In Chrome Flesh, it says that a hard nanohive can re-program hard nanites already in the body to another form, and it can store the recipe for up to [rating] types of hard nanites. Very cool, but it leaves some questions:
- Cost and availability for the recipe? I’d think that a recipe might be cheaper than just buying each type of nanites, but clearly it shouldn’t be free (otherwise nobody would buy anything but the cheapest kind with a rating 2 hive, and copy them over to what they wanted). Lacking any other info I’ll stick with the cost and price of just buying a nanite dose, but I wonder if there was supposed to be something there which got cut.
- time to re-program? (using relatively cludgy body networks to talk to all of the nanites, it seems like it shouldn't be near-instant, but I didn't notice a time specified)
Now, the answers to these questions become a lot less interesting once you notice that the heading on the table on page 150 is incorrect, and that table is the soft nanites (not hard nanites as listed) -- most of the most interesting options are soft. But hey, hard nanohives can be installed using 2 capacity instead of using essence, so hard nanite systems can be run for zero essence, so even if the benefits are pretty niche it is something I could see playing with at some point.