I think I have a plan of borrowing my printing head design ideas to merge multiple cell lines into a truly massive swarm.
The idea is simple, instead of cramp them all into one, we create each cell line for their individual functions
- harvesters/worker drones that would go out to harvest plants (swimming out in all directions to find the plant harvesting area of light, and when energy storage lipocytes are sufficient, grow a light aversion senseocyte to return to the home base in the dark side). I have some "pheromone" ideas, but they are not as robust and simple as this
- Patrols/soldier drones, those follow the worker's color/signal. Which might be a way of "depositing" pheromone color cells. Since they wouldn't feed themselves, so they will eventually die, and if we time their life span just right, we can make them only last a distance less than from the home base to food source. Their corpses will leave a trail of food when them pop, and many allow the worker to follow, and not just blindly search the light source.
- Nanny drones that use secrocyte to either provide the signals to bring egg in the form of stemocyte into the next larva phase, and would devour the harvester's lipocytes for energy, and even collect and group the leftover lipocytes connected with keratinocyte near the queen (attracted to both the lipocyte color and the egg colors)
- Caretakers with secrocyte that can produce protease to consume the "protected lipocytes food storage" and sacrifice themselves or burp the food to the queens (or this can be done by a variation of nannies that act as living food storage themselves, by converting keratin protected lipocyte into direct energies where they can be glued to the queen)
- And finally the queen itself, essentially a variation of my print head design that glue the starting stemocytes to the "birth channel" which will create each drone caste (instead of printing a string). The senseocytes can use colors as the activation, instead of S1 to S4 signals, hence the queen's "control" can be done behind an enclosed "brain" (which again can be a different cell lines, so we have even more cell modes to work with). And the larva growth pad can even be the extension of the birth channel just outside the funnel, and attract larva, with constant burping of food particle. Or the larva can also swim to and be glued to the growth pad, where another version of the caretaker drones "provide" the food.
In terms of drones, I think beside the pheromone mechanism and the caretaker mechanism I haven't fully resolved, the others are definitely doable, or been done before.
The most difficult part of this, might be the brain state control. Effectively, we need a control and detect mechanism for producing different number of internal "color state cells". The number of drones in each caste depends on a lot of factors, obviously when the food lipocytes are low, we need to produce more harvesters (or when the queen haven't "seen" caretaker drones near its feeding heads, more caretakers and harvesters will be "printed". Or sensocytes near the growth bed that detect the nanny dronee, and when they died or leave the area too far, indicating too few nannies to print. The patrol drones are harder to control, but not necessary needed if we don't use them, or just print a certain ratio of them related to the harvesters. The issue though is that these detection areas might be quite far from the internal brain color state area, and how to relay them effectively. Or do we need some internal "messenger drones" that travel between sensing areas and the brain receptor?
Another final question is that do we have enough cell count to scale up to this level. Individual parts and drones definitely would work, but I think around 10000 cells, the lag would start to get very troublesome. Each drone might be about 10 cells each, and the energy required to travel on a large substrate (maybe 5mm? even 6mm?) for room to set up such complex queen (and the nest) will be enormous. Harvesters need to be very efficient in travelling and transporting, and there will be a limit for how many cells the queen can sustain. (but in the early development we might have to compromise, and glue some photocytes and turn up the light for energy, just to demonstrate that this could work in principle)--
