OK, I have a few ideas in my head, but I want to hear about some tricks groups and GMs have used Drones for.

I like using Renraku Manservants with high pilot, Adaptability R3, Fuzzy Logic, and a lot of autosofts stored in them. They can repair your vehicles and gear, they can drive you around, they can hack for you, and they can shoot trespassers for you. It's literally like adding another teammate, but one that never argues with you.

Until the Hacker you pissed off does some 'reprogramming' to give it an attitude.

Then it acts just like any other PC

1) Disable the wireless. He can't hack it unless he wants to jack in directly.

2) Have it set to automatically fend off people attempting #1.

3) I was trying to get the thread moving.

One of my characters once made a two drone infiltration team for air ducts.

Both were modified Kanmushies (sp), of which the first had a robotic arm, a mini welding laser and a electronics toolkit, while the other had a canister of nerve gas and a improved sensor package. Pretty good for getting past pesky air duct security systems and ventilation fans. Though they did up costing more then 50K combined.

Roto Doc - Rotodrone with cyberarm and embedded med kit and appropriate autosofts.

You know about dikoted ally spirits? You realize drones are easier to dikote? And they come with all those attachments and it doesn't take all that karma to upgrade adrone.

I'm unsure whether the phrase "dikote" has moved from the 3rd edition rule to a catchphrase for "awsome" now. I think it has.

Also, I have a thread somewhere about Vehicles, Drones, and Agents. Glitch is on there.

Someone explain dikote to a pre-Sr4 virgin?

You coat something with molten dimonds to make it even more awesome.

(Srsly, it made almost anything better to be Dikoted, and was cheap enough that almost everything was.)

Yeah, it was based off a real-world application.

The SR version could be applied to any object that could survive the furnace required for the diamond deposition process. It mysteriously made everything stronger, harder, sharper, etc.

It was also fairly cheap. So pretty much every armor you saw a shadowrunner wearing had Dikoted plates, all swords and knives were Dikoted, etc.

Someone eventually noted that many Spirits could easily survive the Dikoting furnace.

So, here we are now, years later, still pushing the running joke about Dikoted Ally Spirits.



-karma

Well, at least you can say that DiKoting was a market for diamonds that put them to some use other than DeBeers DeCeiving women everywhere into thinking they are more valuable as a "rare" precious stone than they actually are by artificially manipulating the supply.

That's one part of the future that isn't so dystopic, heh.

Well, that technically wouldn't work.

Diamond deposition gets it's diamonds from spraying carbon-laced gasses into a chamber with an high energy source, forming a plasma. The object to be coated is passed through the plasma encouraging diamond formation on the surface.

No actual pre-existing diamonds are used in the process.



-karma

I know. You're ruining my fun though. What's been interesting is the amount of propaganda that the diamond industry has been spreading over the last decade or so disparaging the "artificial" diamond market as not being legitimate, even though the only "easy" way to tell the difference between a real diamond and a manufactured one is that the fake ones have no flaws. Well, and no blood stains.

Does it broadcast with Radar o'Reilly's voice when it's called in?

"Incoming, wounded!"

I'm thinking about buying a suite of Autosofts/Pilot programs and such, all Rating 3, for the Bust a Move. With copy protections stripped, they make it a pretty expendable but versatile drone. Maybe they could use holdout pistols? Their fluff describes them being able to open up a store from the inside, which suggests effective paws. (Although they don't explicitly have those in the rules.)

Using a chameleon coated Dragonfly (the close combat variant) and a really high dice pool with 5 passes and called shots to papercut enemies to death.
Since its small and chameleon coated it was damn hard to spot!

How about the other route - turning vehicles into drones?

A D-C Horseman with advanced cargo drone has handy arms and cargo space, and wouldn't raise suspicion wandering around in the non-slummy area of town. Throw in some advanced image screens and it can even appear to have a smiling, waving little old lady sat inside it. Quite speedy for a drone that can emulate a human, too.

And an ES Cyclops might make for a fun pursuit drone, with some engine mods. Not as fast as the P4, obviously, but can carry a larger weapon-load.

