unmanned jump ships (Q for GMs)
- Thread starter F33D
- Start date
AndrewW
Emperor Mongoose
alex_greene said:That's six ideas I came up with off the top of my head just now.
Don't forget the drone ship returns a couple of centuries later loaded up with advanced technology.
It became self aware and is now trying to convert more machinery to it's cause (to rule mankind of course).
The ship has returned but is now on a collision course to collide with a space colony.
The returning ship was changed in some way.
A ship matching the unmanned scout has been sighted, but not where it should be.
The ship once thought lost has returned, but is not responding to any signals. When sent to investigate the characters discover that some of the equipment is missing, who did this and why?
alex_greene
Guest
There really is no reason to not have drone vessels, is there, other than clinging to the atavism of a 1970s vision of the future. If Voyager 1 can stay functioning for 35 years, with a further ten to thirteen years projected, on crappy TL 7 technology,and get as far as the heliopause and the threshold of interstellar space - then I'm sure that drone ships can easily be constructed and deployed for remote operations in the far future with the advanced tech at their disposal.
alex_greene
Guest
Well, that won't happen clearly. Just the big cargo ships, drone probes and similar ships that are designed to require jobs requiring no human decision-making and little maintenance.F33D said:
Fighting ships need human crews for human decision-making, and also because some of them are likely to carry human crews for fighting in conditions where robots are unsuitable. Further, human crews are generally required on passenger ships, not to mention those free traders and tramp ships which are effectively a home to the Traveller crews whose job is to provide those skills that really require a human touch.
Incidentally, the idea of not equipping weapons platform drones with autonomous smart systems able to use their own initiative is even more important when it comes to the concept of designing a ship of any size, designed for combat, but automated. It's a matter of ethics - the drones might be doing killings, but there is still a human at some point, pulling the trigger.
far-trader
Mongoose
alex_greene said:
Why? IFF and protocols should eliminate that before long. We already have hunter drones that could well be autonomous once loaded with a target profile.
At the very least manned space fighters are a non-starter. IF space fighters are valid combatants. If not then just make them bigger until they are, and call them corvettes, or destroyers, or whatever. You have more room for what counts in a fight; weapons, speed, armour, and speed.
alex_greene said:
What possible conditions could exist that are unsuitable to robots but suitable for humans? It'd be easier to protect circuits from any environment than humans.
alex_greene said:
Skills like what? Steward? MgT has "Luxuries" to replace that. Medic? Have you seen the bedside manner of PC medics?
I'd sooner trust an AutoDoc... Homes for the crews? Sure. Tonight on "Multi Million Credit Homes of the Poor and Unknown"... without those jobs (replaced by automation) the "crews" would have perfectly fine jobs somewhere else and a home that doesn't require 10s of thousands of credits of upkeep a month to cover the mortgage, and skipping a little maintenance won't leave you stranded in space facing a slow death.
alex_greene said:
Again though, why? Or more precisely, why do I need a crew of tens or hundreds to maintain the ship, man the turrets, fly the fighters, etc. etc. etc... when all I really need to satisfy even that requirement is a few officers?
Just playing Devil's advocate :twisted:
Faelan Niall
Banded Mongoose
Really I don't care how realiable something is, shit breaks. It breaks when you absolutely don't want it to, it breaks especially if you have a back up, and that back up does not necessarily work. Call it Murphys law, call it whatever you want, things simply break, and nine times out of ten you are left with the low tech solution which is so simple it is more difficult to break. Thats how assembly lines break down, thats how mechanical failures occur, thinking you can maintain everything in the kind of condition where multiple redundancy is viable is a fallacy, things will be missed, and if not you have machines monitoring machines monitoring parts of machines, and quite simply the cost will grow into the astronomical until it is cheaper to put a crew on it. The only thing that breaks the cycle is a true AI.
Not necessary, they are well aware of it and quite likely toF33D said:
agree on an international law which restricts the use of au-
tonomous weapons. The currently emerging consensus is
that such weapons need an operator or supervisor of com-
battant status who has the legal responsibility for all activi-
ties of the weapon. In short, if the weapon commits a war
crime, there has to be someone who goes to jail for it.
Captain Jonah
Mongoose
F33D said:
For pure cargo there is no reason. But as I said before. People want people around them, servant robots are one thing but on those big passenger ships the passengers want to have crew around to talk to and interact with. The entire ships crew may be a load of stewards and a bridge crew with no skills and nice uniforms but as long as everyone thinks they know what they are doing the passengers are happy.
