I just watched this little short ( http://www.analogik.com/mm_rev_tetra.asp - ~15mB DL, .mov, worth it...) of a robotic police officer (in South Africa, of all places), and SR came to mind almost immediately. Why doesn't LS invest in this sort of stuff? I'm pretty sure they have the technology, or at least Mitsuhama does. A rigger could pilot it if it were AI limitations...

Regardless, watch the damn movie .

This got posted here a short time ago. Check This Thread.

On the topic of law enforcement applications: It would probably be cheaper to just use officers. I could see limited applications though, you might be able to include them in a run sometime as lonestar shock heavies in the same way another corp might use cyberzombies

I see a FRT with one or two of these assigned to a couple of officers equiped with either the cranial remote deck or jacked into a remote deck controlling them via captains chair or letting them run autonomously for the most part receving data via Battle-Tac. Use the bots for recon or hazardous environs while the humans make the important descisions.

Here's a little drone I threw together for a run a few months back. It was Mitsuhama's premiere robotic drone for a world-famous revolutionary technology show and labeled as a drone designed for security or bodyguarding work in heavily populated areas where it could more easily blend in. As a show piece, it's chock full of all of Mitsuhama's most advanced features, especially in the robotic programming department. When working with a team of MiBs and a specialized drone rigger with insane BattleTac gear, I was actually surprised at how effective they turned out to be. Moreso than I expected, at least.

If they have a major weakspot, it's in their lack of vehicle armor. If only a human-sized anthroform had enough CF for a few points of Concealed Armor. But if someone were to take a few of these, shuck off their synthetic skin and replace it with bolted on vehicle armor, they could fit on up to 8 points worth without needing to increase its Load Capacity and only increasing Handling by +1 (to 0). That'd be pretty scary. Throwing them in some heavy MilSpec Armor would be even worse.


Mitsuhama Man-in-Black Mk2

Chassis: Anthroform, Medium
Power Plant: Electric Fuel Cell

Fuel Tank Enlargement 8 (16 DP)
Improved Economy 300% (300 DP)
Increased Cargo Space 8 (8 DP)
Load Increase 160 (16 DP)
Signature Improvement 2 (3,200 DP)
Speed Increase 32 (64 DP)

Anti-Theft System 9 (Electric Shock and Proximity Alert) (522 DP)
Contingency Maneuver Controls 9 (1,350 DP)
Drive-By-Wire 3 (2,100 DP)
Electronics Port (10 DP)
Mechanical Arms w/ Strength Enhancement 3 (2, Strength 9; 720 DP)
Smartlink-2 Integration Kit (350 DP)
Smart Materials (100 DP)
Structural Agility 3 (900 DP)
> Reaction +3, Control Pool +3

Autosoft Interpretation System (250 DP)
Autosofts: Clearsight 5, Security Procedures 5 (30,000¥)
BattleTAC FDDM and IVIS Receiver Modules (600 DP)
Fuzzy Logic Algorithm 5 (2,500 DP)
Improved Neural Network Algorithms 5 (3,125 DP)
Multi-Object Manipulation 5 (2,500 DP)
Remote-Control Encryption Module 10 (500 DP)
Robotic-Pilot Advanced Programming 5 (6,250 DP)
Robotic Reflexes 3 (300 DP)

Body: 2
CF: 0.6
Handling: -1
Armor: 0
Robotic Pilot: 5 on acid
Sensor: 1
Seating: --
Entry: --

Load: 165kg
Speed: 42
Acceleration: --
Signature: 8
Fuel Code: 80
Economy: 2.0km/PF

Design Points: 25,681
Mark-Up Value: 1.40
Standard Cost: 3,625,340¥

Quality Factors: Complex Chassis, Master Workmanship 3, Ruggedness 2

Standard Equipment: Form-Fitting Body Armor, Savalette Guardian (Smartgun-2, Concealed Quick-Draw Holster, 2 Spare Clips), Smartshades (Low-Light Vision, Thermographic Vision, and Ultrasonic Vision), Vashon Island Actioneer Suit (4/2 or 5/3 with Long Coat).

Mechanical Arms Accessories: Dependant on task. Most come with a Cyberarm Gyromount, Orientation System, and a total of Ballistic Body Plating 10 in each arms. This provides 3 points of recoil compensation and an overall Ballistic Armor Rating of +4 with 3 ECU of space for other accessories.