In an earlier edition my rigger had a solar-recharging blimp cruising around the city on an autonomous holding pattern, on which he sold cheap advertising. Whilst on a run with the rival team in hot pursuit, I let somebody else take over driving the van so I could jump into the Blimp (previously moved to ensure it was in the right area) pop out the concealed twin linked machine and begin a strafing run...

Alternatively they can use electricity to cause the diamond to form on objects - I saw an article a year+ ago about (I'm not kidding about this) Mexican scientists turning tequila into diamonds for computer parts.

Well, we've already had "Fuzzy Logic"... Now we know how to get that fuzziness into the computer.

I know my biological computer gets fuzzy after a few tequila.

Now we know why SnS is broken: it is Dikote's father.

Who's the mother?

Tila Tequila, of course. Yes, the conception has been videotaped and can be found online.

Hmm, stupid drone tricks? A group of 10 bust-a-moves with the [Profession (cheerleader)] autosoft along with a Maneuver(bust-a-move) autosoft. Even well trained guards will get distracted by the enormous WTF of a bust-a-move pyramid chanting company loyalty songs. They usually call the bomb squad, which means you can get the same distraction as calling in a bomb threat, but are more likely to make the evening news.

An MCT Fly-spy with Improved Sensor package. Add a small tweeter speaker system into the extra room and chameleon coat the whole thing, and give it 2 levels of signature masking. Have it land on the shoulder of the target and pipe the high frequency noise directly into the target's ear. Great practical joke, if you do it to a friend you should give them a cyberear afterword to replace their exploded eardrums.

Depending on your GM, you can take the Daihatsu-Caterpillar Horseman and keep adding modules until you have a Caterpillar instead of a Horseman. You could then refit any of the cargo modules to remove the wheeled mode and replace the legs with arms. Add gecko tips to each modules hands, and a winch to the rear-most module. Get a smoke projector for the front-most compartment and add chameleon coating stripes as a custom look (no bonus to hiding, but makes a cool display screen). Hang out on street corners and sell mushrooms to British school girls. Avoid chameleon coated cats who didn't shell out to get their teeth covered.

If your GM won't allow the Caterpillar as a vehicle to have more than one module, use the Centipedes to do the same thing, but smaller.

Amazingly funny.

Bust-a-Moves are really the key to stupid drone tricks, because those tend to be suicide acts for drones. And BaMs are the only drones you can really afford to sacrifice on a regular basis.

Now, if we had a nice catalog of cheap household drones...

Oooh! What about a GI Joe doll with a real holdout disguised as a fake? (Using the B-a-M stats as a template).

It'd probably fall over from recoil every shot, but it might be a really nice assassin droid.

I had posted a while ago about using a Bust-a-Move with a Colt Asp and a John Wayne software personality.

EDIT: He'd probably need to shoot it from the hip though..

Why am I reminded of "Six-Shooter" from "Puppet Master III" right now?

Here is the reason that any Shadowrunner worth their salt will blast a bust-a-move on sight.

i personally am fond of the GTS tower with multilaunch rack full of sentinel drones. arm with whatever your personal taste in weapons dictates. (also a handy way to represent autonomous guns on a drone, if your GM won't let you do it with smart firing platforms modded into the mounted weapon which should technically also work)

Um, no. Multilaunch racks hold Micro or Mini, not Small; the Sentinel is rail-mounted, so it doesn't seem like it should be allowed in a drone rack anyway (cuz they don't launch).

Now, I'm totally behind the idea of sufficiently large (read: battleship-sized) vehicles mounting a rail system for Sentinels. That'd be cool.

Ares Sentinel drones are small, and the multilaunch drone rack only takes micro and mini drones.

efb

And will never attempt to kill you the hacker!
(Its been a loooong time...)

I also like taking the Ford LEBD-1, modifying it for a flexible weapon mount (laser pistol), and giving it another laser pistol to hold in it's mechanical arm. The Conestoga Vista can support 6 standard weapon mounts, so it can have 6 Small drone racks, so you'll want 6 of these. Give the Vista Improved Sensor Array, and Missile Defense System, and slave all of the LEBDs to it.

