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How Common Are Robots IYTU?

For me, I once ran a campaign akin to Dune where all Robots were almost wiped out in a Jihad. Other campaigns I have made them as common as automobiles, in the 1970s...some parts of the world, it could take years before an individual could save enough for a car or even see one in one's lifetime but almost everyone knew they existed.
 
These aren't the droid's you're looking for...

As with some others here, robots are common IMTU... clever robots, not so much.

Most worlds in the Spinward Marches are relatively sparsely populated, so you end up with agricultural planets, where the farms are owned and run by people, but dumbbots do the work.

Industrial worlds have higher pops, but there's still no shortage of unpleasant jobs that droids can do, while freeing up people for the jobs that need a bit more adaptability.

So there are not really any C3P0s about, except for a limited number of experimental machines, but there are janitorial units, garbage handlers, factory workers, crop pickers, etc. Most of them cheap designs, not too smart, and restricted in what they can do.

There are also some security guard units with no mobility (basically Aliens "sentry guns"), but they are more expensive and tend to have strict laws governing their placement.

Some civilian ships will also use astromech droids. Imperial regulations say that a ship can replace up to 50% of its engineering crew with robots.

All of the robots are Book 8 designs.
 
mine

in mine they are a major "race"...within the other "races" they are not common but very low level "worker" kind of "roids"...
 
Last campaign I actually ran (93/94), they were as common (and in the same types) as Star Wars. Astromechs, translators, dumbbots, the whole nine yards. Gave the small group (2 to 4) of players I was "working" the ability to run much larger ships. At times also used to give the PCs additional headaches as well, hehe.
 
Adding more "food for thought" as it were...

The general economy of any given world depends on whether or not the individual in question has a job bringing in income for said individual. What kinds of jobs are there and how well do they pay? A lot of it depends on the culture right? Lets examine that concept one step further...

Most low paying jobs tend to be the kinds that require little in the way of skills, possibly where an education is a liability rather than an asset no? Now, take that particular job away because you've got a robot doing it, and the question becomes multi-fold. What are the results of such an action?

A) the person who did the job not only loses the income from that job, but now has no hope of finding such a job again - assuming that other corporations follow suit and roboticize their own "posts". Since corporations are a cut-throat type organization, if one finds it profitable, others will SOON find it equally profitable.

B) The person who held that job, will discover the mentality that if his position becomes more expensive to pay in wages than it takes to use a robot, that the job will be filled in by a robot. Net effect is to lower the wage rate for the job.

C) Robots have no consumeristic impulses. This function is mostly uniquely the domain of living creatures. If enough people are unable to find work, then their life becomes one of quiet desperation so to speak. The only materialistic goods they will be able to gain for their own will be those things that are granted to them via some outside agency.

D) Taxation depends largely on having a citizen base to tax no? If wages are driven down, where does the tax money come from?

E) Cause and effect: Less discretionary income means less consumerism, which in turn cuts back on demand for products produced at factories. Less demand at factors means less jobs as production cuts back to meet only that which is demanded.

F) Service sector jobs remain popular IF robots do not fill those positions as well.

Minor list of jobs available:

Creativity style jobs: advertising, entertainment, communications
Labor jobs: mostly production type industries from food to material goods.
Administrative jobs: someone has to keep civilization running
Security jobs: Protection of assets from thieves/criminals/vandals
Military: self-explanitory, however, Militaries tend to be microcosms of society


Now, what happens when you create an automated drug production line? The drugs can be either licite or illicite drugs. Purity levels are reasonably ok, reliability issues as far as "loyalty" is a non-issue unless someone can hack into the computer/positronic brain of the robot. Reasonable security keeps your assets in good order - but who are you producing the drugs for? If the general population is unable to buy things, how much profit can you make?

My guess here is that robotics within a mature society will reach levels where certain jobs are left for the lower classes not because robots can't do the job, but because robots as a "Class" tend to disrupt economics in the long run. Societies that heed "history's lessons" probably either have social structures in place to avert a similiar issue from ever occurring again, or there are outright laws emplaced for the protection of those whose lives depend upon the production of the "lessers". Multi-millionaires for example, manage to use their capital to earn them income - which requires that they invest their capital in other "engines of prosperity" in order to increase their earnings. A bank would for example, take their cash and pay interest on it in order to have the privledge of lending the actual cash to others - at an interest rate HIGHER than that which they pay to those who invest their money (er, bank their money) in the bank.

One of the things I've noted about Gross Domestic Product and Per Capita Income is that Per Capita Income is an average of the Gross Domestic Product divided by the population figure within the region being discussed. Although it is possible to have a reasonably high GDP for a given region - it is to some extent, a clever lie to describe it as being the average condition of the people involved. For example, suppose you have 2% of the population who own roughly 70% of the region's assets - which includes also earning 70% of the Gross Domestic Product by virtue of controlling those assets. If you have 2% earning the 70% of the GDP, that means that the remaining 98% of the population earned the remaining 30%. If you divide the 30% of the GDP by the actual number of people in the 98% of non-rich personnel, you find that the baseline for the "Common" man is far far less than the "ordinary Per Capita" Income value suggests.