Modern aircraft are capable of taking off, flying and landing with no more than 1% pilot involvement. There are a couple of stories doing the rounds now about pilots found asleep in the cockpits while the autopilot flew the plane.
Which does of course lead to some interesting problems when the players find that they are the only qualified crew on the 100,000Dton liner as the entire crew have steward skills and a few pilot/engineer zero's and that random acident just took out the entire AI and its backups along with main engineering :twisted:
far-trader
Mongoose
Captain Jonah said:
Well it would, but...
...where did the player characters get that kind of experience in a universe of fully automated ships with barely competent "show" crews?
Of course, international law is a slow process, and new typesF33D said:
of weapons rarely get banned or regulated before they were
invented, introduced and used. Still, the intent to regulate or
even ban autonomous weapon systems is there, and a law will
probably follow in a decade or so.
Captain Jonah
Mongoose
Where did the players get those skills. Running the small ships of course.
AIs at tech 15/16 require a vast, powerful and very expensive computer network to exist within.
Putting a Mcr30+ computer in a small ship that only costs Mcr50 is a massive waste. On that Mcr1,000 super liner the computer costs are just part of the package.
Those tech 12 sub 1000Dton craft that make the minor runs, visit the frontier worlds and go places the big ships don't bother will be hopelessly out of date in the core or when alongside those tech 15 mega ships. The core world crews will be far more passenger relations teams and far less technical. They will, of course, look down on those rustic frontier types with worn and grubby jump suits and tool belts.
After all what sort of core world engineer actually gets his hands dirty, that is what drones and remotes are for.
I can see the crew on the advanced ships having Admin, Steward, Liaison, Diplomacy etc and enough of the actual skies to be able to talk the talk. A ship’s captain with pilot 0, navigator 0, Admin 2, Diplomacy 2, Liaison 1, Steward 2. The chief engineer with Admin 2, Engineer 0, Remote Operations 2, streetwise 1. The bulk of the crew being stewards of various types.
The free traders, the Tramp merchants, the Frontier yokels etc have to do the actual work and so have the actual skills. Even the tools of the trade may be lacking on the big ships. Need a tool kit on that mega liner, send a repair drone since it has all the tools built in. Drones out of action, grab a crow bar and open up a drone for the screw driver you need.
The impact of this is something we talked about a lot at Terra/Sol. Advancing technology has a massive impact on where the Meat fits in and in many cases it simply doesn’t. High tech ships have crew to look after the meat cargo not to run the ship. High tech factories and manufacturing process use drones to harvest the raw materials, process them in automatic plants, make the bits and assemble them in robotic production lines and ship them to customers computer controlled homes using drone delivery vehicles.
Hand crafted becomes a mark of quality and expense, “Anyone can own a nano built chair from an AI factory but that rug is hand woven by human craftsman and it cost a hefty pile of credits I can tell you”.
Without having people in jobs there is no income, no commerce, no market for the sellers. You can end up with a technological Utopia or a living hell where the AIs have human pets.
There are people flying ships because they are operating in the cracks of the system. They are dealing with loads to small for the AI run super ships to bother with. They deal with customers who do not or will not deal with the AIs or Hypercorps.
There is nothing wrong with AI ships. However before doing that in YTU consider the overall implications. Since Drones, Robots and AIs can do the work faster, more accurately and more safely than the Meat then why bother with the Meat.
In T/S the Orion Confederation has 30% of the population identified as Dolee’s. They live on a citizen’s stipend and will never have a job; multiple generations of them have never had jobs simply because there are no jobs for them. Something like another third of the population will have jobs that pay about the same as the stipend but have better benefits. Many of these involve no real skills, they are make work for which no real skills are involved. Shift supervisors in an AI factory for example. The AI’s deal with any problems before the Human supervisors are even aware of them but have the Humans authorise them because they are the supervisors.
The remainder of the working population have actual skills that are in demand and as such earn real incomes. When your verse is a capitalist commerce based type there needs to be people with money to buy what you are selling, it may be that many of them get that money from the state or that the cubicle drones only have jobs because the mega corps get tax breaks for employing people. It doesn’t matter where they get money from, all that matters is that they have money to buy and sell stuff so your players can trade. Otherwise you are playing Star Trek, “Buy your cargo, what a quaint idea, we Humans have evolved past the crude money based commerce systems of the past”.