*pew! pew!*

The Conestoga Vista can also support 3 Large drone racks [12], which can support 3 Towers, which can dump 20 S-B Microskimmers with ECM 10, 20 Stonebrook Stormclouds with Self-destruct (area), and 20 Shiawase Kanmushis with chameleon coating, electromagnetic shielding, retrans unit, and signature masking rating 1. The Vista should add amphibious operation level 1 [2], ejection seats [1], Rocket Boosters [5], and chameleon coating [1] if your GM lets you overmod it.

"Shadowrunner and the Magic School Bus"

The rules don't appear to support a Missile Defense setup like that. I like the LEBD, though; it's the archetypical 'handy flying helper bot'.

Is pretty explicit about them being the vehicle's weapon mounts, which says I can't do my trick. However, the MDS (missile defense system) is a node, like every other computerized device in Shadowrun (Unwired p48: "Nodes"). Nodes can be Clustered (Unwired p55: "Clusters"), and a Cluster is treated as a single node. If you cluster all of the drones together, they are all operating off of a single node, and are therefor part of the vehicle's hardware, and the MDS can use them.

I also have to mention that my gamemaster kicks me in the head fairly regularly for making this type of argument, so your mileage may vary.

Yeah, because it's a ridiculous argument. If you actually manage to assemble all that hardware, though, a house rule should allow you to slave (certainly NOT cluster) the LEBD's into the MDS for some kind of rudimentary functionality. Perhaps 1/2 as effective as a real MDS setup, and all the drones have to be in range, and they can't be used for their normal actions when the MDS commandeers them. Nothing wrong with a house rule for that, and it's way better than some crazy idea about how clustering drones' *nodes* makes their *guns* part of the bigger vehicle… as weapon mounts.

blast. well, there goes that. guess it's back to multiple small drone racks. (for some reason i thought they were mini... ah well, can still pull it off with heimdalls and do ramming attacks if you give them ram plates...)

edit: actually, ram plate is a standard modification. drat, and double drat!

Pilots are OSs for Nodes. I fail to really see what is ridiculous about clustering them into a single Node run under one Pilot. Admittedly, the PC would need to code that Pilot from scratch, which would be a giant pile of suck, but it's better than slaving. You could only use slaving if you had Commands you could script for each slaved node to shoot things out of the air, but you'd have at least one simple action in lab from using Command.

It's just a terrible idea, it's not that you couldn't do it; it also wouldn't magically make it all one *drone*, or make them weapon mounts of one vehicle. The point of slaving is to 'satisfy' the MDS' requirements for the hypothetical house rule.

Slaving just means that the master has full and sole access to the slaved device. Your computer at home, for instance, has a mouse and a keyboard slaved to it. Clustering, on the other hand, merges several nodes into a single node. A multi-core processor is a cluster, as is a supercomputer cluster. The cluster seems more likely to me than the slave.

I know what slaving does. I explicitly said, 'if you want to do this illegal thing, you should invent a HOUSE RULE that works likes this'. Slaving is *exactly* how weapons systems like the MDS work; you 'assign' the weapons to it, and it takes over 'master' control of them. For the purpose of a totally hypothetical *house rule*, slaving makes the most sense; obviously, it's not required by the SR4 rules, because it's a house rule (anything goes). We're literally making it up, see? Given that we're already making things up, the MDS is exactly the "Commands you could script for each slaved node to shoot things out of the air" that you're talking about. That's its sole purpose: control guns to shoot things down.

To recap: MDS in the RAW *requires* that a single vehicle have Extra-Large Vehicle Sensors, MDS, and 1+ remote weapon mounts with lasers/full-auto guns. There's no other way to do it. So, hypothetical *house rule*: allow flying drones with appropriate weapons to be slaved to the MDS so that they can function as point-defense. That's all. They're still drones, still flying, except they're under the direct and overriding control of the MDS (just like remote mounts in the RAW version); this is necessary so the MDS can do its job, and for game balance. *shrug*

My point about clustering is that it certainly doesn't do what you're suggesting (maybe you're also talking about a house rule, I have no idea). What I do know is that clustering a LEBD with a Vista (if that's possible), does *not* turn the LEBD's gun into a remote weapon mount for the Vista's MDS. If anything, it turns two vehicles into one crappy commlink. So, I thought it important to make it clear that your proposal certainly was not RAW, and that it also didn't make sense as a house rule (compared to slaving).

