Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
A post about a prison in a Farcebook Traveller group made me want to design a robotic prison guard that could handle all direct interaction with the prisoners and not be a pushover. This is my design. Enjoy.
Robotic Prison Guards (Or How To Oppress Your Players For Fun)
- Thread starter Terry Mixon
- Start date
Fluffy Bunny Feet
Cosmic Mongoose
Grappling arms in the prison area. Immune to most weapons the prisoners might use and a prisoner would know that if he is grappled he might well be crushed to a thin red goo. Able to punch through most barricades the prisoners might build as well.
Guard robots should be traversing the ceiling not the floor and make the room height tall Harder to hurt the robots if you can't get to them but their weapons and limbs can get to you.
Guard robots should be traversing the ceiling not the floor and make the room height tall Harder to hurt the robots if you can't get to them but their weapons and limbs can get to you.
Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
True enough, but with 40 armor, they aren't in danger.
Still, you're right that they don't have to be humanoid. Doesn't even change the design. Good thinking.
J. L. Brown
Emperor Mongoose
I like it; expensive, but worth it. Two questions:
1} Why four copies of Athletics (Strength)/4?
2} How did you get to Armor-40?
Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
1. The spreadsheet adds all mentions of them. One per limb. Not my doing. Athletics (dexterity) comes from Agility, so only one of it.
2. I added 36 to the base armor value.
I'll post the build sheet. Thanks again for letting MixCorp take care of your correctional facility needs!
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Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
The guards don't care about their rights. They have the right to bleed unless they do what they're told.
Streetwise or deception could be swapped out for it if someone insists. Personally, I suspect they wouldn't need the skill. They'd have the boundaries of what the robots could do programmed in.
Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
I can totally see that.
Fluffy Bunny Feet
Cosmic Mongoose
But what if one of the prisoners is Bender (Furturama)?
Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
Sounds like an adventure to me.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
I think the question is more more what you want convicted prisoners for.
If it's cheap labour, or retribution.
If it's cheap labour, or retribution.
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
It's quarantine. Separate the criminals from the non-criminals, or separate the poor criminals from the non-criminals anyhow...lol...
Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
Robots are good for labor.
There is a school of thought that hard work is rehabilitative...
I mean, there's a whole spectrum of penal systems, from a benign exile colony on a nice planet to a concrete cube with goo piped in once a day.
Punitive systems. Reeducation systems. For profit systems. No longer our problem systems.
I mean, there's a whole spectrum of penal systems, from a benign exile colony on a nice planet to a concrete cube with goo piped in once a day.
Punitive systems. Reeducation systems. For profit systems. No longer our problem systems.
Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
All I can say for sure is these robots would eliminate sophants putting themselves at risk in those environments. The skills could be swapped out to perform different functions for different kinds of penal system. They are pretty flexible.
boggo2300
Cosmic Mongoose
You and I do LIVE somewhere where that was the premise of it's original population, and we both know how that turned out...
Paradise on Earth, baby
But yeah, even with exile colonies there's wide variation.
Australia very quickly became a proper colony with a focus on free settlement *supplemented* by the labour of serving convicts. A very critical point was that most were on seven year terms and earning a ticket of leave for good behaviour to move to probabtionary release was usual.
A setup where the cons are just dumped on a planet and left to fend for themselves is a whole other matter.
But yeah, even with exile colonies there's wide variation.
Australia very quickly became a proper colony with a focus on free settlement *supplemented* by the labour of serving convicts. A very critical point was that most were on seven year terms and earning a ticket of leave for good behaviour to move to probabtionary release was usual.
A setup where the cons are just dumped on a planet and left to fend for themselves is a whole other matter.
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Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Depends on what you want to do with them.
Cheap labour is that someone has figured out how to leverage the prisoners in a way that's cheaper than automation.
While giving prisoners weapons would be considered something of a risk, you can promise them better treatment, or reduced sentences, if they join penal battalions.
If there is some resistance to more permanent solutions, like hanging or mindwipes, transportation seems rather attractive, if social reintegration is not deemed suitable.
In that sense, if there are boundaries, then you have robot guards supervising that.
Cheap labour is that someone has figured out how to leverage the prisoners in a way that's cheaper than automation.
While giving prisoners weapons would be considered something of a risk, you can promise them better treatment, or reduced sentences, if they join penal battalions.
If there is some resistance to more permanent solutions, like hanging or mindwipes, transportation seems rather attractive, if social reintegration is not deemed suitable.
In that sense, if there are boundaries, then you have robot guards supervising that.