Miscellaneous Notes: Enhanced Sensors 4 (Electronic Magnification range +3 plus Flare Compensation, High Frequency Hearing, and Spatial Recognizer only; it was the only way to do it without taking up extra CF).

Sorry for the repost, and thanks for the writeup Lime. I really think the cops are going to kick a lot more ass in my games now.

Hmm. That drone has ultrasound and low-light vision built-in to its rating 1 sensors. You'd probably be just as well adding thermo sensors (available with rating 2 sensors) for 500 nuyen. Upgrading magnification to level 3 might be adviseable (1000 nuyen) and Flare Compensation for another 2000 nuyen. You could probably do that at the design stage for 5, 10, and 20 design points respectively.

how about sending in a swat team of about 4 of these with the rigger sitting in the armored van down the road commanding the entire operation? maybe have a rotodrone with a sniperrifle hovering outside the building to pick of anyone spotted?

Ack. I forgot to give a page reference.

Yes, You can upgrade sensors a bit like cyber vision enhancements. The rules are on Pages 30 & 31 of rigger 3.

Some armor on the drone itself might be a good idea, but might make it look a bit military for some duties. At-least one point could probably give the benefit of hardened armor. Logically it would be applied as cyber armor, thus not subject to layering penalties.

Sticking some cyber ballistic armor on the arms would also help, as might some Armor(Personal) from P131 of R3.

I think the mistake is in making the drones robots. It'd be a lot more economical to train up a few riggers with low-level VCRs to control your gang of anthro drones.

That may have some problems with jamming, underground work, stealthy work (bug locators can pick-up the signals even if they are encrypted), ETC.

[edit]
I think the real cost there is the Ruggedness 2 quality factor... That costs over 2.5 million nuyen. Without it you could afford 4 of them for just over 1.1 Million each. Not bad considering how much cyberzombies cost.
[/edit]

It has limitations, yes, but think of the advantages. Here's a basic drone loadout:

Chasis: Anthroform, Medium
Engine: Electric Fuel Cell
Handling Improvement -1 DP 25
Improved Cargo Space +1.6 DP 8
Load increase +150 DP 15
Speed +30 DP 60
Pilot rating 3 DP 250
Armor (vehicle) 5 DP 250 Load 100 kg
Engine Seal DP 30
Sensor level 2 DP 25 Load -8 CF 1

Total DP 1414

Base Cost 56,560

Add in magnetic limb systems, weapons and ammo bins (as desired) and you're still looking at only around 70k for a drone. Even with the training and cyber a rigger requires, you've got a choice which equals or exceeds your average SWAT member in both performance and cost. You don't use them for prolonged operations, but you DO use them for storming a building, etc.

Hmm. Why not dikote it? Assuming the drone is average human-sized (based on the numbers in SR3) it'd cost around 181k. Perhaps up that to 225k to cover a particularily large man? That's probably worth-while for executive models considering it gives 1 point of vehicle armor and adds 1 to the body rating.

Remember, the drone I listed above was basically a prototype design for a technology show. A commercial version wouldn't be as expensive (most likely ditching the Ruggedness and Master Workmanship modifiers, dropping the Mark-Up to only 0.10, or 286,810¥, giving you enough of a budget to pay for some dikote).

And yes, Cray, I know there isn't room for much in the Medium Anthroform. That's part of the reason I designed it in the first place, just to see what you could do with it. Luckily, a passive use of sensors relies on the pilot's own abilities instead of the Sensors rating, thus making a robot with Sensors 1 about equivalent to a metahuman in that fashion (save that the one above has way more dice available than most metahumans). Higher sensors would just increase the capabilities anyway, thus me opting to use the enhanced sensors rules just to snag a few extra perks.

On the other hand, you could always get it an External Cargo Mount to store some extra accessories. It wouldn't work on a model like an MiB, though, whose entire purpose is to look as "normal" as possible. But it would work just fine on something like that police drone in the video. Just make sure to only put the parts you don't mind losing in a firefight in there, though, since it doesn't gain the benefits of armor.

Lilt, the MiB does usually come standard with Ballistic armor in the cyberlimbs (enough to give it a +4 overall bonus). Vehicle and Personal Armor wouldn't be appropriate since both are extremely obvious (no Concealability even), and anything less than 5 points would be about as useful as gel-packed armor. I figured for most situations standard armor clothing was enough, especially since they still count as vehicles and thus all non-AV weapons are automatically staged down one level and have their Power cut in half. If they were tasked with a mission that sent them into the heat, they could just strap on some light milspec armor (9/9 Hardened, trumping vehicle armor a great deal, especially since there would be no loss in Handling that way).

