Of all the SR rules, drones and rigging in general have always been some of my weakest areas.

With my own builds, I never seem to have enough money left over to really dabble in rigging with my sammies, but I've decided to try it out for kicks.

So I'm looking to the optimizing wizardry of you people.

What are some of the best drones for a totally part time rigger sammie for extra fire support and maybe overwatch/scouting sort of role?

Which are the cheapest bang for the buck?

Which need extra autosofts and pilot and which are good to unleash right off the shelf?

Finally, which commlink programs would be most needed to keep the drones running independently and taking orders?

Thanks for any help you all can give.

The first one that pops to mind are any of the micro flying drones to help watch your teams back and gather intell. The eyeball one would do a nice secondary job of that too. If you could outfit some spider drones with tools to pick locks or bypass electronics would be nice too.
It would even look cool too. Say you come up to a locked door and your hacker is in total VR at the time busy with the rest of the security system or it's not wired to the system, the sammie just holds his arm out and a couple of spider drones climb out of his sleave and go to town on the lock. Or even incorperate a launcher for the micro drones in a cyber torso, it would look like some bees flying right out of your back.
I know the drones don't cost a lot but the programs to do that stuff and the outfitting could cost you. Exact prices I am not sure on though.

I go for a great pilot/autosofts/eccm/encryption and throw them in a decked out Steel Lynx equipped with a minigun. Cant really out do that. Great for taking point, covering your ass, and laying down suppressive fire for you. I also like hordes of spy drones to watch out for my back, and if I have money left over when all of its done, I go for the heli-drones and equip them with miniguns. Then I have a veritable army.

i would probably get him some sort of flying drone that can lift him and some extra-weight . . Green-Goblin style for example *g*

Pocket full of flyspys. Worked wonders for our troll.

Forget Flyspys - get Dragonflys.

Detachable hand drone, with Chainsaw replacement.

Or angry ticks flying out of your nipples....

In your opinions, is it worth it to get combat drones like lynx if you can't afford a big van or truck to haul them around?

To have a large drone rack, you need a body 15 vehicle, and all of them that are like 30K+, which blows too much of what I had to spend on drones.

I thought about a mecury comet with a couple of small drone racks for dobermans, but not sure if I could squeeze enough out for it.

Are racks even needed, or can you just load your drones into the trunk and have them climb out as needed?

In contrast to worrying about vehicles and big guns, it'd be easy to just spend it all on a horde of dragonflies, toss them into a backpack or something and release the horde for spying, sabotage, and possibly even vehicle killing.

So how do you all haul around your drones when your not the rigger with the bigass van?

Or is it just better to go for the horde like most people have suggested?

Je. Sus. Christ.

...my anus is bleeding.

My anus... is bleeding!

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, AND ALL THAT IS HOLY,
MY ANUS IS BLEEDING!!!!

*Dances for joy with other like minded balls of fluff*

YAYAYAAYAYAYAYA!!!!

Great, now I want to send a red Stormcloud drone with a gecko tape winch to children's parks.

The eyeBall is a great one for sammies with some tech skills. Keep an Agent running Edit on your commlink, taking in feeds from your ultrasound, your radar, your drones, your map chip of the structure, etc and layering them onto your AR. Throw the eyeBall into a room, have it spot the guys inside, and bang... you've got a +2 or +3 AR bonus to shoot people inside nicely helping out against that -6 blind fire penalty. Throw on the +2 for the smartlink, and you're ready to rock and roll. Your enemies, on the other hand, are about to learn the difference between "cover" and "concealment" when you start pumping 6.8mm through the walls.

Huh, I wouldn't have thought of the edit being used for painting on the team's AR, I'll have to go add that in. Out of curiosity though, why use the eyeball over say a couple of kanmushi running along the walls and ceiling?

Squickfactor?
SC1: "i throw my eye in there"
NSCs:"eeewwww"

Well, I feel retarded now. Even though I typed eyeBall too, my brain was totally thinking iBall and so it took me a second to figure out what the hell you were talking about with throwing one's eye in the mix.

I was actually talking about the lone star drone, not your eye but I'm still amused.

The iBall has smoke and flashpak capability, if memory serves. Leaves you some flexibility.

Doesn't the eye drone mod for cybereyes function the same as the iBall though (can't remember for sure, and don't have books at hand)? At which point you would more or less be throwing your eyeball in first to get a look at the situation...

The dragonflies in arsenal that can do double duty as a HE grenade are bloody awesome and you should have some.

You could easily fit a nissan doberman or two in the boot of your (regular) car, so I'd get some of those too. Huge on tap firepower.

A doberman with an AR (I'd suggest Ares Alpha because of the underbarrel grenade launcher and good RC), and three levels of the mod from arsenal which increases walker stability (and adds up to 3 points of RC) is incredibly accurate and effective. Here, doggy!

Also, an awesome drone that will only cost you about 4 or 5 bp is an MCT flyspy with an enhanced camera, enhanced microphone, a millimeter wave scanner and a chameleon coating. With it's minidrone class and the chameleon coating that only costs 3k, it has a -6 perception modifier to see the damn thing, and that's on top of it's infiltration roll. I'd also heartily suggest buying a r5 response upgrade. Helps with maneuvers etc. And don't forget to check the Errata for the updated drone action table.

Also, if you want to be silly (and you do) get a flyspy or dragonfly and give it a weapon mount with an MGL-6. Tiny flying grenade launcher!

Also, don't get an eye drone. Those things are so tiny that it would be MUCh better to just keep it in your pocket, rather than having to whip your eye out.

The prospect of a minidrone hauling around a grenade laucher is both amusing and terrible.

Me and my rigger team-mates player were discussing it, and I think we found that by raw you could mount an MGL-6

Ah the MLG-6, the Glock of the Grenade Launching World!

First off, thanks for the responses. Like I said, the drone rules aren't my strength, but I'm confused about a couple of these things, specifically from Sir_Psycho's, so forgive me if these are stupid questions.



Arsenal page 105 Vehicle Weapons and Recoil seems to indicate that weapons on a weapon mount don't suffer from recoil at all, so not sure about the walker stability or whatnot. Do you know what the specific name of the upgrade is and any idea why it would contradict the no recoil thing on 105?




Where does the -6 come from out of curiosity? -4 from the chameleon coat and then -4 from being a minidrone maxes at -6? Also, is there a way for the drone to make an infiltration test on its own or does it have to be done by a jumped in rigger controlling it? Is there an infiltration autosoft I missed somewhere?




And finally, how do you mount a weapon on a minidrone? You can only add a number of weapon mounts equal to the Body/3 (rounded down) so it shouldn't be doable that I can figure out.

Unless somehow a mechanical arm could be added and it's strength of 1 was enough to carry and fire the thing.