Can a drone use gunnery to just shoot something (as apposed to locking on and using sensor enhanced gunnery).

That about covers it.

If it believes the command tells it to.

Eg.

"Shoot that door"

It will probably start shooting the door without resorting to enhanced gunnery.

If you consider drones to be pretty dumb in most situations, it would probably lock on to the door and then use SEG to blow it apart.

Since the drone has no other way of making sense of the outside world than Sensors, it can't even know there is a door there unless its Sensors tells it so. It would have to use its Sensors to know what it's shooting at, to aim its weapons, etc.

This does bring up the very ugly question of just why you need a separate lock on with SEG, ie why can a drone use SEG against a door it has previously spotted with a Sensor test but has not locked on to -- if you get rid of the abstractions, spotting an object with sensors and locking on to it are the exact same thing. Maybe it's just better not to think too hard about it.

If you take a 'normal' gunnery test to be that of passively using the visual spectrum to identify and aim at targets, I believe drones can do this, as they would have interpritation software beyond anything we can do nower days and knowing what is a door is not to much of a hard issue for a 'dog brain'.

Drones can only use sensor enhanced gunnery on their own. It's in the section about snsor enhanced gunnery and targeting.

Actually, yeah, it works out, sort of. In a Passive Sensor Test, as with Manual Gunnery through Sensors, the drone-brain is interpreting the output of the Sensor system much like a person looking at the feed of a security camera.

And again, you're better off not thinking about what exactly constitutes a Sensor system "actively" looking for targets and when it becomes the subsystems of the Drone "passively" looking for targets.

[Edit]Bah, I only looked under the Drones section for attacking rules and the Manual Gunnery section for whether it's forbidden from not directly controlled Drones. The SEG section does say that drones not directly under the control of a rigger use SEG. The GM's got the final word, as always, and the wording could still be interpreted to mean that they use SEG by default but can be programmed/ordered to use Manual Gunnery (even if that might be a bit of a stretch).[/Edit]

As A.E. said above, Sensor-Enhanced only _for_drones_on_their_own_.

A jumped-in rigger can do what he likes, but drones have teeny, teeny brains.

True enough, I suppose - I've never seen a drone make it to the CLUE files.

Interesting. Just read the rules for sensor enhanced gunnery and they seem to have a mistake. Nothing serious however.

SR3 p152 sensor enhanced gunnery second last paragraph last sentence “making a sensor enhanced gunnery test constitutes a complex action”

SR3 p154 sensor enhanced gunnery modifiers table “recoil, semi-automatic +1 for second shot during phase.”

How do you get a second shot if the first one was a complex action.

No matter.

Do you still have a lock after you fire.

Example. i order a drone to kill another drone under its own processor. It maks a sensor test to lock on and makes a gunnery test (adding half sensors) and damages the other drone. But it is still operational. On its next action can it fire again or dose it need to make another sensor test. I assume it can continue shooting

What do you know without making a sensors test? Say I a drone to destroy any thing that moves in a room. There is presently one other drone in the room because of my drones pissy gun it is going to take a long time to get a kill. My drone locks on and starts shooting. 10 seconds later it is still shooting with every action and a person walks into the room. Dose my drone notice the person while it is using all its actions to shoot.

SR3 p152 sensor enhanced gunnery paragraph 2 first sentence “the attaching drone must first make a successful sensor test to DETECT the target with its sensors” would suggest not effectively making the drone blind to any new threats until it takes an action to locate them. This may interact in interesting ways with walls and other obstructions. Or should a drone be allowed a sensor test (or be assumed to pass one) in any situation a metahuman would be given a perception test (or assumed to pass one). Only being required to make a sensor test as an action to get a weapons lock.

Lastly assuming a weapons lock remains active after subsequent actions how many do I get with a single complex action sensor test (say there are 3 targets in view) and how many can be maintained. Eg can I lock on each enemy drone before we decide to fight so I don’t have to wast actions after the negotiations have failed.

Edward

Even with the crash and loss of tech I would not have expected military tech to have gone backwards. Old techniques would have been lost but human commanders would remember “we used to be able to target 30 individual fighters at the same time. Tech boy get me multiple targeting” and it would be done. at least on ships capable of firing on a dozen different bogies in the same action.

Edward