Interesting article here about the USN deploying unmanned boats to protect against small speedboat attacks. These 'drones' are equipped with .50cal guns and missiles and are intended to give navy ships protection from pesky speedboats.

Has anyone else designed Traveller ships with drone support in mind? Or created drones themselves?

http://news.yahoo.com/navy-test-fires-m ... 56306.html

I've been looking at this but 1st have to redo the rules on unmanned craft. The MGT rules calls for an insane amount of space for the computer system of such craft. ("A drone command unit takes up 1.5 tons per required crew equivalent and includes a basic electronics suite.") Must be using early TL 6 mainframes .

In that instance I've come to accept a bit of 'haziness' in the rules. While you are correct, that the computer itself would not take up that much room, other aspects of craft design are not taken into account at all (structure, sensor feed, redundancy, etc).

So if you assume the control section itself is relatively small (say .1 DT), the remaining space might be secondary computer nodes, storage, access to control area, power feeds, sensor feeds, control feeds, armor protection, rad protection, etc.

Spacecraft have lots of characteristics we don't have to deal with in our planetary environment. It's not perfect, but I can live with it (though the weapon systems aspects confuse me to no end... using anti-ship lasers in an attempt to shoot down missiles??? Have they never heard of point-defense laser clusters?)

You might not be far off on that

One of the suggestions some time back for the bulkiness of CT computers was that they were vacuum tube monsters rather than transistor/ic miniature marvels for hardened survival reasons. Just look at the punishment they take and keep on running uninterrupted. Hard to imagine modern computers surviving even routine operations of a spacecraft in Traveller given the far too fragile microscopic tolerances of modern computers. Just a thought.

Though I suspect the real reason for the size of the drone command units is a game balancing one, to offset the much larger real estate gained from eliminating crew comforts.

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When I read those rules, I assumed they were talking about the Drone Control station, where the Remote Operator was located, not the Computer on the drone itself.

HUMMM

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Could be. That sounds much more reasonable. I was just going by the post above, and may have even failed to properly understand the issue there

Where are the drone rules? Core or HG? Or somewhere else? Vehicles maybe?

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Dan "far-trader" Burns

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Small craft design rules / drones are in High Guard (starts on page 56)

Thanks phavoc, I'll have a look at them again (I'm sure I've skimmed them) later so I know what I'm talking about in future

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Everything (electronic) is already in place with human pilot. But, let's break it down. (A cockpit takes up 1.5 tons per crewman) This covers the electronics. The person would require ~1/2 ton for just the body. Another 1/2 ton for life support. (redundancy of systems is already assumed)

So, 1/2 ton + tonnage (if any) for advanced sensors. This would NOT be addition 1 1/2 tons for other crew positions as the electronics are extremely small.

1/2 ton for drones.

The High Guard turret drone pretty much is this, isn't it?
What's never made clear is how big the 'operator's station' on the mothership needs to be; obviously if a light frigate is operating a halo of 20+ railgun drones (assuming you've not got a drone command unit shiny enough to operate without remote operations), you've got as a minimum the same computer/crew support needed as operating 20 railgun barbettes. That's a sizeable extra whack of crew on the bridge.

Also: similar concept - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UXV_Combatant

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Minbari Protectorate Fleet:
http://www.mediafire.com/?cmymg13nzmd

Check out the Aegis class Scout from Gorgon Press. It's a small navy scout which uses six drones to greatly extend its sensor range to check out systems before the main fleet arrives.
It mentions the use of other drones as well, though they're not in the stats.

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