And I still don't agree, Jaid, that you can 'mount' a rail-drone in a drone rack. They're specifically for launch (and possibly retrieval). And there's no reason to: remote mounts can be controlled individually, AFAIK, by something like agents. Your GM should certainly allow *that* before allowing (requiring?) you to turn a weapon mount into a drone rack with a Sentinel *just* to have an autonomous gun.

I like how standard procedure for Bust-A-Moves has become calling the bomb squad.

I am aware that a house rule was being discussed, and that what I suggested to do with the MDS is illegal according to RAW. Not arguing that. I just wasn't getting why slaving would work other than in the circumstance of the slaved devices also having an MDS being set on area defense around the bus, as opposed to being on point defense and part of the bus. I see that you are saying that in the case of someone wanting to house rule this, then slaving rules would be better option than clustering rules, I just don't get why.

Is that a sufficiently non-confrontational way for me to put that? I didn't mean to offend.

I do like the idea of effectively creating a drone swarm, and using that as a kind of missile defense. It's rather hard to push that through the RAW, but the concept isn't bad in itself.
It kinda reminds me of the Aggressive Defense mod in Deus Ex. That one was hilarious

No worries, Simon. Here's the reason:

Clustering is for turning weak peripheral nodes into a single standard (commlink-style) node. You use it if you need more Processor Limit or Persona support, etc. Presumably, it disables the primary function of the nodes while they're merged, but that's not in the rules; what really matters is the intended *purpose*, which is to create a stronger node. The component nodes don't even have to be touching, AFAIK; wireless is enough, though I'd assume 'nearby' is the intended requirement. It certainly doesn't merge hardware, especially not non-node gear (guns, for example), into a single device.

Slaving is for limiting a device to the sole control of a single master device/node. In SR4 RAW, it uses a subscription and auto-forwards all other connection from the slave(s) to the master. That's all it does, really. However, the intended *use* of slaving matches the needs of the MDS: 'control' is tied in to the central/master unit for the purpose of coordination. Could this be accomplished (hypothetical, for a house rule) by simply requiring a subscription? Maybe. Certainly a subscription is required for that kind of coordination, and one is needed for slaving as well.

Why would my house rule require slaving, then, instead of just a subscription?
The kind of priority access this describes says 'master/slave' to me. Certainly you can comply with these rules without it, but it's logical. That's all.

Agreed, Ascalaphus. It's probably not abusive, because the drones have to be at least Small just to have the weapon mount, and I'd probably require flying to have sufficient maneuvering ability. (If you were in a wide open field, maybe you could argue that a ring of Lynxes could do this). That's an expensive setup. The Laser/FA requirement also helps, and remember that this is a totally defensive measure (inherently a little less abusive). Watch out for gauss cannons. Probably also should *not* allow your rigger to argue that his PD drones are also in a TacNet and a TI system, because oy.

sure. and while the drone is waiting for launch (which you presumably won't be doing with the rail drone, since there's no rail to launch it onto) you just have it do it's thing.

as for the ability to have the turrets each controlled by a different entity, yes that would make all kinds of sense. but it isn't how the rules work at all. (the rules only permit one active weapon at a time, which is just silly imo)

but really, my method is more of a "here's a rules kludge to represent X" than anything else. autonomous turrets should be a possibility, as should multiple turrets being controlled by different people on the same vehicle. by the rules, the simplest way to handle that is what i have presented, imo.

One active weapon system, IIRC. Up to you to determine what exactly a "weapon system" is though.

Jaid: Indeed, I was expressing a house-rule situation, because we were already talking about going outside of RAW. My suggestion is *less* of a kludge, that's all I meant.

However, I'm not sure it's as cut-and-dried as you say. After all, remote/manual turrets exist; surely a vehicle can have more than one 'weapon system' in use at 'once'. Can you point out the rule you're referring to? (Just so I know what to ignore at the next game, hehe.)