A continuing series for the gravitationally impaired.
The futuristic vision of nanotechnology replication is the general all purpose do anything artificial intelligence magic like technology, that will create anything the user desires out of nothing in an instant. But, it might take a while to get there. What is really needed is a very simple assembly unit.
Basically this assembler will be about as smart as a roman centurion, or a greek hoplite, or a swiss pikeman. Make a square, hold a shield, swing a sword, march in different directions, fill a hole in the formation, take orders, and die well. Nano assemblers will be in a grid like formation, holding on to their neighbors, they will pass materials along to the assembly front, and stick it to whatever is being made. They will also weigh each atom to determine if it’s the right type, probably by shaking it and determining mass by how fast it vibrates. your basic assembler will have a central body for the computer, power system, sensors etc., six holding legs to position itself in the grid formation accept power and communiocations, about twenty four gripping manipulators to move atoms around with, and about eight mass scale vibrators to weigh atoms. So, not to smart, not to complex. They take orders from above and do what they are told. The most difficult task is to build new assemblers, and knowing when to die, the dead to be disassembled and recycled. New assemblers might be built in a special section with the new units crawling to their operational locations. Local information can be very limited.
Consider if you will, a dust mite sized MEMs (Micro Electrical Mechanical) unit that looks, well, like a dust mite. Across it’s tail end is a rectangular cell which is filled with the very simple nanotechnology assembler grid. A new dust mite sized MEM will be processed out the back of the first one’s assembly cell. Several smaller nanotechnology cells will be used for raw material processing to feed pure stocks to the main assembly cell. The brains of the whole operation can be in the MEM section of the dust mite. This will allow a very rudimentary but tough MEM / nanotechnology unit to be transported to the Moon, where it’s tasks are to replicate a few limited million times and then build a radio system to get further instructions from that big bright blue ball in the sky called Earth.