In Renraku Arcology: Shutdown there are many extremely nasty drones to make any player's life a living Hell. Few, however, inspire as much abject terror as the Bumblebee drone. Tiny, extremely difficult to detect, utterly lethal.

Back it up four years to 2055. If an enterprising Rigger (or rather, some company that said Rigger would then do business with) wanted to create a Body 0 UAV designed to fly to targets and then inject them with some nasty substance (nothing near the beautiful lethality of the heat-generating nanites, of course), how would one best simulate this with the vehicle-creation rules? How would one handle the actual injection? What would be a good compound to inject?

~J

Assuming Rigger 3 chassis were available in 2055, it'd just be a Micro Rotor UAV with a syringe mounted on it (which shouldn't even take up a firmpoint). Drone/Piloting Skill would be used to deliver the toxin by "ramming" the target, though it would most likely leave the drone in bad shape.

In essence it would just be a "smart" Narcojet round.

I'm not sure 2055 SOTA allowed the creation of micro-drones. I believe they only really took off during the shutdown period, specifically because Deus was able to push the SOTA and create what was previously impossible (or greatly impracticle)

So there weren't any microdrones listed in the previous Rigger books?

~J

Eh, we have "Body 0" RC rotorcraft today. I can't imagine it requiring much space to add a little extra circuitry (the drone pilot) and ducttape a syringe to it.

My thinking is that there just won't be anything quite as tiny and insect-like 'till Deus starts playing.

Any thoughts on cost or compound?

~J

There are hints that these kinds of drones were made possible my Deus' advanced nanotechnology breakthroughs. M&M says that nanotech was kinda of a sleeping field until Deus shook it up good. So nanotech compounds would be very, very expensive to make, since you gotta make the nanites to make the compounds...

Sure, for the nanites the Bumblebees delivered. But the drone itself wasn't anything fantastic; just a little smaller and quieter than what most anyone else could've done if they really wanted to.

All the finicky bits of drones are made by nanites, according to M&M. Microcircuitry and such. So you'd have to have one hell of a magnifying lens to make your standard cebot...

New Flaw: Super-microvision (-4)
You're vision is focused to the level of nanotechnology. +2 to work with nanotechnology. +6 to do anything else.

You either mean -2 or +2 dice, I am not sure which.

Just as a side note, didn't the substance that the bubblebees inject you with change from heat generating to cutters? Also could they like only fly for 5 minutes or something?

I think Brainscan kept them as heat generating but suggested the GM treat them like Cutters.

IRL I'd think it would be quite hard to find a suitable heat source - heat is actually a pretty inefficient way of damaging the human body, energy wise, and I don't know that a nano scale machine could generate enough to do much harm unless it was packing a very unusual compound...

just remeber that a 41c fever will kill you and you will see that they dont need to generate that mutch heat to kill...

They heat a human from normal body temperature to about 108f. I'll do the math when I get back to see exactly how much transfer that probably is.

~J

I figured it's in the order of 1 Megajoule (250 kcal), perhaps slightly more, for a 70kg human (5 kelvin temperature raise for 50kg of water).

So, uhh, to get that heat in under 100 seconds, you'd need an electric heater of at least 10,000 Watts @ 100% efficiency. Which would be about a cubic meter in size with current technology?

Physics is fun when you don't understand it.

I always thought they forced the body to overheat itself... not that they actually did the heating.

Much more insidious that way anyway.

I thought there was a revision of the way those worked and they were retoriacively changed to be cutter nanites, as the raising a body temperature thing was expressly forbidden for nanites to do in a later book.

What later book?

The heat increase thing is altogether too cool, so if all else fails the nanites in my game will deliver some chemical, carcerand-style, that reacts exothermically to cause the same effect. Perhaps no more possible, but at least more plausible.

~J

I was pretty sure it was explicitly listed under things in Man and Machine that nanite flat out cannot do. I'm at work now, I cna check it when I get home...

Stop the sweat glands and start twitching all the muscles. Internal body temp will increase quickly.

If they can twitch muscles, just get them to the heart, diaphragm, or simply the guy's back muscles, and turn on Full Seizure Mode. Death through heart failure, asphyxiation, or breaking your own spine into bits.

In the heart, even twitching could easily result in death.

Identifying the heart, though, would take more work than causing general twitching.

~J

If it soaks itself to muscles through the walls of veins, it will automatically find its way into the heart -- or at least part of it will. And when the nanobots start twitching everything, your heart is in on the action. Excruciating pain, insane pulse, followed by flatlining and loss of consciousness in short order.

That seems consistent with Eagle's final moments in RA:S after getting stung.

~J

Hey, I love the idea of nanites boiling the blood, and that's what they'll do in my game reality be damned.

I was just raising a concern as to whether that could actually be done - I'd think you'd need some kind of nuclear reaction to provide that kind energy in that short a time - and I don't buy the fever analogy, sure that'll kill you eventually but it won't provide the kind of instant kill that they're meant to deliver.

Are you kidding? A 108 fever will put you down and fast.

~J

Check the chart at the top.

Eesh, denaturation at ~112°? Ouch.

~J

Finding the heart is pretty simple, just get the nanites to look for cardiac muscle...

Though the nanites sound much more complex and 'expensive' than a simple biologiccal toxin.

For Deus, they're actually easier to obtain than a toxin. He can build effectively infinite quantities with what he has on hand.

For my purposes, yes, I was thinking in terms of a more ordinary compound.

~J

hmm, gives new uses for the renraku arachnoid drone
just think about it, a tarantulla (complete with poison) with the cunning of a human :twisted:

hmm, remind me to use this as a security plan for the next building with a CCSS nothing like droping some spiders down on the enemy to scare them silly. hmm, can they incorporate a narcoject? is there a spider out there that spits?

I thought that drones, aside from those on a circuit track or gun emplacements could not be hooked up to CCSS, as it requires hardline wiring. That's my take from Rigger3, which divides up the drones (mobile) to basic RCDs and CCSS to the system control rig.

A spider with neurostun or some sort of drug would be interesting for your average corp sec guy, assuming they spot the runners early.

Don

Think Renraku nicked any of the drone designs?

Think Saeder-Krupp made some money today?

~J