Which is why we'll probably have practical powered exoskeletons long before we have any practical biologically enhanced human.
Yeah, calcium is used in multiple parts of the body, especially in flowing in and out of the muscles cells as part of contraction/relaxation. But, again, this is fantasy. Future scientists could develop gene therapy where as only the processes within the osteoplast (bone making) cells use the "adamantium" and therefor leaving calcium free flowing in the rest of the system. Also, there could be chemical therapy that could enhance the brain barrier to prevent passage of the foreign metal or at the very least prevent uptake in the other processes. This means it would be a slow, potentially painful process but you could get it done. As far as blood creation...just stop that function altogether. Use artifical blood. They have it now. It could be (actually will be) perfected in the future and that could be one of the characters weaknesses. The need for regular influx of artifical red cells from time to time. And as far as leukocytes go...well, if the get eliminated... well, nana-bots could (and eventually will) replace the function of white blood cells.
Interesting stuff so far. I had considered the liquid metal injection route but it struck me as pretty implausible, and since we are interested in making some kind of enhanced individual for the purposes of warfare, then clearly long and arduous and invasive surgical procedures will be par for the course and is highly prolonged and expensive, which helps explain the relatively low numbers of cyborgs. So that takes care of the skeleton, some of that clever memory plastic material can replace muscle tissue, and be more resistant to heat or impact into the bargain. Some additional plating with titanium or foam metal to protect other vital organs too. The brain will be augmented too, in fact it would have to be. Not only so we can control the subject but also because the mere shock of being injured is often enough to kill, so we'll need some trauma management software and probably an implanted medical kit of sorts to take care of the metabolism and maybe keep the brain alive for the time being if the subject takes mortal damage which stops heart function or similar, long enough to get the subject into a freezer or operating table. Epidermis is interesting stuff, and easily grown in a vat and replaced if destroyed in our advanced world. I could bring synthetic analogues into play of course, provided it means the cyborg is still passable for human even on detailed inspection. Blood and other everyday tissue can be replaced, cloned or otherwise sorted. Neither erythrocytes or leucocytes are really essential in my book, we can soon find other molecules to carry oxygen about, and leucocytes are a more long term issue, we could send our subjects out into the world for some time without any at all, after all, there will invariably be some genetic modification involved when they are produced, so we could eliminate a lot of disease and so forth at a genetic level. I did explore the exoskeleton route, but it always strikes me as crude, clunky and there is always the soft fleshy bit in the middle. Also the individual in question will hardly pass for a plain human. Other questions I still need to explore are just what sort of lives do these augmented beings have? Are they mere drones kept in freezers between uses, or are there cyborgs in everyday life? Would they automatically know they were not just flesh and bone? I mean, if there was no clicking or whirring going on deep under your skin, no apparent external features, and you didn't have any cool graphics on your retina or patched into your brain to overlay your plain eyesight, how would you know you'd been doctored? Say you were abducted, drugged heavily for a couple of years and then released on to the street one day, thrown out of a van in medical garb and had no apparent scars, short of an airport X ray, you would never know. A quick once over by a doctor would show you in remarkably good health... but nothing untoward.
Well if you were a cyborg that ended up in the situation that you described... certainly you would notice that you could run faster, jump higher, see farther, have faster reaction times, be able to think more clearly and logically... and if you got cut and you had the really tough skin... the blade doesn't cut you? I would think there'd be some noticeable differences from what you were before.
The thing is, unless I actually told you you were a cyborg, how else would you know? An average joe isn't going to notice, unless of course he is in the habit of doing a few long jumps on his way to work, or steps out in front of fast moving vehicles routinely. Yes he might be a jogger or a runner, and notice he doesn't get tired or can run at 40mph or something but even so, its unlikely. I've read a huge amount of stuff, of course I'm interested in military history, technology and so forth so I'm really enjoying the process of putting the bones of my novel together. I'll definitely post some cut and paste passages at some point.
I have done a lot of research into the carbon nanotubes thing, intriguing how they work, nanotech could well revolutionise many existing branches of S&T that we already know because of the ability to build materials and objects from the ground up, meaning you could get better performance etc from even plain metals like steel, much less anything exotic or novel. On-going work with the novel, lots of background to fill in yet, plus timeline and more flesh on the principal characters. Also, much research into rail guns, practical application, how they work and so on.