A large chunk of GDP is put towards making sure that every citizen has some form of income, a home and food. This allows them to buy the goods the AI factories are making which generate the tax incomes the governments need to run and keep the whole capitalist system turning.
There is nothing wrong with pure AI ships, just consider how far it goes when you replace people with AIs or VIs in all the risky or boring jobs and then the routine jobs and then most of the other jobs as well.
AIs at tech 15/16 require a vast, powerful and very expensive computer network to exist within.
Putting a Mcr30+ computer in a small ship that only costs Mcr50 is a massive waste. On that Mcr1,000 super liner the computer costs are just part of the package.
Those tech 12 sub 1000Dton craft that make the minor runs, visit the frontier worlds and go places the big ships don't bother will be hopelessly out of date in the core or when alongside those tech 15 mega ships. The core world crews will be far more passenger relations teams and far less technical. They will, of course, look down on those rustic frontier types with worn and grubby jump suits and tool belts.
After all what sort of core world engineer actually gets his hands dirty, that is what drones and remotes are for.
I can see the crew on the advanced ships having Admin, Steward, Liaison, Diplomacy etc and enough of the actual skies to be able to talk the talk. A ship’s captain with pilot 0, navigator 0, Admin 2, Diplomacy 2, Liaison 1, Steward 2. The chief engineer with Admin 2, Engineer 0, Remote Operations 2, streetwise 1. The bulk of the crew being stewards of various types.
The free traders, the Tramp merchants, the Frontier yokels etc have to do the actual work and so have the actual skills. Even the tools of the trade may be lacking on the big ships. Need a tool kit on that mega liner, send a repair drone since it has all the tools built in. Drones out of action, grab a crow bar and open up a drone for the screw driver you need.
The impact of this is something we talked about a lot at Terra/Sol. Advancing technology has a massive impact on where the Meat fits in and in many cases it simply doesn’t. High tech ships have crew to look after the meat cargo not to run the ship. High tech factories and manufacturing process use drones to harvest the raw materials, process them in automatic plants, make the bits and assemble them in robotic production lines and ship them to customers computer controlled homes using drone delivery vehicles.
Hand crafted becomes a mark of quality and expense, “Anyone can own a nano built chair from an AI factory but that rug is hand woven by human craftsman and it cost a hefty pile of credits I can tell you”.
Without having people in jobs there is no income, no commerce, no market for the sellers. You can end up with a technological Utopia or a living hell where the AIs have human pets.
There are people flying ships because they are operating in the cracks of the system. They are dealing with loads to small for the AI run super ships to bother with. They deal with customers who do not or will not deal with the AIs or Hypercorps.
There is nothing wrong with AI ships. However before doing that in YTU consider the overall implications. Since Drones, Robots and AIs can do the work faster, more accurately and more safely than the Meat then why bother with the Meat.
In T/S the Orion Confederation has 30% of the population identified as Dolee’s. They live on a citizen’s stipend and will never have a job; multiple generations of them have never had jobs simply because there are no jobs for them. Something like another third of the population will have jobs that pay about the same as the stipend but have better benefits. Many of these involve no real skills, they are make work for which no real skills are involved. Shift supervisors in an AI factory for example. The AI’s deal with any problems before the Human supervisors are even aware of them but have the Humans authorise them because they are the supervisors.
The remainder of the working population have actual skills that are in demand and as such earn real incomes. When your verse is a capitalist commerce based type there needs to be people with money to buy what you are selling, it may be that many of them get that money from the state or that the cubicle drones only have jobs because the mega corps get tax breaks for employing people. It doesn’t matter where they get money from, all that matters is that they have money to buy and sell stuff so your players can trade. Otherwise you are playing Star Trek, “Buy your cargo, what a quaint idea, we Humans have evolved past the crude money based commerce systems of the past”.
A large chunk of GDP is put towards making sure that every citizen has some form of income, a home and food. This allows them to buy the goods the AI factories are making which generate the tax incomes the governments need to run and keep the whole capitalist system turning.
There is nothing wrong with pure AI ships, just consider how far it goes when you replace people with AIs or VIs in all the risky or boring jobs and then the routine jobs and then most of the other jobs as well.