This brings me in a round about way to my "food for thought" commentary...

If the day ever arrives where the people who are part of the 98% of the population discover that they have little effect on the overall economy, chances are they will become disenfranchised from the government who is being funded by the other 2%. Robots are "possesions" of the rich who can afford the capital outlay costs of robots. The wages that would have gone to the worker are now being retained by the wealthy - but few people are ever truly far sighted until it hits their own pocket books. Robotics will be one of those things that will cause fluctuations within a society as people try to determine the most efficient balance between robotic labor and economic needs to keep a working class viable. Where the level is - I personally can't predict. My gut feeling is that some societies will begin to look like that of "I ROBOT" by Asimov. Eventually birth rates will drop, more and more robots will be produced for each human until humans begin to die out due to a lack of "replacement rate births". Currently, that replacement rate hovers around 2.1 people at present. If people keep on putting off having children, or can only "afford" one child per couple, the general population will contract.

Those are my "Gut" feelings at present. I suspect that although some people believe that GDP and Per Capita Incomes will increase at a major rate, my suspicion is that GDP and/or Per Capita Income will increase as a major result of Inflation, and that GDP can only increase in direct relation to not just the population expansion in general, but the economic division of spoils. The more commoners can earn and spend, the more the economy will expand. The more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a smaller percentage of the population, and the more "low level" jobs are weeded out by robots from the general economic environment, the less the GDP will grow in the REAL sense instead of the Inflationary sense
 
A) the person who did the job not only loses the income from that job, but now has no hope of finding such a job again - assuming that other corporations follow suit and roboticize their own "posts". Since corporations are a cut-throat type organization, if one finds it profitable, others will SOON find it equally profitable.

B) The person who held that job, will discover the mentality that if his position becomes more expensive to pay in wages than it takes to use a robot, that the job will be filled in by a robot. Net effect is to lower the wage rate for the job.
Note that the same thing holds true if you replace "robot" with "immigrant". These are not new economic issues; they're part and parcel of general economics, and have played out many times before. Economies change over time, as groups produce one thing, and then shift to producing something else, for whatever reason. It's not always an easy shift, nor is it directed by an all-knowing force, but the changes occur. There can also be changes due to technological improvements, or in differing regulatory environments.
C) Robots have no consumeristic impulses. This function is mostly uniquely the domain of living creatures. If enough people are unable to find work, then their life becomes one of quiet desperation so to speak. The only materialistic goods they will be able to gain for their own will be those things that are granted to them via some outside agency.
Unless they find other jobs somehow; structural unemployment is never complete. Workers do get retrained, and there are generally social measures taken to ease the transitions for those who are unable to adjust. GMs are free to choose the level of concern any society will have in these cases, as best suits the story they want to tell.
D) Taxation depends largely on having a citizen base to tax no? If wages are driven down, where does the tax money come from?
There are many, many ways for a government to raise revenue. It's true that massive unemployment due to technological restructuring will result in negative overall economic consequences for some time, and it's difficult to sustain government spending in the face of sustained economic shrinkage, but this is not a situation that will remain static in the long run.
E) Cause and effect: Less discretionary income means less consumerism, which in turn cuts back on demand for products produced at factories. Less demand at factors means less jobs as production cuts back to meet only that which is demanded.
However, there are going to be additional jobs in plants producing the robots, and those workers will have some counterbalancing effect on the overall pool of discretionary income available. The additional retained corporate earnings will get distributed somehow, even if it's just in the form of extra dividends for shareholders, and that money will ultimately wind up making its way back into the economy. While rich people do tend to save a goodly chunk of their money, they also spend it on things they want; it's very rare for them to keep spending levels consistent with a middle-class worker, for example. Images of Scrooge McDuck aside, it's not very common for the wealthy to save all their money just so they can roll around in huge piles of it.

Jobs will certainly be redistributed. There may be fewer cheap cars produced, and more luxury goods sought; there may be areas that cannot adjust to economic change and suffer a serious reduction in their standard of living (example: textile-mill towns), but there will also be areas that have booms (example: Silicon Valley). Skill sets will change; where one generation may have been satisfied with a certain level of education and technical savvy, the next generation may well have entirely different expectations about what they need to know.

