Computronium

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Any densely packed volume dedicated to nothing but computational equipment, information storage, and other such information technology applications. This can be either relatively mundane and modern, such as a mainframe or a server room in an office building; or it can be futuristic and complex, such as the primary cores of an AI construct or a mechanoid mind.

Computronium comes in several different "flavors" depending on what it is made up of:

  • Mechanical Computronium are "old fashioned" computer system such as a Charles Babbage difference engine. It operates on either purely or mostly mechanical principles with gears, cogs, and nonelectrical machinery performing the calculations. While generally quite slow and very noisy, they are completely immune to electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effects.
  • Thermionic Computronium are relatively premodern computer systems that rely on vacuum tubes and mechanical relay switches to compute, much like ENIAC. Processing times are still very slow compared to modern systems but much faster than purely mechanical systems, and while energy intensive and noisy they are less noisy than mechanical systems at the expense of being slightly more prone to EMP although not as much as more complex electronic systems.
  • Solid-State Computronium are modern computer systems that use transistors instead of vacuum tubes. They run silently and are less energy intensive than vacuum tube-based computers, and are generally more resilient than either mechanical or thermionic systems. A powerful subset to solid-state computronium is Integrated Circuit Computronium which uses microchips to perform many many calculations on an extremely small space. These systems are very fast and very flexible, but are extremely vulnerable to EMP and overheating because their components do not dissipate heat well.
  • Optronic Computronium is a postModern Tech to Future Tech system that replaces most of the electronic components necessary in solid state devices with light. This is often coupled with quantum computing and other advances to produce AI constructs or extremely advanced computers such as Menelmacar's systems or SeOCC's Q-Consoles. While these systems are extremely fast and flexible (and, in the case of AI constructs, possibly sentient beings in their own rights), they can also be vulnerable to EMP depending on how dependent they are on electronic components. Mechoptronic Computronium relies on a mixture of optical and mechanical systems with as little vulnerable electronic gear as possible, increasing resistance dramatically.
  • Biological Computronium is a special case where the computer takes the form of biological matter, usually patterned after a brain (or, essentially, being a brain). It can be argued that each baseline human has three pounds of biological computronium inside his or her head.