All right, two brand new questions:
1. Is it possible to fit a "cyborg body" drone (Akiyama, Otomo, Tomino) with standard drone control interface, ie. CPU able to use Pilot program and remote control rig? Costs are less important, this one would be a corp job.
2. How hard is it to rebuild a drone into something similar, but bigger? For example, taking a control unit from a Bust-A-Move and fitting it into a five-foot-tall light frame with more powerful servos and battery packs? Specifically, for someone with a workshop the size of a typical auto repair shop and lots of time.

Yes, it's a normal drone.

RAW, impossible.

They come like this standard. You need to upgrade them to accept a CCU if you want to cyborg them up, not the other way around.
Obviously, they all come with Cyborg Adaptation out of the box.
However, you should be able to find a Pilot program for them, and every drone comes with a control rig.

I don't think so. I checked for the difficulty of writing a new Pilot program - possible, just very time-consuming. Autosofts should be readily available, costs be damned. As for hardware part, it's at least Complex or Intricate mechanism (Build/Repair Table, SR4, p. 125) where we cannibalize the poor Bust-a-Move and use the control electronics with new servos and motors. Bust-a-Move is so popular we should have no problem with sourcing AR plans for it. It is going to take a couple of weeks or months, and will serve little practical purpose, but it's not like people wouldn't do something like that now, if they had a Bust-a-Move at their disposal. With all that time available, documenting the construction for future reference can be considered an obvious thing to do, plus we can simply copy the previously prepared Pilot soft to a new drone. Also, who wouldn't like to have a maid drone looking better than the clunky Renraku Manservant?

Now just think a little what else you can use an human-sized anthroform for.

There's Pimped Ride for this.

On several levels of wrong.

Also, Mimic, for that uncanny valley-bridging synthskin.
And don't even get me started about Extra Entry/Exit Points.

Building a new vehicle from scratch is by RAW impossible. You need schematics for it. Since no schematics exist for a 5' tall Bust-A-Move, it can't be done. A GM might feel nice though.
Autosofts are as vehicle specific as Pilots are. A new vehicle will need new autosofts.

I don't think moving a Pilot from a drone to the same drone, but scaled up several times requires the Pilot to be modified (or modified that much anyway). After all, all the control and executive mechanisms are the same, the Pilot issuing the same commands produces similar results, etc. There would be some difference in movement routines to account for scale, but if my player asked for something like this, I wouldn't ask for any overly hard programming roll to account for that, or even let it slide altogether.

I'm sorry that it's the case, Seriously Mike. There are no rules for building new vehicles (or anything, really). There's also no reason to start with a Bust-a-move if you're just building a whole new thing anyway; it has basically no useful parts to re-use.

You perhaps could custom-write both Pilot and all Autosofts (AFAIK, they're chassis-specific as well), but I didn't say anything about that.

I dunno, Fatum. If it were a *perfect* scale model, it'd still be bigger, more massive, and interact different with its environment in every way. And, again, not RAW. We're squarely in the realm of 'GM makes stuff up', so your solution is fine in that context.

Uh, I didn't mean THIS. I thought more of "four gun-toting obvious robots walk into a bank..."


RAW never state you need plans to build anything. Plans give you +1 dice, +2 for AR enhanced ones and that's it. Also, building a walker drone from walker drone parts isn't exactly "creating an item from a concept only". It would be costly (although not as costly as an Otomo, while, of course, not being as powerful as Otomo), time consuming (guys who take part in Robot Wars spend months working on their creations) and complicated (threshold of 12), but ultimately possible. Just not feasible (imagine working on this kind of thing for a year or so, and then having it hacked, shot to shit and/or dumped in the river).

Oh, and I'm the GM.

...oh, don't you worry. CGL will most probably figure out a splatbook for that.
Well, the default Pilot value for a Bust-a-Move is 1. Also, adjusting the programming to take new mechanical parts into account is in order - after all you need stronger servos and motors to move a bigger, heavier frame.

Regardless, there are aren't functional vehicle construction rules; you as the GM will have to make everything up. Yes, there *should* be construction rules (in an ideal world).

I still don't see what use Bust-a-move parts are, but as long as the end result has appropriate costs in time, money, legality, etc., and it's realistically crappy (the real vehicles are made by globe-spanning corporations with huge fabs and design teams), anything goes.

Well, Bust-a-Move is the cheapest walker and all you need to salvage is the control mechanism, like chips and gyros controlling how the thing moves.

And yes, obviously it would be crappy enough. No armor, Body of "not enough", obviously artificial exterior... Oh well, maybe that last one doesn't have to be true. I've seen home-made cars pimped out enough to look like a factory model, and guns too (dad's a forensics expert, they had three walls in their office lined with confiscated home-made guns, ranging from "pipe, spring, rusty nail, chunk of wood" to "hang on, that one's home-made?").

Except that creating a new Drone body is not in the realm of the Players. It is GM Discretion.
Fortunately, You are the GM.

Yep, especially considering the fact that I don't like "No, because no." justifications. It's not like I'm pondering how to build a killdozer, after all.

Actually, that one is possible.

By modifying a standard Vehicle even.

Precisely.
Just like Marvin Heemeyer did.

Can't help but be reminded of this.

Killdozer (as well as deathvan) is actually very dangerous even if used straightforward, and much simpler to make than life-size dollbots. Dollbots are pretty much a matter of flavor.

I was always partial to the Cherry 2000 Dollbot myself.