Robot Crewmen?

[lord senobio]

I went ahead and designed a robot crew-astrogation robot, mechanic robot,and guard robot (gave it a gun for combat) rest of the crew is human-players.
You can give the bots an experience processor (p.23 of Robots book)which it can improve its skills through use of those skills.
I dont see why you couldnt have bots as crew-as long as a crew member was able to repair and maintain them. I try to keep the bots "behind the scenes"

My pirate ship uses bots to storm and attack other ships. They just want cargo so tend to shoot anyone in the way. Helps with the pirates boarding numbers-and doesnt strain their life support.

 

[lastbesthope]

Sounds like those are some...

[pun mode on]
Dread Pirate Robots!!!
[pun mode off]

I'll get my coat...

LBH

 

[Infojunky]

Good question.

IMTU robots are ubiquitous, largely unremarked on as they are mostly appliances. When was the last time a PC stated they where cleaning something? Or cooking? Or any of a number of background chores?

It also depends on the setting your playing in "Classic" 1105+ sorts of games they are fine, but imagine a robot crewman in a 1248 setting, machines moving.... Fright Check.

While I will my Traveller Universe is a lot more Post-Human than the published core, robots are only remarked on if they are part of the story.

The most common bot a PC will interact with on a regular basis is the Alpha class General Labor Unit, which is a humanoid shaped bot that has a bunch of grunt skills at zero or one, skills like Cargo handling, steward etc... The ships extra hands. (This general model is also used as a basic frame for full body cyborgs as it is designed to be human/sophant shaped) [A Alpha also has attributes similar to a baseline of the replicated species].

 

[GypsyComet]

Wrote one up back in CT/Striker days to be the Gunner that none of the crew were.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

It also depends on the setting your playing in "Classic" 1105+ sorts of games they are fine, but imagine a robot crewman in a 1248 setting, machines moving.... Fright Check.

Or Vilani at any point in time since they had Ancient's war machines rumbling about their planet. Racial memory and all that...

 

[alex_greene]

The stricture that sophont AI has to be TL 17+, impossible tech beyond the common experience, is an artificial barrier established so that player characters can't just plug in a commercially available AI program into a robot frame and send out the bot to do a man's job all the time. Traveller is geared towards the humans making the critical decisions, solving the critical problems of each scenario and ultimately being the driving force of the story, whether as agents of change of society, or agents of its destruction, or simply as agents of acquisition of their own wealth and fortune.

So your human Traveller crews could occupy the critical decision-making positions - Captain/Owner, Pilot, Engineer - and non-critical roles can be filled with robots run by Expert programs with skill sets better than the characters', though still subordinate to the human characters' decisions and obligated to follow their orders, such as Navigator, Ship's Medic and Gunner.

A large ship could have a human Captain and Pilot, with robots as Co-Pilot to manage the course of the vessel while the humans sleep, and a human Chief Engineer running a team of subordinate robots to maintain the drives, and occasionally to boost those drives' performance based on decisions the human Chief Engineer makes. While a robot might work Sensors and Comms, and have exquisite skill in those fields, it's still a human who will operate the Computer, and it's practically mandatory for Stewards to be human - though sometimes, on larger vessels, the same sort of arrangement could exist as in Engineering, where the Stewards are mostly robots which defer to human managers and the human Purser.

In the end, it would be humans who make the critical decisions about the vessel, no matter how many robots are purchased to fill in the gaps. Specifically, the player characters.

 

[alex_greene]

Which thought gives me pause to wonder what would happen if the rules for robot construction from Book 9: Robot could be merged with Special Supplement 3: Biotech Vehicles to create semi-organic robots capable of their own decision making.

You don't have to thank me all at once.

 

[F33D]

The stricture that sophont AI has to be TL 17+, impossible tech beyond the common experience, is an artificial barrier established so that player characters can't just plug in a commercially available AI program into a robot frame and send out the bot to do a man's job all the time.

You are incorrect. Reread the Main Rule Book as to what positions can be held by robots using the Agent/expert programs.

 

[torus]

I think this is one of those cases where you have to choose whether to stick with Traveller's original retro scifi setting or introduce more modern technological developments. Clearly in a high tech space faring society extrapolated from present day technology there would be a sophisticated network solution for interstellar communication, making efficient use of the links provided by jump traffic. In seventies scifi however I suspect something closer to a mailbag with actual letters would have been envisaged.

