I have been furiously searching and cross referencing SR4a and AR, but have come up with no answers yet. I also did my best to search the forums, but the terms I had to use were far too general.

I am building a new rigger who will have an Ares Roadmaster Van (AR 109) with Rigger Adaptation and a Ford LEBD-1 Medium Drone (AR 120). I can not find where the rules for the default signal rating are as well as the rules for upgrading it. I suspect that they follow the upgrade rules in SR4a 222. Where do I find their default Signal rating? Do drones also have a Response rating, or do I have to add a commlink to them for that?

When a rigger is jumped in to a drone, the above Van in this case, is it possible for the Rigger to use his own actions for piloting and observation, while allowing the Drone to use its own action to fire a mounted weapon? What is required for the weapon to be interacted so the Drone can use it? For now, I have it on a weapon mount with a Smartgun System.

Thanks in advance.

On the Roadmaster van and the LEBD-1, you do use device rating. So my best guess is that both are security vehicles and thus device rating 4. So that gives them System, Response, Firewall and Signal of 4. I think they're peripheral nodes (not that it matters much). You could upgrade them as if they were a commlink (buying the appropriate hardware/software).

As for the later question on using the drone's pool to shoot, I think technically not. The GM might give you permission to do so however. If not, you can get More than Metahuman quality and trade one of your simple actions in your phase for a free action (giving you two free actions and 1 simple). Jump out as a free action and command the drone to attack as a simple action. Once the drone attacks, jump back in with your remaining free action. You don't have to delay on this since it's a free action (SR4A 146). I'm not sure why you would do this. Jumped in Rigging gives you +4 dice (Control Rig and hot sim VR) which will make you as good or better as an autosoft drone assuming you have any skill.

As for drone firing its own gun, you need the remote controlled option on the weapon mount. I would consider this to be the default for any weapon mount on a vehicle especially if it's a drone.

The only problem is that using Command is a Complex Action even if the action it is doing would have been a Simple Action.

Thanks Hida and Miri.

I'm still relearning the rules, so my optimization of the rules is far from good. My thought was to have the Drone act independently while the Rigger made use of other aspects. Maybe the drone would continuously scan with Radar or Ultrawideband Radar while the Rigger directs movement or the other way around. Is it possible to command the Drone to continuously (and autonomously) perform an action while the Rigger manually uses other systems? Ideally this would use one Rigger command action on the first turn, then no actions on the following turns.

Thanks again.

P.S. I really wish Device Ratings, Cargo Capacity, Seating, etc. were listed for vehicles.

Yes, that is possible. Remember, that a drones ability to understand the command is based on its pilot rating. Something simple like "scan police frequencies and feed me any info" is relatively simple, as opposed to "scan police frequencies, and feed me any information pertaining to Ares at 1575 10th Ave, that involved a violent crime, excluding reported rapes"

To be honest, that is something I was wondering to, though I wanted to have my Machine Sprite riding shotgun so to speak. And to be fair, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to issue a Command to a drone you are jumped into. If you are going to use a Complex Action to take that Full Auto burst, you may as well abuse Threading some and issue it as a Command.

Because while you're jumped in, you ARE the drone, you cant act on two sets of commands at the same time, which is what you'd be doing. you'd be directly controling the drone, and then trying to tell the drone to do something else.

While jumped in, or using command to remotely control a drone, it overrides the Drone's Pilot. In order to use any of it's other functions, the rigger needs to do them himself.

Like many other things about rigging this is not covered by RAW (something you'll have to get used to), but personally I'd say why not. Weapon Mounts can be manually controlled by somebody else than the driver, so letting a program do the same thing sounds fair.