I have a question that I'm having a hard time finding the answer too...

Are autosofts limited in their max rating by the pilot or system of the drone on which they are run?

Does running too many autosofts reduce response in the same way that running too many programs for a commlink's system reduce said commlinks response?

And what's perplexing me moreso, are said autosofts limited (if limited) by the drone's system or pilot program?

And lastly are autosofts considered another type of program and thus add into the pool of common and hacking programs when determining response degradation on a commlink/node?

Thanks for any help anyone can provide

It's generally true that the Response rating of any hardware item, eg comlink or vehicle computer, is a limit on the rating of what it can run. There's a question of what happens when you load a Rating 4 program onto a Rating 3 device; does it say "sorry, I can't run this at all", or does it say "This program is optimized for a system with more resources, and I can run it at partial capacity"? in other words, does a Rating 4 autosoft have the ability to run at Rating 3, adapting to limited system resources?

I hope you don't mind me adding a side question: what's a reasonable market value for a cracked copy of an autosoft, that one can run on each and every unit of one's drone army? It's worth more than the single-device-license version.

Well for commlinks it runs at the lower rating. So if you stick in a rating 6 program, but your system and response are both rating 4, then the program runs at 4. You would figure everything would follow the same lines as that.

Since every regular program is capped and reduced by response the same should apply to autosofts.

And I don't think any runner is using a licensed version of any autosoft. It's just a program and I don't know anything in the BBB preventing you from having multiple copies of it running on diffrent drones.

There's a passage on copy protection P228 of the BBB


As for autosoft being limited by response I never thought about it, I guess it makes sense to treat them as any other software.

Legally purchased soft might be protected, but what runner has legally purchased soft? Like, no one?

That's up to the gamemaster I guess, the software you got at creation could be legal, depending on your background. But seeing how easy the test is, there's not much point, besides balance, to price the software so high if they aren't legal.
But after creation nothing prevents the hacker of the team to crack all his software and give it to the team for free (which could lead to the agent smith problem with agents though).

Which lead to the GM laying a major smackdown an the player trying to pull that one off.

Watch out for the WGA (Wuxing Genuine Advantage). You don't want your drones to automatically check for updates and then shut down. =)

This GM killed software costs. In a world were piracy is the norm rather than the exception, and the players are all criminals (in most campaigns), noone should pay a few k¥ per program. And by all means, the hacker should give the stuff out (maybe charging a bit for the service). Only hackers paying for programs? Wrong.

The black market is not a legal place to bye stuff, but when you want serious progs, you need to bye here. And you will have to pay for the services of someone stealing that prog out of a secure datacenter. Or whatever. Now, you payed for a program a lot of and it is not copy protected. Do you distribute it on the street for free?

I don't think so. You would be giving away your money first. Also, you would cut into the market of some nasty people. Who will kill you and feed your entrails to some ghouls so no one tries that stunt again.

No problem.

Well, back to the original question I thought it was system that limited the max rating of a program that can be run. Also, if memory serves, if you run a number of programs equal to your system, then your response degrades by one.

So I suppose my questions are, is the drone's Pilot program capped by the drone's system rating and count against the number of programs that can be run on the drone before response degradation? Or is the drone's Pilot program more like a Firewall program in that it acts independantly and is not limited by System in anyway.

To follow up, are autosofts limited in rating and number by the drone's System like other programs? Or are they limited by the drone's Pilot instead? The reason I ask is that the book refers to a Pilot program as a special kind of Operating System, and I was wondering if it is independant, but ruled in a similar fashion to, a drone's system, which normally represents Operating System.

The drones Pilot program replaces the System. So it would therefore be limited by the response of the drone/vehicle (See device ratings for these, and just assume if pilot would be higher than response, the response is equal to the pilot). So number and rating of programs would be limited by Pilot as well.

to answer the original questions (ie from the first post):

1) yes. they are limited by the pilot rating, which is limited by response. note that the drone has no system rating, because the pilot rating beat up the system rating and stole all it's cool toys. also note that it is not, strictly speaking, the response rating (as some have suggested) that limits the rating of the autosofts... this is important because response degradation cause by running many programs does not affect system rating (and therefore pilot rating), which means that if you run 4 autosofts on a response 3 pilot 3 drone, the response effectively drops to 2 (which affects initiative, for example) but the pilot rating remains 3.

2) yes. see above for an example.

3) yes.

4) yes.