I’ve scoured the books for information but i cannot find the simple answer to my question.

How, when and where do drones refuel their batteries and/or refuel their tanks.

Are there refuelling stations and docking stations scattered around the city?
Can drones just plug themselves in into wall sockets?

It really borks my plan for making an AI self sufficient as a drone when there is no clear information in HOW the drone gets recharged.

Gridlink might be one thing but it sounds more like an automated transport system and not battery recharging.

I guess they use some sort of inductive charging, ie. the drone just stands next to a wall socket for some time. Given that drones are everywhere most do not have manipulators to plug themselves in, evrything else would require a lot of manpower simply to keep all the drones going.


See the description in Arsenal, it actually does provide power.

Exactly my thought - which gives the image that power is free or that they charge the ID of the owner of the drone.

Drones with Spoofing Access ID is golden in that case.

By this logic I assume that all drones can just plug themselves into any kind of power outlet - perhaps by just staying close to power masts.



I knew I'd read it somewhere - unfortunately it is not available to smaller drones.

Thematically, a world where power is free would also be known as "Utopia". Seriously, there'd be no greed-driven megacorps, no poverty and no crime (well, hardly any) in a world where the second law of thermodynamics didn't apply. Ok, I know you really just meant it as a corporation/government endorsed street-level scheme, but that'd never be at all resistant to abuse.

Charging the ID of the owner is much more the thing, though a little tedious in terms of book-keeping. I'd handwave it by saying the lifestyle costs absorb it, since anyone with more than a couple of small drones will have significant lifestyle expenditure in necessities and security. If you don't want to leave a datatrail (or physical one for that matter) then that's a different story.

Alternatively, if you like the idea of a dystopia where power is expensive (and there's a good chance that's where we're headed) make it noticeably so and give them the fun dilemma of weighing up a drone's worth every time they leave the house. "Yes I know we're outnumbered six to one, but do you know how much it costs just to turn this thing on?!!"

Of course, where it gets really interesting is in rural/decayed urban environments where power availability is scarce to none. If the players don't think to charge up beforehand they'll have to be somewhat thrifty with their fire support ...

Of course it can be abused, by criminals. ^_^



Well yes, this is a slight problem for my Drone AI. He lives as a mini-drone inside a GTS Tower with his 10 mini-drone buddies that works like a small carrier/hive.



Exactly, also why one needs to know how drones would survive on their own. Perhaps one would have to spoof one's ID in order to access a wall socket so that one can "steal" power from someone else.

I recommend the "Special Machinery" modification to vehicles as it can be applied to ALL drones, including mini-drones.

Give a mini drone "Special Machinery - High Capacitor Battery" and treat it as a fuel tank but it cannot use the energy directly but can only dock it to a larger drone (GTS Tower in my case). Use the same cost for fueltank (1000Y). Also, special machinery have no limitation in how many you can have on a drone so X5 Capacitor Batteries on a refuelling drone and you have +30 hours operation time to spread out over your drones.

Just pray that no-ones shoot the drone or the batteries will most surely explode.

It's a lot of paperwork to track fuel. For the AI, the answer is, fuel is part of lifestyle! Buy a lifestyle, pay the monthly costs, and fueling "happens".

To bring the consequences of lack of fueling/recharging into play, it can be one of those consequences of a glitch or critical glitch. e.g. you fail that following test because the drone had to stop for gas.

You know what would be tedious in terms of book-keeping? A globe-spanning scatternet, yet that is reality in SR

Besides, most drones will rarely leave the property of their owner, and even then mostly to travel from A to B (at least I can't think of too many other scenarioes). So the issue of recharging somewhere in the open should not come up too often IMO.

Unless the drone IS the owner...

But yea, basic fuel expediture should be covered by lifestyle - unless the energy is scarce (middle of desert, wilderness, over the ocean)

Heh, if you use the Advanced Lifestyles from Runner's Companion, treat The Neccessities as your power quality. With Low Neccessities, you get the power required, but it "tastes" funny, or is not really filling.

I always imagined drone recharging very similarly to modern-day Roombas or Star Trek's Borg. Drones would come standard with docking stations.

Alternatively, you could also apply an Additional Fuel Tank and a SunCell system to your drone. It should also be noted that the blimp drone has an operation time of really long, so refueling would not be an issue very often. You could also do a Multi-Fuel System, and reload on what's available.

But even then the AI has some physical place to store its stuff, right? At least if it's an AI who interacts with the real world regularly.

I was thinking more along the lines of regular citizens. Buy a cheap drone, fill it up for free at your neighbourhood powerpoint, go home, transfer energy to a big battery, repeat. Thus, a socially charitable scheme gets milked for all it's worth by all and sundry to get free power for everything for life. Hence it couldn't work.

Even though the running time and refueling of vehicles and drones is a critical bit of info, they really gloss it over.
I mean really, the best info out there comes from arsenal, which states everything runs for 6 hours, unless it doesn't.


I'm bringing PF and gas tanks back, as soon as I can tweak what I have to be fair. I want a smart runner to be able to setup solar powered drones that don't need to be refueled every 12 hours, or use a tower drone as a refuel point for it's compliment of minis.

Home: GTS Tower

Storage Area: GTS Tower Special Machinery - Storage Area

Comfort: Mini Drone Storage Rack

Friends: 10 more mini drones

The GTS Tower has 2 mini drones with the equivalent of multiple fuel tanks and a grid link to refuel the "fleet". If ONLY the GTS Tower uses the fuel it would have about 600 hours of fuel for regular use.

I cant have suncell as they are all using chameleon fields

Why exactly is this tedious in terms of Bookkeeping?

Keep the Faith

OK, I assumed you had some hole in the wall where the Tower lands from time to time.

Like I said, recharging stations are probably not at every corner simply because most drones have a "home" where they can charge. On the other hand there are still applications for drones with a flight profile like yours (advertisement blimps and traffic control drones come to mind), so a network of outdoor charging stations for registered customers sounds completely plausible to me. The registration would be part of the lifestyle cost, problem solved.




@Tymeaus: Just imagine one person crosses the street - all routing tables of nodes he was connected to and he is now newly connected to have to be updated, all connections which were routed through his PAN (which is just a node the larger network) have to seek new routes, access IDs have to be checked again and so on and so forth...of course all of that fast enough to avoid any stuttering in the call he just made, let alone aborting the call.

But that is handled behind the scenes, and takes up nothing in terms of gameplay (which, as you say is essentially how SR4 is set up)... So maybe I am missing your point here, but why would you care to bookkeep this? The fact that it works in the game is all that matters, there is no need to actually map this information anywhere...

Keep the Faith

Sure, just like charging one's drones is simply considered part of the lifestyle cost and nobody cares how exactly people are billed for their power consumption. So yes, I was talking about behind-the-scenes bookkeeping in response to Aerospider's point about behind-the-scenes bookkeeping.

Your' confusing GridLink and GridGuide. Happens all the time.

GridGuide: Traffic Control & Navigation Helper
GridLink: Induction Power and non-WiFi Uplink to GridGruide

This - because I'd really like to know.

The books makes a poor effort in explaining how the daily economy works for Joe Wageslave – especially now when you have rules for spoofing the lifestyle.

I would simply like a bit more detail since it would help both players and GM’s to flesh out the world – especially when you talk about rural areas where luxuries we take for granted are available.

Electricity
Fossil Fuel
Signal Range
Food