I'm a bit confused about how you can't enhance the sensors more without taking up extra CF. That dosen't seem to be how it works in R3.

Each component upgrade you make to sensors costs +10% of the original Sensors cost, with no listed CF or Load requirements for doing so. It's on page 30 of Rigger 3. Thus Spatial Recognition, High Frequency Hearing, Flare Compensation, and Magnification +3 costs 60% of Sensors 1, or 3,000¥.

Actually now that I think about it, a gel-packed Secure Jacket would give them 5 points of hardened armor. It's actually pretty viable for an anthroform... nice.

I would think weapon systems built into teh drone/robot aside from possibly taser weapons would be a bad idea logistically.
It takes time to open a bin and feed in more rounds, but it takes only a moment to pick up a new weapon.
Though I can see merit in both, logically, weapons become obsolete, they cost more to replace (hourly charges from the gunnery contractors) and maintain and now you risk incompatibility. With all units, meta-human and robot using identical weapons, ant can use a fallin comrade or units ammo.

Though tools like climbing/rappelling gear, extinguishers, smoke projectors, etc would be good built in though.

Yup. Luckily, you could fit most of that stuff into the Mechanical Arms, and Smoke Projectors (and hell, even Oil Slick Sprayers) don't take up any CF.

But for the above model, I figured the armor would be better than a cybernetic weapon. Especially since any weapon you can install in an arm usually has a cheaper and less cumbersome equivalent available as a standard weapon.

The only thing I'm unsure about is how a drone with Mechanical Arms uses weapons. Is it just a Mechanical Arms (ie, Robotic Pilot) test as normal regardless of the weapon? If so, that versatility is pretty attractive.

Not quite, each upgrade costs 10% of the original sensor rating, times the difference between the current rating and the sensor rating needed to have the addon. Adding flare compensation to rating 1 sensors, for example, costs 2k on its own (upping the 'do I have flare compensation' rating by 4 levels). Meanwhile, I don't think you can add spacial recognition or high frequency hearing using those rules as they're not available on any of the standard sensor ratings. As IIRC sensors provide vision magnification equal to their rating, it would take a rating 2 upgrade (20%) to get vision magnification to rating 3.

What are you talking about?

"The parts cost for such upgrade is equal to the original cost of the sensors times .10, multiplied by the number of levels the player intends to boost the system for upgrade."

Six upgrades to Sensors 1 (Magnification 4 instead of 1, Flare Compensation, Spatial Recognizer, and High-Frequency Hearing) would be 60% of Sensors 1. 5,000¥*.10 = 500¥; 500¥*6 = 3,000¥. 3,000¥ = 60% of Sensors 1 (5,000¥).

The rules go on and specifically state that you can upgrade or add specific sensor components. Just because they're not directly listed for any sensors package, that doesn't mean they're not available. Spatial Recognition is basically a really low-grade passive radar/proximity detection system, and High Frequency Hearing is easily done as well. Technically they already come with Sensors 1 (SR3 p. 135), but I added them just for the sake of completeness.

about that armoring, how about ditching useing personal grade rather then vehicle grade armor? the weight diffrence is enormus as you only have a weight of body * 2 kg compared to body^2 * 5 kg for the vehicle style.

lets say we want 10 points of armor:

personal style: 40 kg for the MIB

vehicle style: 200 kg!

sure the vehicle stuff will be hardend but hey we are talking about a drone that will be used for bodyguard and police style missions. not something that is trying to take on a tank or similar

hell boost it to 20 or so and you will be more or less unstoppable
that is unless they are packing av or antiarmor ammo but hello, this is a police drone not a military one

Which means it should have 30 to 40, after all the military doesn't deal with shadowrunners who are not bound by the 2060 equivalent of the Geneva Convention.

It was a joke, AE, just pointing out that shadowrunners often seem to be carrying around more ordinance than your average Seal Team when they go on a run.

OK. It's just that there's some much bullshit going around about the Geneva Conventions, I just have to jump at everything.

Great, so now we got Robocops running around the sprawl. Not that I mind...

About armoring the drones. You should put 7 points of normal vehicular armor on it, that will make pretty much invincible against anything that is not antivehicular. Only non-antivehicular weapons that might hurt/destroy it are assault cannons and some rocket launchers. Even so, those units would probably give a real Hell to anyone facing them in direct combat.

