I think I have the basics down, but I want to make sure I fully understand exactly how this works. For the purposes of this example, lets assume that the rigger has three drones that he or she wants to bring to the fight. Lets also assume that the rigger is trying to make them as secure as possible (so that they do not get used against him).

1. The rigger can slave the drones to his own PAN such that an enemy hacker would have to hack the rigger's link in order to get to the drones first correct? This would generally be advisable as its almost a certainty that the riggers link will be harder to hack than the drones would be by themselves.

2. If the rigger is running up against his max system load, he can actually slave drone B to drone A so that they only take up one slot (assuming A is slaved to the rigger). The drawback to this is that A and B then have to receive the same orders. In this setup, an enemy would still have to hack the rigger's link, but doing so would allow him access to both A and B correct?

3. Once combat starts, the rigger now wants to use the drones as effectively as possible (i.e. wants all three to be able to fire each pass, etc.). If the drones are allowed to act autonomously, then they can all act each round while still allowing the rigger to engage in different actions (like cyber combat against the enemy hacker). In this case, each drone would use their Pilot + Targeting autosoft to determine their dice pool.

4. If the rigger wants to make the most use of his gunnery skill he could remote control one of the drones and use gunnery + command to determine the attack dice pool, but I'm assuming that he could still only remote control one drone at a time correct? Logically, it would seem like trying to remote control all three at the same time would be too time consuming.

5. So potentially, the rigger could remote control Drone C (using gunnery + command) while A and B are running autonomously (with B possibly slaved to A to reduce load) and each would use (Pilot + Targeting). Doing this would allow all three to act each pass correct? Assuming this is correct though, how exactly do A and B operate? Does the rigger at the start of combat say "Seek out and destroy my enemies" and then they go on their merry way? The rules seem a tad vague on this so I don't want to try to game the system or get overly cheesy since it seems as though this could get fairly obscene fairly quickly.

6. Finally (for now anyway), since drones are also vehicles, do you add their handling modifiers to the attack tests, or is that only used for vehicle tests to maneuver? I can see arguments for both sides so just curious as to what the rules are.

Hopefully this makes some sense and thanks in advance for the help for a newbie!

I'll start by saying that i'm in roughly the same position as you, so I may well be wrong - or at least as wrong as a different interpretation can be.

1. Depends, an enemy hacker has the option of Hacking on the Fly (SR4a p.235) which is an extended test against your drones firewall. You can load the drone with an Encrypt program to slow this down. The other way is to Spoof (SR4a p.236) your drone, but that requires your access ID. The hacker can get this by capturing the wireless traffic (SR4a p.229) and tracing you (SR4a p.232). This too can be protected by having a mean Commlink, and using a simple action to Encrypt your communications between your Commlink and your drone. A chokepoint, which is mentioned in Unwired will also aid against spoofing. A Chokepoint essentially uses a second Commlink loaded with encryption and IC with a wired connection to make it harder to be hacked wirelessly.

2. I was not aware that you could daisy-chain drones, in fact I don't see how you could. As far as i'm aware, to remote control you have to be subscribed and if you are letting them autonomously they just need a command, which doesn't require subscription, and could as easily be a spoken word or morse code.

3. That's pretty much it

4. Aye, one at a time. You can be subscribed to as many nodes as your Commlink's system x 2 though, so it's not a problem. It's a complex action to remote control, switching nodes requires no action so in two passes you could remote control two separate drones. Issuing a command is a free action I think, and that can obviously be ongoing. Therein lies a plan of sorts. Through VR you'll get two passes, so that would be to take Drone A and attack, then use the free action to tell it to keep attacking that target, then get remote controlling Drone B and so on.

5. Roughly right, but 'attack my enemies' is far too broad. As your GM i'd want you to make it to attack a specific target. Drones are daft remember. Though your GM will be the one to speak to about this.

6. Hrm, I would imagine that depends on the situation. To my interpretation Drones don't count as vehicles in combat, unless in combat with a proper vehicle of course.

Hope this helps, as said bear in mind I am also new to SR4 so it might be that i have some things off as well. Look forward to seeing what the seasoned players have to say

1,3,4, and 5 are pretty much right. Just to clarify on point 4, remote controlling via the command program is always a complex action. So you could only hande one drone in that manner. Though on different IPs you could switch drones.

Regarding 2, iirc you can't slave a node to another slaved node. It essential means it is slaved to your PAN, so would still count. The other interpretation I can think of is if Node B is slaved to Node A, and Node A is slaved to the PAN, Node A would have to command node B. Drones are not typically designed to give commands to other drones. I am not sure how that would/could work.

Regarding 6, handling tests do not apply to gunnery tests.

Yes, they must hack the master node (commlink) OR if the hacker has the master node's (commlink) access ID, he can spoof the drones orders as if coming from the master node. This can be prevented by having the drones scripted to confirm all orders, but then every command requires a response from the drone (so it's a useful setup for preset static orders, but not for dynamically changing orders on the fly).



