Will pretty much any drone work underwater if you add enviroseal (not to include rotor drones, and other obvious impossibilities)? As in, what would I need to do to a small walker or tracked drone to make it usable underwater?

I don't have Rigger 3 (from bad to worse) in front of me, but Thats basically it. If you want it to behave like a sub you have to add ballast tanks. Sonar might be a good idea as well.

For drones, you need cabling past a very short distance. I don't remember exactly what it is, though.

~J

Yeah, what JD's saying sounds good to me too. I GM a campaign where the team's rigger had to retrofit a few drones for deep-sea service and that's basically what he did.

Ballast tanks are a great idea. Thanks.

Ballast tanks if you want any depth control, as well as one of the hydrojet propulsion systems if you want to move with any sort of speed. You might need a modification for it to even get normal propulsion as normal, i cant remember.

I was actually planning on making a couple different sized walkers and a couple different sized sleds.
Maybe some other stuff that seems to be missing that would be useful for security and salvage work underwater.
A medium sized sled that could drop 10 mini walkers, each equiped with gyroc pistols and sensors seems like it would be great as a first response to any emergency. The sled could be loaded with casualties, etc and sent back as a quick response ambulance while the walkers secured the site and gathered enough info to determine what other response was needed.

Basically. They can be communicated to underwater (at least US and Russian subs—the gear required is very complex and expensive, so they're the only two to have them at the moment), and some radio communication is possible down to about 20 meters, but if you want transmission from the sub you pretty much need to surface.

Edit: JackDaddy, aside from concerns with bandwidth, you're forgetting that the power of a rigged drone comes from the fact that the interface is two-way. You may be able to give orders (very slowly), but you aren't going to be seeing what the drone's seeing, hearing what the drone's hearing, or for that matter even knowing where the drone is or that it's still in one piece. Encryption is critical, too, since you're pretty much transmitting your signal to the entire ocean.

For reference, stations in Antarctica picked up signals when the transmitter in Murmansk went on-line.

~J

hmm, going over rigger3 i cant find any purpose buildt underwater drones.
the only chassies i find are sea sleds and they are not listed as having enviroseal or anything like that...

strangely the only sea sled i find is one used as a underwater scooter or something. and its not equiped for rigging, remotely or otherwise...

allso, ballast tanks are a design option only. so to fit those to anything you would need to design it from the ground up.

still, a simpler solution would be to rig the drone for zero bounacy (or whatever the word is) and use small thrusters or fins to move it around under water. much like a helicopter or plane depending...

Neutral buoyancy changes with depth. That's what the ballast tanks are for, to adjust the vehicle to a proper buoyancy for the desired depth. Water pressure does the large changes in depth.

Even with the Rigger 3 list, there are a lot of vehicles that should exist which don't have stats. That's why GMs have the vehicle design rules to come up with a few designs that the original developers didn't.

If you want an aqua-drone that doesn't use ballast tanks, you'd need to make it internally as high density as possible (or at least high enough not to float above your desired maximum depth mark) and use an aqua-modded vector thrust or rotor engine system if you want it to swim.

Target: Smuggler Havens has some interesting rules on underwater drones. Its probably superseded by R3, but its interesting none the less.
Most importantly it talks about free range underwater drones... they have a network of transmitters (much like cell towers) allow drones to partol with out wires.. within the network.

If I remember Smuggler's Havens also has rules for visual ranges underwater as well, and "blue-light" cameras to increase said range at the expense of color vision - mods that one might make to an underwater drone's sensor package as per the partial upgrade rules in R3.

As per the use of VLF transmissions as well to drones, the gear itself isn't so complex, its more the size of the antennae required to recieve any. The size of the antennae required being proportional to the wavelength - I can't remember the formula off hand. Either way, suffice to say to have such capability the vehicle must be the size of an attack sub or large aircraft. (Both of which one might add were what the VLF Omega nav system were designed to operate with - until the Libyans destroyed the transmitter there.)

I think we had the discussion on VLF and drones here somewhere before. I can't find the thread right now.

VLF is easy, yeah. It's also almost useless—it's what I was talking about when I mentioned penetration down to about 20 meters above. You need ELF to get long-range communications, and that is complex/expensive/difficult.

(I don't think the VLF gear needs to be all that large, as they've implemented it on buoys raised from submarines submerged further down)

Edit: checked, at the upper range of the wavelength a VLF antenna should be 50 meters, at the lower end 5 meters. High-frequency VLF isn't small, certainly, but implementable without too much difficulty.

~J