Nanotechnology isn't metamaterials technology.
Nanotechnology largely opens the door to the fine structures necessary for metamaterials.
In fact, it's quite hard to conceive an universe with nanotechnology and no knowledge of those fantastic meta properties.
They literally about to observers who start fiddling with materials arranged at the nanoscale.
The fact that it isn't mentionned out loud doesn't preclude their existence, really.
Star Wars makes heavy use of big bulky dishes.
The first link your provide in your second list gives a good reason why good old antennaes would still be used: much cheaper and reliable.
Low cost designs would obviously have massive drawbacks.
How is a design solid enough in space, against radiations and particles, when it's thin (in the case of the phased array)?
A metamaterial good for radio isn't also good by default against microimpacts for example.
However, for some reason, the tech development in several domains has stalled at some point rather dramatically in the warsverse. One only needs to be look at Vader's and Luke's artificial limbs to understand that. Pistons instead of synthetic muscles.
Only the android Guri was of a high quality, and equally extremely rare.
That said, they have extremely good AIs, while Data is an oddity in his universe. Guri would easily pass as a human to anyone who didn't know. Data would need considerable refinement to get there.
Enough disgressing anyway.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: What might explain the limited use of those metamaterials in other settings could be due to econommical and industrial pressures, especially in highly capitalistic and predatory environments meshed with bloated patent protocols. In and outside of that contest, more simply, prices could also explain that.
Plus metamaterials might be good at some tasks, but largely weak at others.
Perhaps some technologies were found which proved to effectively counter metamaterial to the point of making them less interesting and still way more expensive than good old lumps of metal, for example in armour. Add to that problems of mass production and maintainance.
Every technology has its strengths and weaknesses, but you aren't going to create a counter to a metamaterial antenna that won't be effective against more primitive designs.
Depends on the function and goal of the device.
Btw, to use again the dish example, nothing tells us that the inside wouldn't be partially covered with metamaterials.
A few sensors tacked on to the hull of a ship, and it would no longer have a single blind stop.
The ISD had a blind spot because no one thought about sticking a damned simple antenna or mini globe there, to scan the back of the bridge tower.
The shape or tech level of the needed sensor is totally irrelevant.
Besides, talking about metamaterials and Star Wars, here's an interesting
observation:
MIT news wrote:Researchers at MIT have now fabricated a three-dimensional, lightweight metamaterial lens that focuses radio waves with extreme precision. The concave lens exhibits a property called negative refraction, bending electromagnetic waves — in this case, radio waves — in exactly the opposite sense from which a normal concave lens would work.
Concave lenses typically radiate radio waves like spokes from a wheel. In this new metamaterial lens, however, radio waves converge, focusing on a single, precise point — a property impossible to replicate in natural materials.
For Isaac Ehrenberg, an MIT graduate student in mechanical engineering, the device evokes an image from the movie “Star Wars”: the Death Star, a space station that shoots laser beams from a concave dish, the lasers converging to a point to destroy nearby planets. While the researchers’ fabricated lens won’t be blasting any planetary bodies in the near future, Ehrenberg says there are other potential applications for the device, such as molecular and deep-space imaging.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: All cyberpunk universes obviously are very metamaterial-friendly. Ghost in the Shell, Deus Ex, ShadowRun, etc.
Do you have any specific examples? The only thing I can think of is the major's skin.
Nanotech allows the arrangement of materials in very specific ways. Thinking that they wouldn't know about metamaterials at that point doesn't make sense.