Ok, i was tooling around with a small idea and started reading a bit more about drones, and it says on page 240 SR4 that a rigger interface gives non-drones (Ok, it says vehicles but lets be imaginative runners) a pilot program - this basically means that you can put a rigger interface on a toaster as long as you pay the cost for the interface.

Soo, perhaps my Hacker would need some help out there in the cyberspace but does not want to rely on agents to clutter his commlink and response? Rigger interface+Commlink+autosoft= Drone hackers - add a virtual person program to add some flavor personality to your drone commlink and you are ready to go.

You basically get a pilot program with a skill of 4 and autosofts at 4 and then you just give them the programs you usually use (if you got programs at rating 5 it will use 9D6 for skill tests - very good when you want to have some cyber combat assistance.

In a combat situation you could tell them to hack enemy commlinks while you, the hacker focus on staying alive.

For fun, add the same thing to your low-end commlink and add a pilot program there too, a virtual secretary to take care of incoming calls and other tasks, and even initiate defenses against hacking (even more secure than just using agents and IC)

The main drawback is the price tag.
Every commlink would be 2,5K more expensive and the programs would cost around 2K each and would have to be bought for each program, no skill group program.

On another note, can one buy autosofts with specialization, and what would that cost be?

Actually, it's a lot more better:

Every Pilot has all relevant Matrix Skills equal to its Ratings, needing only Programs and the Electronic Warfare Autosoft for the rest.

And since no runner worth his salt should buy a program more than once...

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the hacker also buy all the autosofts necessary once, and then just crack them for use on all his Dronelinks?

Well, I didn't mean as a mean to 'rig' anything but more of an option to make items not normallly associated with drones to become drones. Sure, One could use drones already but see a comlink with a pilot program more like an advanced virtual secretary that can handle several items at once including upload agents and use the comlink independently from the Hacker.

Using a regular drone as a commlink would still mean that it would need a commlink, it will still be a drone in the end. I wanted something different, in this case a modification for implanted comlinks with two pilot programs and a secondary low end comlink as the one used to the fake sin and such.

More of fun thing, but it has its tactical advantages even though it would cost a lot in a high end pilot program (rating 4) and all the relevant computer programs. You can even add "Etiquette" autosoft and even linguasofts for your virtual secretary to take care of incoming calls and dealing with people you usually don't have time for, perfect for the guy pretending that he has a large company with several VR personas taking care of different tasks.

I still think Drone > Commlink.

You don't have to give the drone a commlink - they basically ARE commlinks.

A commlink has an OS and a wireless link. A drone has an OS (it's pilot) and a wireless link. You can upgrade the drone to outperform (or at least match) any commlink. It can run any program your commlink can, including virtual people.

It sounds like what you want to do is to give the commlink's OS a pilot, which the drone OS's already have. (At least, I don't think that a Drone's pilot program counts against its program limit - since the rules state somewhere that the pilot IS the OS).

What I don't get, is why you can't just crack/copy that pilotted OS to any other device - but oh well.

I see what you're saying about it being cooler to have a commlink that's as smart as a drone without it having to have 6 legs, or wheels or something - and about the pilot being better than some agent program (if only for the response it saves).

What makes you think one cannot copy a pilot program? You buy one of them like an agent or IC and then just install it in the device you want it in. Ah, you mean use it as a pilot program without the need of a rigger adaption. I believe that is because the adaption includes space for the pilot OS and space to run its programs independent of it's OS unlike agents who function inside the OS instead of being a separate entity.

That could be it. Still, since the rules don't go into detail. By RAW, you can only rigger-adapt vehicles. Anything else would be a house-rule by your GM. If he allows it, I say go for it.

One drawback would be the max-ratting of 4 (at chargen) on not only the pilot, but the underlying OS/firewall/responce/etc. Better than most commlinks, sure, but a step down from where a normal hacker would be. and it'd take nearly as much time to command them as to simply do it yourself. They could hold 4 programs without suffering - but so could your regular (upgraded to 5) commlink with an agent running on it (eating up the 5th program spot) - and those programs woudl be at rating 5 instead of 4. Alternativly, you could take a rating 5 commlink, put an agent and 9-10 other programs on it, (reducing its response/system to 4) and it would work as well as your drone-commlink, except that it would have twice as many programs avaialbe to it.

This is without the rules-fuzziness of rigger-adapting it.

'Sides, your coming at this half-assed backwards. You want backup hackers, yes? You don't need to go drone modifiying commlinks of shit like that.

Buy a second commlink. Subcribe it to your first one. Buy an agent program at level 4 and crack that sumnabitch.

Load as many agents onto commlink 2 as you feel required. You'll fill up that commlinks subscription list fast, but don't subscribe them to your primary commlink. Give 1 agent the command progrem. Call him Leftenant jones or something. He's your seargent. Subscribe him to your main commlink.

When you need your agent army to do something, use command to give an order to your seargent. "Sarge, tell the boys to crack that system." Sarge then uses his actions to give orders to the required agents, while you go on your own merry way.

Interesting, that means that onewon't need to buy that kind of autosofts. neat, makes the idea simpler.

