Default Assumption: Do robots survive in a vacuum?

[Werner]

Here is Ingrid's starship.
SCOUT/COURIER
DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS

Installed components	Tonnage	Cost	EP	Notes
100-ton Hull (Wedge)	100	MCr12.000
Bridge	-20	MCr0.500
Computer	-0.2	MCr8.000		Model/2
Flight Avionics	-0.8	(MCr1.800)		Model/2
Sensors	-0.6	(MCr1.200)		Model/2
Communications	-0.4	(MCr1.000)		Model/2
Jump Drive 2	-3	MCr12.000	-2
Jump Fuel	-20
Maneuver Drive 2	-5	MCr3.500	-2
TL17 Antimatter Power Plant	-2	MCr2.000	16	40 years of operation.
Antimatter Power Plant Fuel	-4
Fuel Scoops		MCr0.100
1 Hard Point		MCr0.100
Double Turret		MCr0.750
Air/Raft	-5	MCr0.273
Staterooms (4)	-16	MCr2.000
Cargo	-23
Totals	0	MCr41.223

[BRover]

Originally Posted by Werner

It is a rather unique starship, either a prototype or an artifact. I'm going with prototype, as the power requirements for her positronic brain are ridiculous, she has a remote control android body, it needs to stay within communication range of the starship otherwise it reverts to "dumbot mode". I would trade the no jump fuel requirement with self-repair capability, basically the ship's computer builds the scout/courier around itself using nanites. The ship "heals" so long as the computer is not destroyed or its antimatter containment system is not breached, otherwise it is a flying bomb!

. . .

Reminds me, in a sort of reverse similitude, of McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang series. They were "shell people"--people who, from birth, needed life support, etc, to survive, and were put into a "shell" that was then installed into, say, a courier ship or whatever, as brain and pilot of her ship-body. A successful one, after paying off the ship, could have a body built in which to make excursions--but since their enshelled brain/organic body was still aboard, they could only go so far and still maintain control.

The ship team was a partnership: shipboard was the "brain"; the partner was the "brawn," the mobile member, available for maintenance and other tasks the brain was unable to manage.

And hmmm, it seems there was another similar fictional situation that I thunked, but it escaped me. By Frank Herbert maybe? Or someone else entirely??

[Werner]

Originally Posted by BRover

Reminds me, in a sort of reverse similitude, of McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang series. They were "shell people"--people who, from birth, needed life support, etc, to survive, and were put into a "shell" that was then installed into, say, a courier ship or whatever, as brain and pilot of her ship-body. A successful one, after paying off the ship, could have a body built in which to make excursions--but since their enshelled brain/organic body was still aboard, they could only go so far and still maintain control.

The ship team was a partnership: shipboard was the "brain"; the partner was the "brawn," the mobile member, available for maintenance and other tasks the brain was unable to manage.

And hmmm, it seems there was another similar fictional situation that I thunked, but it escaped me. By Frank Herbert maybe? Or someone else entirely??

I did a write up of Ingrid Caradeen with both character and ship statistics, she is a ship AI with an Android remote linked in with a meson communicator she has a 40 year supply of antimatter on board and she is in a subsector of the Andromeda galaxy after being sent by a one-way intergalactic jump gate. Interestingly she could fly back to the Milky Way galaxy theoretically with her maneuver drive alone, she can accelerate at 2-G for 40 years, those 40 years are for ship board time, time dilation effects mean that for the rest of the Universe, she would arrive back 2.5 million years later, so she decided to wait for the return jumpgate to be build before she attempts such a journey.