Hiver automation

[Gonzag]

Just got through character creation with my players and the one who got the ship was the Hiver. They got particularly unlucky and didn't get a lot of ship skills before mustering out, which is kinda fitting the Hiver's ways. So I looked at the base personal hiver ship from aliens of charted space vol.2, and particularly its automation feature and I feel like I'm missing something. Is it just bigger, pricier and worst that virtual crew or a ship brain with avatars? I got that it doesn't need to roll for most common tasks like skimming fuel or landing in wilderness that these other automations would have to.

But at 37MCr, it rolls 2D-4 to fire its particle barbettes, which make it only hit on a 12, which make any kind of firefight hugely in ots disfavor, and its automated, carefull way of doing things make it pretty likely to get jumped by pirates in hiding. At 10MCr, the Omega ship brain has +3 across the board and don't take 12% of tonnage.

Am I missing something? Even the all new Hiver ships from Traders and Gunboats use the poor Hiver automation, so I guess its not some kind of powercreep from newer book.

 

[RYXlord]

The main advantage of Hiver automation is that it handles a lot of the physical components that a virtual crew can't, from repairing the hole in your engineering bay to making you a sandwich. The downside is that it's slow and predictable, which is most keenly felt in combat, you're correct, but Hivers aren't big on combat, so they mostly get by okay. You can still manually operate the guns, so I suppose an easy answer would be to just acquire a designated gunner to take control of things in a pinch, or even just hack a virtual gunner into the existing automation system, if you don't mind crossing the barrier in that regard.

Would it be better to have a ship mind and a crew of badass avatars? Absolutely. But so would any given ship you could name, and that's not how the cultures designing these space ships like to run things.