By the way, even if the drone has mechanical arms, you're still somewhat limited in using weapons in them. R3, page 67, second paragraph:

With a Handling of 2 or below, that's not going to being a serious problem. How many dice will the drone/robot be rolling to fire weapons, and how many for the Pilot Test?

That mechanical arms test stuff only applies tot eh rigger controlling the device, the 'brain' just rolls it's pilot rating.

As previously mentioned, vehiclular armor is right out not because it can't be done, but because it ruins the concept of the drone in the first place. I realize you may not be talking about the MiB I built, but still.

Also, Personal Armor sucks for a drone. They still only have (Body) dice to throw to resist an attack, and even 100 points of Personal Armor will only reduce your TN to a minimum of 2. So it would need 6 successes using Body 2 dice to completely resist a piddly 2D attack (staged down to 2S). Basically, two taps from anyone with a mild competence in Pistols is enough to take down a non-vehicular armored Body 2 drone -- 100 points of Personal Armor or not.

Dodging isn't augmented by armor at all, so it's a moot point. I only added personal Body Armor for completeness. Gel-packed Body Armor has a lot of potential, though, thanks to the vehicular reduction to Damage Codes.

The problem with gel-packed armor is that in theory it hits the gel packs first. If they can't stop it then it gets through to the robot underneath.

That's why Dikoting the drone is such a good idea: it adds hardened armor under all others at virtually no encumberance *and* it adds 1 body.

There's no rules for that in the game. Vehicles and drones don't stage an attack down, the attack simply has a reduced Damage Code, period.

As it stands, a 9M gunshot is only 4L against a drone or vehicle. If that drone were capable of wearing a gel-packed armored jacket, he'd have hardened armor 5, allowing him to ignore the shot completely. By your logic, any external armor (like, you know, all armor) would never get the benefits of a reduced Damage Code.

the question is, does the vehicle effects of damage change happen before or after the stageing rules for attack? from what i understnad i must happen before as burst and full auto is allso handled after the vehicle changes have been applyed. that means that a holdout or light pistol is useless againt this drone, heavy pistols starts out on L and so on. this gives the drone a edge as a beatcop atleast as running into stuff like heavy smgs to assault rifles in a urban job outside of Z zones are unlikely.

and if that happens send in an entire squad of these to give the enemy more then one target to worry about and use ammo on. and rember that even if they are taken to D they can still be recoverd and repaired for future use, unlike swat teams that have a limited existance after hitting the D mark.

basicly a realynicely equiped runner team need miltary hardware to be taken down, but this unit is for going after punks and gangmembers or similary lightly armed...

never forget that even robocop and ed-209 had problems when it came to military level hardware...

That or give it one hell of a failsafe device.

Goon 1:Shoot that hunk of junk!
Goon 2:No way man, that's one of those, you know, Star FRT assault chargers. They take out a quarter city block when incapacitated.
Goon 1:Drek, let's bug!

I never found his designs to be ground-breaking, just fun.

Just over 250,000 nuyen retail (note the last word) is hardly expensive to a megacorporation, especially the one popping them out. Even more so when you consider that they're 100% loyal and can be pretty much superior to any group of runners when working in tandem as a group.

Pilot (effectively their Intelligence and all Combat Skill ratings) of 5, Adaptation Pool of 10, IVIS Pool +5 each, Initiative 13+4D6, 15 dice for all Comprehension (Perception) Tests, Strength 9, Signature 8, can be nearly invulnerable to standard weapons, has the equivalence of Damage Compensators 9, capable of running at 33mph, smartlink-2 bonuses, and if a rigger jumps directly into it, he gets all of his standard abilities and +3 to his Control Pool. And that's just off the top of my head.

If one is damaged or lost, you simply replace it with another. IF a SWAT member goes down, you have to spend time and nuyen training, implanting, and equipping a new one, pay compensation costs to the last one's family, and all sorts of other bric-a-brac.

All that pilot rating only workd as a pseudo AI when it's on it's primary mission as defined in it's programming though.

No, that's just the Adaptation Pool. Without it, they still have an IVIS Pool which will often be as good, if not better, than many character's Combat Pool.

Ahhh, that's right.

Not to mention while SWAT are inherently professional, they do have a high percentage of 'Alpha' types. This can make replacement members tough on the team with humans. machines don't care about how many years you pulled in Downtown, or if you walked a beat in Touristville.

Autosoft: Giving a dammn (5).

Take a look at surgery costs, as well. It'll cost you almost half the cheap drone's 70k just to implant an officer with his basic cyber.