> Overall it seems the meta design spec, "involve the pcs", clashes with how > much can be done more cheaply by robotic drones. And i guess feeling > better, if there is a human on board, who can panically pull some levers, > if something fails, or wanting a dead pilot to be responsible for > insurance reasons, does not make that much more manned missions.
"Robotic drones" can cover a lot. At one end of the scale are remotely operated vehicles with humans at the console, at the other end are sentient AIs. The lightspeed lag might preclude ROVs, while sentient AIs are only available at TL10. A mainframe-sized robotic brain at TL9 has IQ 10 with neural nets or IQ 9 without it. A human astronaut is probably smarter than that. > Finding out what happened, repairing stuff and moving stuff, that does not > go into standard slots (crew members for instance, especially injured > ones) seem to be the tasks, where you most likely need humans. And unless > the crew of the rescued vessel is inoperative, they should be able to do > all that. A rescue mission might become a salvage mission if it takes too long. Still worthwhile, to find out what happened and to avoid it next time. Corporations will look at the value of the assets, too. > So it seems, that while a sort of a bridgehead for robotic missions could > propably make sense, my original idea of it being a base for diverse pc > missions does not work that well. Considering the IQ problem and signal delay, I'm assuming that robots are only used if a whole bunch is controlled by nearby humans (e.g. ice-mining around a moonbase) or if swarms of passive sensor drones record data for later analysis. Each distinct "mission" or "operation" is centered around a manned ship. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
