This came up in the mage power topic, but I didn't want to derail it. But the same applies with and users. Can a drone have multiple pilots? Can I trust the drone to pilot itself, and focus on gunnery? Can I summon 3 Rating 3 sprites and put them in a single drone, one to control maneuver, one to control the guns, and one to control defense? Would this result in a drone who takes 3 actions per pass? I have a technomancer, and these have crossed my mind before, but I usually stray from anything that the GM is likely to respond to with shotgun blasts to the side of my techno-skull.

Perhaps this is something else that could be covered in Unwired, or maybe there's some fine print I'm missing on controlling devices.

Multiple response chips operating semi independently? One chip dedicated to doge, or gunnery, or ECCM. Seems like it would work (it would just be pricey to put it into most drones.)

It would also not be unreasonable to penalize the gunnery pilot's attacks since it doesn't know when the maneuvering pilot will zig or zag. You could claim that they all work together in perfect harmony, but that that point it could just as well be abstracted as a single high-rated pilot and we're back to where we started.
I'm not trying to piss on anyone's candle, but I am trying to head off the inevitable Ford Americar with 40 drones duct-taped to it as some kind of bizarre I-win device.

edit: Oh, and this is a good place to remove the vehicles-suffer-no-recoil assumption and replace it with vehicles-get-body-recoil-reduction option in Arsenal, and have recoil be cumulative across any weapons attached to a single vehicle.
That said, I think this is a sweet idea, but you can see how this can very easily grow out of control without some kind of limitations.

(Trying to rationalize with myself)

I don't think they should suffer any more than runners do shooting from moving vehicles. This usually has more to do with the speed of the vehicle though than whether they are controlling it or not. I'm in no way trying to get 3 pilots fighting over one weapon (thus firing 1 weapon 3 times per action). But each has a designated system they are monitoring. Defense and Maneuver would probably have the most difficulty, with fixed turrets weaponry would probably run into issues, since the targeting is basically handled in part by the maneuvering. So the sprites/pilots would be most effective distributed with one on Maneuver/Defense, one on targeting (non-fixed turret), and one running sensors. Pilots are themselves a system (much like agents), but usually run on a device without a system, so they are potentially subscribed to the device. Response then would limit the number of pilots (but not sprites since they work outside of boundries and limits, and have their own personalities not tied to the systems they are on).

If the device would have clashing agendas between the various pilots there would be penalties (basically clashing with maneuver is the only real issue), but for the most part they should all be able to be able to work fairly well in their area.

Anything that seems to get extra actions for free I would just discount.

However.

If the drone has two weapon systems, could the drone pilot fire one weapon while the rigger fires the other? This doesn't seem unreasonable.

p. 239 "Fire a Weapon System (Complex)
A rigger may fi re an armed weapon on
any single drone (see Gunnery and Sensor
Targeting, p. 162.) If the rigger is directly
controlling the drone, he cannot perform
this action with other drones."

There is the special case of Jumped In Rigger, where the drone and rigger are supposed to be treated as a single unit, which seems to preclude allowing the software pilot to act independently in that case.

Jumped In
p. 239 "A drone controlled in this manner acts on the rigger’s
Initiative—the rigger and the drone are treated as a single unit.
Any tests are made using the rigger’s own skill and attributes."

So, if the Drone Pilot is maneuvering or doing Gunnery, it doesn't seem to be a big problem for the Rigger to use Command + Gunnery/Pilot to drive or shoot while the Drone Pilot software does the other task.

Arsenal page 137


To further muddy this discussion.

WMS

Damn it WMS, I was hoping no one would notice that. (translation: I thought of it after I posted)
I still think the recoil thing is the best way to keep this from getting out of control. Of course, if every gun is individually compensated and never goes over the limit, then there is no recoil to be transferred. Shoot.

Honestly, I never understood the "rigger can only activate one weapon system at a time" line. If anything, riggers should be able to control everything at once, since jumping into a vehicle is said to feel as intuitive as moving your own body. Just imagine that your body is a helicopter, and your arms are rocket pods. Now imagine that you're sensor-assisted when you fire those arms. Yeah.. destruction. If an AH-64 Apache pilot can put his chin gun and multiple missile launch systems on a target just by looking at it with the integrated helmet targeting system, I certainly don't see why a rigger wouldn't be able to use everything on his vehicle if he's running it through his own mind..

i assume it mainly has to do with balance. imagine someone loading up, say, 5 LMGs onto a vehicle. and firing 10 rounds from each of them as a single attack. i figure they were trying to avoid that

Using the rules in Arsenal, I'm pretty sure that you would have a heck of a job getting more than 1 or 2 weapons on any vehicle.

Unless your using fixed, external mounts (not exactly stealthy) the capacity cost shoots through the roof in a big hurry.

There's still the limit of 1 mount per 3 Body, or 1 Heavy mount per 6 Body to contend with. So most street vehicles aren't going to have a ridiculous amount of weapons. And they're capacity is fairly close to this, so there'd be little room left for other things after just 3 or 4 weapons.

A PC armed with two weapons has some special complexities to go through to use both weapons in the same IP on the same or separate targets. A single entity, the PC, doesn't get a freebie of using extra weapons just because they happen to have them.

Since there is a Drone Pilot, that can operate a weapon independently, and a PC Rigger, who can also operate independently, I don't have any issues with the Drone Pilot performing an Action, and the PC performing an action.

Now if you happen to have a drone with a whole bunch of weapon systems and you want them all fired off at once by a single entity (PC or Drone Pilot) just because they happen to be there, then I would probably look at the mechanisms used for attacking with multiple weapons by a single entity that already exist.

Which is defined as split your dice pool... Good call

this opens things up for just installing extra drone pilots into the vehicle though, one per gun.

in any case, the "max 1 weapon activated" was in the core book, and was needed for balance at that time because you could just load up 1 weapon per 3 body, and that was the only limitation... there's plenty of chargen-available body 15 vehicles in the core book, so that could be a problem

It's really no different then if you buy 6 drones with guns, or buy 6 flying guns with Pilots and personality chips. In fact it's slightly limiting that the weapons systems are attached to the vehicle in comparison. The main thing is you can't just have an extra weapon and get + Firepower without either being less effective by splitting the pool, or have another entity operate it, either a PC or Pilot software.