Have you ever been in a situation where you want to swap your robot's battery out, but it conflicts with an apparel restraint? Does your robot keep sneakily switching to an extra battery without permission? The Polycell Soft-Swap may be for you.

The idea behind the Polycell is simple: it's an attachment that contains all of the linksets for our different batteries, as well as the programming to become any of them. But unlike a normal battery, it can't be detached without the owner's permission as long as the avatar is wearing a controller. Which battery will it be? Well, that's up to the unit's owner: while it's ejected, the battery inventory HUD can be used to swap in any of the cells you own, and they'll appear just as if the unit had attached the normal version of that battery from its own SL inventory.

The Polycell inventory HUD will be based on our 2017 Halloween Treasure Hunt HUD, the same technology behind AHM's inventory manager. Much like ACS's battery box, Polycell batteries will keep their charge and degradation while in the HUD, and you'll be able to recharge and refurbish batteries directly from your inventory using a specialized battery maintenance station.

You probably won't be able to trade your batteries with other HUD users, though, so there will still be some perks of having a traditional, physical battery, especially for units with no owners, as Polycell batteries will only stay in the robot as long as that robot belongs to the battery's owner—this is the best way we can think of to prevent disputes over stolen batteries. But we will at least try to figure out how to implement a battery validator that can be used to automatically convert normal batteries into Polycell inventory items (and vice-versa), and maybe even finally automate updating old batteries! (What a thought.)