 

[alex_greene]

I think this is one of those cases where you have to choose whether to stick with Traveller's original retro scifi setting or introduce more modern technological developments. Clearly in a high tech space faring society extrapolated from present day technology there would be a sophisticated network solution for interstellar communication, making efficient use of the links provided by jump traffic. In seventies scifi however I suspect something closer to a mailbag with actual letters would have been envisaged.

I've a funny feeling this should have been in the thread next door. I've done this myself once in a while and posted Traveller stuff in the Legend forum. Which is hilarious, imagining some Legend dude wandering around with the FGMP-15 combat style.

 

[locarno24]

Which is hilarious, imagining some Legend dude wandering around with the FGMP-15 combat style.

"What is that?"
"I think it's called 'the staff of blowing lots of stuff up really, really quickly'. Observe..."

 

[Infojunky]

Which is hilarious, imagining some Legend dude wandering around with the FGMP-15 combat style.

"What is that?"
"I think it's called 'the staff of blowing lots of stuff up really, really quickly'. Observe..."

This is My BOOM Stick......

(C'mon, somebody had to do it..... )

As for Robots in Traveller, they where one of the 1st things speculated on/add in jTas back in the day, Traveller has always evolved in its scope and coverage as time has moved on. The brutally honest answer is if a robot is cheaper than a person a robot will get used, as the 3rd Imperium as presented through the years is a pretty brutal sorta place, that is nowhere near as culturally Homogeneous as some would like.

 

[Morte]

I think this is one of those cases where you have to choose whether to stick with Traveller's original retro scifi setting or introduce more modern technological developments.

Whilst there's a lot of robot/AI/cyber/biotech stuff that can be worked into traveller, if that's really what interests a gamer they should at least think about running Transhuman Space instead.

 

[Infojunky]

Whilst there's a lot of robot/AI/cyber/biotech stuff that can be worked into Traveller, if that's really what interests a gamer they should at least think about running Transhuman Space instead.

Heh, there was quite a bit of discussion of the suitability of Traveller for running a interstellar Transhuman Space game on the TS List and gurpsnet and the forums in the days when it was shiny and new...

(Hey, after a quick look at my digital shelf one could do TS in Mongoose Traveller now mostly, just a thought.)..

 

[locarno24]

Heh, there was quite a bit of discussion of the suitability of Traveller for running a interstellar Transhuman Space game on the TS List and gurpsnet and the forums in the days when it was shiny and new...

(Hey, after a quick look at my digital shelf one could do TS in Mongoose Traveller now mostly, just a thought.)..

It's always been an interesting setting. For that matter, you can even fit it into traveller in a pretty canon fashion - there is a period of quite a few millenia when the ancients and their assorted minions are wandering through the galaxy with AI grids wired into their brains, backup bodies and nanotech blood, generally telling the laws of physics to sit down and shut the hell up.

See chapter 6 of Secrets of the Ancients. It would be challenging in some ways to do a campaign setting (because your players can literally do anything given enough time), but at the same time very rewarding.

 

[2330ADUSA1]

Picture the Star Wars universe, and all the droids that are used there. Now just make that into Traveller and so ends the problem. In my own game, I use driods everywhere and have most of them look like humanoids or wheeled style shape. I could care less what the "rules say" I paid for the books and will and can run things in my own way just fine.

To each their own!

 

[AndrewW]

Picture the Star Wars universe, and all the droids that are used there. Now just make that into Traveller and so ends the problem. In my own game, I use driods everywhere and have most of them look like humanoids or wheeled style shape. I could care less what the "rules say" I paid for the books and will and can run things in my own way just fine.

These aren't the droids you are looking for.

 

[dragoner]

Right now, my players are being offered a bot for purchase and are simultaneously intrigued and terrified of it. :mrgreen:

 

[2330ADUSA1]

In my own campaign, my players bought a ship that came with a system that had a Master Mind Computer with a AI and four Robot/Droids. Each Robot/Driod has a memory slot fuction that allows them to hold up to a specific number of memory slot uints, and they relate to skill levels. It was 1 slot for a Zero level, 2 slots for a 1st level, 3 slots for a 3rd level in a skill. So if you wanted a Robot/Droin to have a level 3 skill it takes 6 memory slots. These 4 Robots/Droids all had 15 memory slots, but if the Master Mind Computer was controlling them, they could have more. Now in that mode when the computer runs them, then they are Droids and have limitations on reaction time, distance of where they can opperate, and power cell usage. As with anything there are always Pros and Cons to consider.