Robotic Drone Controllers and Remote Gunnery

EDIT:
I have checked and it is not actually possible to remove the tag from the top of a quote in edit mode.
You can, however you have to delete the whole quote, and not just the quoted user name that you wish to amend. You can of course "shunt" text you want to keep into the clipboard or another document. Then delete the quote box (blank spaces and newlines as well). Then start again with new quoted reply, and then shunt the kept text back into your message. Messy editing, but do-able.
You can also post a quote, post another quote and delete the content of the first post inadvertently picking up the tag from the second post at the same time and leaving the second post under the tag of the fist, which is what must have happen in my case.
Been there and done that!!! You can accidently get "nested quotes" of one quote appearing inside another quote. This is when you make one quote, then make the second quote before accidently forgetting to move the editor cursor down a paragraph. That procedure produces unwanted nested quotes. Same procedure applies. Just as messy to complete the edit.
 
However there are currently very few options that provide skill and whilst they can clearly be fitted to drones based on the examples in the book, they are all in the navigation, movement and observation area (which ties in nicely with sentence one in your quote) so perhaps the wording should be "drones have very few options providing skills which limit their capability to operate semi-autonomously" rather than drones do not have skills.
Thinking further on this, wording on P208 could be amended my simply changing the words "As such, they do not have skills" to "They do not have skill packages". This would make it consistent with the previous definition and the skills that are imparted from installed options.
 
Who makes the to hit roll for a cruise missile? The computer that programmed its route, the onboard computer that responds to environmental changes, or the targetting sub-routine on final approach?
 
Who makes the to hit roll for a cruise missile? The computer that programmed its route, the onboard computer that responds to environmental changes, or the targetting sub-routine on final approach?
Ultimately it will depend on the specific scenario since there are a lot of variables to consider. It also depends of you are using smart missiles, intelligent missiles fired from a weapon equipped with a smart tracker or actual "robot" missiles since the game rules are different. It depends if your "cruise missile" is a ship to ship missile (as the space combat rules blur a lot of the nuances for a ground based missile from CSC or the Field Catalog). You could create a custom cruise missile from using the Robot Handbook and then you would need to come up with your own rules since investing significant effort into highly capable targeting and sensor packages should provide some benefit, but there doesn't appear to be scope for that in the core rules.

It depends on if it is dumb missile, or has a drone interface or robot brain. If a dumb missile it is the computer or gunner that programmed its route, once it is launched it cannot respond to any countermeasures (but space combat takes no account of the gunner skill or range). If it has a brain it will use its own terminal guidance targeting, but if it has a drone interface it could also be overridden by the mothership if that has a better targeting solution.

It is complicated as the default missile in Traveller are not specified as being drones or robots (but are Smart - which itself means different things in different books). Thus the normal rules for missiles that have drone controllers or brains should be different from the default weapons. For example they may be immune to ordinary ECM measures (or at least require a contest of skills between the ECM and whatever is guiding the Robot/Drone missile.

The effectiveness of mothership derived targeting information should be subject to range modifiers at the range of the target from the mothership, the missiles on-board systems will be at the range of the missile when it implements its terminal guidance routine (at short range proably). Even a primitive brain taking no range modifiers can have more chance of hitting than a more sophisticated system that is at long range, but as stated space combat with missiles ignores range.

A cruise missile will tend to have at least a Primitive(homing) brain which is good enough for the large targets (or GPS coordinates) it is usually designed to defeat. On launch the target will be designated and unless that designated target disappears from its sensors (which may require Recon checks if the target is evading or jamming effectively) it will pootle over to it and whack it out. If the target is a friendly then it will be for the mothership to abort since the primitive brain has no IFF capability (lets hope it has a drone interface).

Larger weapons might have more sophisticated brains, which should have anti-jam capability and probably some point defence evasion capability, but large targets are quiet easy to hit and rely more on shooting down or breaking sensor lock of the incoming missile than dodging making really smart brains on comparatively cheap missiles uneconomical since you might need to launch many to overwhelm any point defence capability. You might be better off launching a drone missile carrier to close down the range and then launch a salvo of less sophisticated and cheaper missiles from it which can manage the terminal guidance (like a MIRV). You might even be able to recover the carrier after the engagement, but even if not it will still probably be cheaper that having multiple missiles of equivalent sophistication.

Standard ship missiles are around KCr21 each which is a little cheaper than the KCr24 one in the Robot Handbook that has a Primitive(Homing Brain). Now we could put that down to a bulk discount for buying them by the dozen. If so we could make a ruling that this is basic missile and with a Primitive(Homing) brain it has no counter-ECM capability. It should also be noted that the to hit roll explicitly excludes the range or any gunnery skill (and doesn't mention Remote Ops). Perhaps even with this interpretation of the standard ship smart missile a Remote Ops could be used with the drone interface to provide a post launch target reselection.

You are going to have quite a lot of work to do to refit Robot Missiles back into the space combat system. You possibly require less in the ground combat system as there is more granularity where Robot options can play into conventional combat.
 
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I am talking about a real world cruise missile to highlight the difference between the real world and the rules, if Mongoose is willing to update the computer rules to a more "realisitc" paradigm it is high time the same was done for so called "drones".
 
Done by which computer...
and what fail safe ensures these things get to make their to hit roll even if GPS is taken out (I already know the answer, it is a sort of rhetorical question)
 
I am talking about a real world cruise missile to highlight the difference between the real world and the rules, if Mongoose is willing to update the computer rules to a more "realisitc" paradigm it is high time the same was done for so called "drones".
I am unable to answer this question at this classification :)
 
But really, the differentiation between Experts systems, Drones and Robots is not clear IRL. The most sophisticated decision making machines are not "robots" they are usually in large fixed computers. We are still trying to get robots to be able to navigate difficult terrain reliably (though this is coming on in leaps and bounds - literally). Drones are controlled by computers as much as their human operators moving us away from direct control and more directing autonomous subsystems to achieve well defined objectives. Even cheap consumer drones now contain more computing power than the most sophisticated military drones of a decade ago, indeed the recent conflict in Ukraine has pointed up the value of simple commercial drones that were rejected by military decision makers as "toys" because they would be easily defeated and thus of no value. Now when you mention disruptive warfare "the answer is Drone, now what is the question".

It turns out the "zerg rush" can have military value against an opponent that is not agile enough to deal with it, and sometimes the high tech hardware demonstrated by opponents is more of a "demo" than a mature capability. Seemingly powerful opponents are relying on social media instead of what turned out to be unreliable encrypted systems to communicate and op sec went out of the window. Crowd sourcing of data (by getting us all to recognise traffic lights to prove we are humans) has massively advanced autonomous vehicles. The acceptance of half-arsed concepts in AI have exposed that humans are as lazy as we feared and are happy to abrogate decision making to a random third party without checks and balances in return for cat videos. The tragedy of the commons writ on twitter.

I don't want to play in a world extrapolated from real life as it is depressing. I'd like to pretend that the future is a shiny place where technology is nicely compartmented and humans are freed up to "level up" rather than what currently appears to be a race to the bottom. I am worried about the future of AI, but I am more concerned that is it the only "I" in our future as science is abandoned in favour of popular mythology and you tube is more influential than academia. Hopefully I'll be dead before we get there, but the rate of decay is accelerating and I fear for my children.

Happy Christmas :)
 
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The answer may be the Borg.

If a Borg can't overcome an obstacle, the collective mind takes note, tries out billions of possible solutions and outcomes, until one finally works.
 
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