Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
"The clothing fabric is not loaded with nanobots, it is made of nanobots"
Could be embarrasing if someone hacks into the nanobots and tuns your suit into a French maid's outfit, or crashes them completely, turning the whole thing into a pile of dust at your feet...
Ordinary hacking attempts wouldn't do much good. The nanobots in the clothing can only do what they are built to do*, and their "programming" is a part of their structure.
However, if you could launch a cloud of remotely controllable nanobots, that could land on and infect the clothing, and alter the structure of the nanobots dynamically into something else on the fly . . .
TL-15, IMTU, doesn't allow free-roaming dynamic nanotech to do anything like that. All nanotech must be a part of a larger whole, (like the cells of the human body are, only smaller), or have fairly limited application (like medical nano that is injected into bodies, one wave after another, each to perform its own step in surgery, etc.). There is also no ability to remotely control nano, individual nanobots are too small to receive external signals, so unless they're wired (usually by hard connection, or by liquid-carried chemical signals) to a larger system, they only do what they've been built to do.
The features which I deem unavailable at TL-15 do appear higher up the scale, but I don't usually worry about that, as MTU is mostly Max TL-15 with very limited TL-16 available (TL-16 is available to the very important in the larger nations).
* Nanoengineers IMTU have a sub-degree in topological mathematics. Crafting legal nano involves proving, mathematically, that no matter how your nanobot breaks, that it will always become inert garbage. (Idea stolen from Michael Flynn's:
The Nanotech Chronicles, and also from Walter Jon Williams':
Aristoi.)