Yesterday, we were creating our first rigger character, and a question came up that I don't know well how to answer. When you buy an autosoft (say, Targetting 4, for example), can you install it in all your drones, or do you have to buy them sepparately for each drone?

Both, kind of. Each drone needs it's own copy. It's possible to crack a program's copy protection to make copies of it (I don't have my book to find the page). Personally, I would require that each different drone model can only use autosoft programs written for that model, so you can't copy a maneuver autosoft for a rotodrone over onto a crawler. During character creation, I, personally, would require the character to buy the program for each instance they wish to have it, unless you think beyond a shadow of a doubt they could and would crack the soft and copy it.

The copy protection rules are written so that pretty much anyone can crack any copy protection with the slightest bit of skill, so unless the guy had no computer skill and no contacts to do it for him I wouldn't make him buy seperate copies at char gen.

I'd definitely require different softs for different layouts. For instance, Clearsight designed for a drone with a camera and microphone would be sueless to a drone with a MAD senssor and ultrasound. I'd let it work on a drone with a camera and no mic, but would apply some sort of penalty (not sure what, perhaps -1 rating per missing sensor).

I'm glad other people have questions about Riggers. The rules are woefully inadequate for an archetype that is probably the most versatile and which is *almost* as effective at those tasks other archetypes specialize in (Steel Lynx ~ Sammie; Shiawase Kanmushi ~ Mage astrally projecting for recon).

Anyway...the Drone Rigger sample character has his autosofts listed separately from the drones in the Gear section. That leads me to believe that those autosofts can be/are loaded on each of the drones. Of course....the autosofts are listed as Maneuver (Aircraft), Maneuver (Groundcraft), Targeting (Heavy Weapons), Targeting (Automatics). Clearsight is listed with no specializations, though.

Also...where does it list what sensors a drone has? I thought each drone pretty much had the same sensors?

-Steve

all drones by default have the same sensors (precisely what those sensors may be is undefined, however).

you can add on different sensor packages to drones based on their size.

(i'm beginning to wonder if perhaps by default drones have no sensors, and a package with at least one kind of sensor must be bought. there is nothing to indicate one way or another, to my knowledge).

My impression of the Sensor rules is that for drones' own sensors that they can read from and use, look at their Sensor attribute as listed on the vehicle table, and the sensor packages you can buy reflect what kind of data you can draw for human analysis. In this case, some drones have inherent sensor packages that are better than others, and these are linked to the pilot program for its interpretation in a Perception test or what have you, whereas installed sensors in a package purchase aren't used by the drone itself - this makes sense, because the drone probably won't have any way to interpret the signals from an Olfactory Scanner, for instance, or a MAD, but they're useful to a human operating remotely. With this interpretation, a drone by default has enough sensors that it can do general things - presumably, see and hear, since you can use its Sensor attribute for Perception remotely - with varying degrees of success depending on that attribute. What's missing here is a way to increase that stat, and rules for getting down and dirty in the bugger and rewiring and -programming it to accept your other sensor feeds, so that the Pilot can identify targets (Targeting autosoft) and choose which enemies to attack first by the results of the cyberware scanner (enemy has no cyberware = geek the mage!).