Yes. Grouping drones to receive the same orders only counts as a single subscription. It is not necessary to "Slave" drones to "group" them however and hacking a master node grants access to everything slaved regardless to any "daisy-chaining" you may attempt.



Yep



At work so going off memory, but remoting a drone is a Complex Action. "at a time" is relative to the actions the player has available, so he could remote different drones on different passes I believe.



Yes. You can give commands on the fly, run prepared scripts, etc. But keep in mind that though drones can function autonomously via a pilot program, pilots aren't people and don't "interpret" the rules, so they're somewhat stupid. Saying "seek out and destroy my enemies" means nothing, since pilots have no understanding of who your enemies are unless you tell them. Your commands should be way more specific. Telling the drone to fire at the orc in a group with multiple orcs might cause it to randomly determine which orc it should fire at. You don't have to be perfectly specific like, "fly up 20 meters, angle 80 degrees down, fire!", but you should be able to give it enough input parameters to carry out the command. It helps to think of giving drone orders as if you were explaining to a young child.



Pretty sure those handling modifiers are just to maneuvering.

Something worth noting is that you may also be jumped into a drone and still spend actions sending commands to other drones.

It's actually a Complex action to remote control drones, but otherwise I think your questions have been answered.

Re: autonomous drones, you can give drones "scripts" that tell them what to do, but they are dumb and can get confused. You can also spend a Simple Action to tell them what to do at any time. Good scripts include things like "shoot anyone that [list of team members] shoots at or is shot at by."

Thank you! I'll edit.

Thanks for throwing this up. I've been trying to build a Sam/Rigger who works as a one-man fireteam, using Drones as simplistic squad members.

The Rigging rules can be pretty obnoxious. Nothing like having to dig through 6 pages from 4 different books and try to string together some sense from all of it.

One thing I'm still a little tripped up on: A drone firing its own weapon autonomously, is this a simple action or a complex action? On the one hand it seems like it should be simple but the gunnery skill states that it is "almost always" a complex action. Way to be specific catalyst.

Autonomously it uses Pilot + Targeting autosoft. As far as I understand it, Targeting works the same as a normal weapon skill, so it could fire with a simple action.

The use of the Command program is still a complex action. The drone firing should still be able to fire two bursts, or two single shots from weapon capable of BF or SA.

Autonomous drones fire weapons normally, ie, a Full Burst from a drone is Complex, a Long Burst is Simple, etc.

Thanks for the input everyone. I realized right after I posted that "attack my enemies" was certainly too broad, but hadn't thought about the idea of "attack whoever teammate B is attacking, etc."

It seems as though when combat breaks out, even with scripts, its likely that the drones will start off slow. If the script is "attack anything I attack" it can potentially throw off the drones should the rigger's attack destroy the target, and if its "attack whatever Bob attacks" then they have to wait for Bob to target something, unless I am just missing something. That being said, I think this is a pretty fair trade off considering the amount of fire support the rigger can bring down in the right situation.

At any rate, thanks again as this really helps a lot!

Right, the main issue is drones don't have a good way to figure out who is and isn't your ally. If you know in advance what's going to happen, you might be able to do better. Example: also throw in "attack anyone wearing an NYPD Inc. Uniform" or even "Attack any metahumans you see that aren't [list of known allies]" or the like.

So, when a drone is searching for a target do you rule that the drone has to roll for a perception check to search for targets matching whatever description you give? It would suck for a glitch to occur on that roll.

This is where target designators are useful.

Have your team's weapons equipped with coaxial target designators, and anything you want the drones to kill you just "paint".



-k

Now, this suggestion is going to suck but assuming you don't have target designators or the combat area does not allow for effective use of them, an alternative would be to put your PAN's in passive mode.

The idea being that it's easier for the drone to scan for nodes associated with all the meat bags running around and not shoot at metahumans that have an access ID on it's friendly list.


... it's probably just easier to handwave the drone target acquisition deal lest we drag RL computer vision into the game.

With a basic tacnets and smartgun-allies, you probably don't need anything else. The main function of that setup is to tell everyone where everyone's shooting.

Yeah as far as target identification and potential friendly fire goes, if you're running drones and not running a tacnet you're missing out.

Aside from that, this is exactly what RFID tags are for. So many runners are freaked out about RFID tags from hostiles that they forget exactly how beneficial a couple of well placed stealth tags can be.

True, and there's even tagger bullets. If you wanted to, you could make the combat a bit more tactical and less auto-spray.

I was also thinking of stealth RFID tags for friendly identification.

Let's not forget that the TacNet will add dice to autonomous drone dice pools, which are going to need every boost they can get.



-k

With the right software and sensors you can get it into the teens pretty easily.

Yes. And that's as far as they get.

Runners on the other hand can get DPs into the 20s to 30s in some cases.

Most drones are going to lag behind their organic compatriots. Probably by 30 to 50%.




-k