Also, ordering a drone to do something complicated means the GM can put some nasty modifiers in there... Like, tehre is a difference between saying "Use this particular exploit to hack into their system (which I have already determined is vulnarable to)" and "Find the weakness in their network, and exploit it".

Or between saying "Crash that IC with this program which I loaded you out with earlier" and saying "Um, crash that IC... whip up some code on the fly to do it."

Tasking them with something even more complicated like "Okay, drone, break into this node, and lcoate any data about Girly-Puff's cereal. Download it, and then log out. While doing that, I want you to avoid being noticed, but if you think you have triggered a system alert, I want you to keep an eye out for IC. If you see any, crash it." would probably be far beyond the abilities of a rating 3-4 drone. That's AI stuff right there.

Right, which is why you only give teh drones simple commands and do the hacking yourself. Things like "Watch for IC and if you see any, attack it" seems well within the capabilities of a rating 3/4 agent.

Sure - something like that, seems fine - a drone could do that with real-life threats, so why not online ones?

Also, I'm not 100% certain that if you have a second commlink attached to yoru first, when yo ugo online, you don't have access to those programs. They would either be agents looking for IC in their node (the second offline commlink) or they would need to be uploaded as usual, or moved to your (online) commlink.

A few fun good things with drone commlinks would be the following:

Anyone hacking your commlink and disabling your agent program has to fight a pilot program who will be fighting to take back the system, something an agent would be unable to do as soon as the system is infiltrated and taken care of, the drone pilot would still be able to fight.

While you hack with your first commlink you tell your drone to upload an infinite number of agents to the enemy/opposing commlink/node to slow down THEIR response while you attack it. (this would probably work AFTER you have used exploit and found a backdoor into their system, after all, if they have a limited response and you flood their system with lots and lots of programs...)

Having the Drone using electronic warfare and jamming or even attacking any wireless transmission within a certain radius not from your team.

Pilot replaces System - so, once it is subverted, there is no more fight...

Actually, it is the other way round:

Agents are not linked to the System they run on - Pilots are the System (So an Agent that is hacked itself has the same problem).

Would you please direct me to the place where it says that a pilot program becomes the OS of an electronic device or vehicle? It also states that a pilot programs rating functions like a characters attributes.

The only thing i can find is the information about pilots is autosoft programs and that states that just because a drone has something installed in itself (a weapon mount for example, or in this case a comlink used for hacking) does not mean it knows how to use it.

A pilot program isn't THE system, its an independent system used for controlling a device - like driving a car and is embedded in the Rigger adaption hardware. In the case of a comlink it would know how to USE a comlinks system, OS and associated programs, but it would not BE the system.

System and Pilot both cap at 6 - only Skillsofts and Autosofts cap at 4.

I think he means that, due to availability, one cannot start wit ha pilot rating higher than 4.

And, for what you want to do, it sounds like you want a pilot running on some device (drone, commlink, toaster, whatever) that is linked to a commlink. That way, if the commlink gets hacked, your pilot isn't (since its a seperate OS) and can still take actions to take back the compromised commlink.

However, this has a problem in that you will want them linked via wire or skinlink or some non-hackable medium (otherwise the hacker could just compromise the drone-device and gain instant control of the commlink that way), which makes it difficult for you to give orders to it (unless, of course, it's the skin-link option).

So, yeah, skinlink two commlinks, install a drone-OS on one instead of whatever it normally has on it. Keepp them on you, and you can command the pilot to operate teh second commlink - and should it ever get hacked he could attempt to do something about it.

However, since SR4 doesnt' differentiate between the directions that links go, your drone is recieving information from the commlink as much as it is giving directions to it... so should the commlink be hacked, the hacker may send quite a bit of false data to your pilot before either of you realize anything is wrong. (If the hacker doesn't trigger any alerts on his way into your spare commlink, the drone probably wouldn't think it strange if the data it was recieving was slightly altered).

*double post*

Yeah, I'm pretty sure - by the rules - you can't do that. One device, one OS.
Of course, having two commlinks hardwired to one another isn't hard... and would barely take up more space than one (approximatly double). It would look a little large for a commlink, but you would have a commlink with a backup OS running - which is what it sounds like you want.

What you cannot do, is have two OS's going at once (the commlink's OS, and the pilot OS) nor can you run the pilot OS inside of the commlink OS and have it be seperate on a single device.

If you put a pilot program on another device, you're basically reinstalling with this new OS. I would even argue sofar as to say that you could set up the device to "Dual boot" into either its standard OS or its semi-autonomous Pilot OS... but you could not boot them both at once, and have one control the other and use it as a "body shield" against hackers, unless, of course, you split them into two distinct devices - in which case the rules would be complely happy to agree with you.

Turning a drone into a mobile electronics warfare platform makes a huge amount of sense. Having a hovering pet following you everywhere and jamming the hell out of everyone else's stuff seems only prudent for a mobile hacker on the go. The only problems're that the AI still isn't as good as a live decker, so the range of functions it could perform would be rather limited, and that if you can think to do that trick, so can the bad guys...