When the Batman character Jack Napier fell into a vat filled with caustic chemicals, the Joker was made. Thus came the sadistic sense of humor, the colored hair and face and the razor-tipped playing cards.

Well the monstrous British aerospace defense company, BAE, wants to create military drones the same exact way. In vats. Full of chemicals. With an incredibly quick turnaround.

It’s a process they’re working on to perfect and eventually implement. It’s called “chemputing”, and essentially makes an aerial fighter — electronics and the works embedded within — through a series of complex reactions.

This is from a BAE press release:

We have been developing routes to digitize synthetic and materials chemistry and at some point in the future hope to assemble complex objects in a machine from the bottom up, or with minimal human assistance. Creating small aircraft would be very challenging but I’m confident that creative thinking and convergent digital technologies will eventually lead to the digital programming of complex chemical and material systems.

They explain (and show) even more in the following animated video:

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