There's also a minimum level of consumption that is required, just from the nature of life. You have to have food, shelter, air, and so on. Those who make things will find themselves sitting on huge inventories if they keep prices high when buying power is reduced. This produces a deflationary effect, where prices will drop to some lower level. There are also measures that governments can take to nurture their economies and to keep prices reasonable, though the power of the marketplace will have strong effects, too. I really don't want to get into the sort of wars over Keynesian theory that economists love to get into, but he had some points.
Now, what happens when you create an automated drug production line? The drugs can be either licite or illicite drugs. Purity levels are reasonably ok, reliability issues as far as "loyalty" is a non-issue unless someone can hack into the computer/positronic brain of the robot. Reasonable security keeps your assets in good order - but who are you producing the drugs for? If the general population is unable to buy things, how much profit can you make?
You sell them to whoever does have the money to buy things. You may not be making goods for the general consumer, but Boeing hasn't done that for quite some time now, and they're doing OK. Maybe you export them somewhere else. Maybe you sell them to the government... which pays for them through a tax on corporate retained earnings.
My guess here is that robotics within a mature society will reach levels where certain jobs are left for the lower classes not because robots can't do the job, but because robots as a "Class" tend to disrupt economics in the long run. Societies that heed "history's lessons" probably either have social structures in place to avert a similiar issue from ever occurring again, or there are outright laws emplaced for the protection of those whose lives depend upon the production of the "lessers".
The thing about economics is that it's always changing when you look at things on a small enough scale. Some parts will have upswells, and others will have hard times. Disruption is just the way of things, and trying to damp it out is generally going to produce problems in the long run, as well as stifling innovation. I have my doubts about "protectionist" legislation, and would instead suspect that societies would take care to minimize the harm from economic disruption instead of minimizing disruption itself; after all, discovering a more efficient way to do something is a disruption, too. There will be jobs that are simply inappropriate for robots or expert AI systems, such as customer service positions. I'd instead expect societies to be hard-nosed about what robots can do and can't do, and to adjust their expectations so that people make choices to go into the fields that are best suited to sophonts. This will make it hard for a GM who thinks that Wavecrest City on Mora will be just like Cleveland (except for the occasional trash-collector-bot), but that's a big part of the appeal for me, at least.
The more commoners can earn and spend, the more the economy will expand. The more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a smaller percentage of the population, and the more "low level" jobs are weeded out by robots from the general economic environment, the less the GDP will grow in the REAL sense instead of the Inflationary sense
There are many ways to increase aggregate demand, although bumping up the per-capita income is certainly one of them. I think that many of those other solutions will be implemented to at least some degree, though.
 
Captain Midnight's responses are certainly within reason, and I appreciate the thought that went into it. It should be noted that I tried to keep things from being "Too alarmist" yet not be too optimistic either. As a student of history, I am only too aware of the conditions that are attendent upon massive changes in "efficiencies" in any given industry or sector of services upon which people earn their income. The problem here is this:

As technology advances, certain specialized tasks become available that did not exist before. Some of these specializations (individual jobs in normal discussion!) require training, and some require merely that someone learn a specific set of not too difficult skills and carry on performing the job. Before, you had horse breeders, farmers growing hay, and blacksmiths in order to service the transporation technology in the distant past. With the invention of gasoline and rubber and metal working in a factory standard manner, we got cars. Gone were the Ferriers and blacksmiths and hay production centers. In its place we discovered the need for specialists such as car mechanics, chemists to produce tires, factory workers for cars and the like. This worked more or less fine because we still retains "unskilled" labor tasks/specializations as well had new specialties open up with varying degrees of training required.

The problem is however, that each of those specialties were filled/held by consumer/producers. In order to consume, they had to produce. The less society values what indivdiuals produce, the less worth society as a whole attaches to their work, which means either that those specialists earn less income, and are able to consume less, or they have to work longer to amass more money in order to consume what the other more "average" consumers consume.

Robotics on the other hand, does two things at the same time. It removes the availability of unskilled labor classification from many jobs. It also does not consume. If it did consume at a level equal to that of a sophant consumer, it would not be efficient to replace sophants with robots. While robots can require goods to maintain them, the factory owner would look at his balance sheet and ask himself "which costs more, the robot plus its maintenance costs, or the sophant and his wage costs?" If the factory owner discovers that it costs the same in labor versus maintenance costs of the robot, the factory owner may still buy robots. Why? If the robot can produce three times as much production goods as the sophant can for the same amount of money, then the factory owner knows that he just decreased his unit labor cost by 1/3rd. If the factory owner can sell the excess production, then he has made a HUGE profit. Problem is - in a one market environment, the factory owner is dependent upon having "consumers" to sell to. Consumers can only exist if they have an income - which is what they will lose if they are displaced by robots. Where the factory owner makes good however, is when he discovers he is not limited to just his market at home, but can sell his goods on worlds as far away as 10 parsecs. Is this viable? It can be. Suppose you have a widget that costs $200 credits to purchase, of which half the cost is labor costs. (I'm going to keep this simple rather than factor in profits, etc which in turn raise the price of items). The owner of the factory sells it on his home world for $200 and everyone is more or less happy. The consumer is happy because they can buy it. The factory workers are happy because they earned income while making the item. The factory owner is happy, because he has an asset he can sell. Now, lets say that the market can only absorb 100 units a day, and the factory can make 150 units per day. The factory owner either has to cut back production to 100 units or he will go bankrupt holding all those unsold units. But he decides instead, to sell them abroad. If the owner can fit in 100 units per 1dton of shipping packages, the owner of the units can ship 100 units at a price equal to 10 credits per unit (100 units times 10 credits per unit = 1,000 credits, the standard shipping cost per parsec). Selling his units two parsecs away at 220 credits isn't all that bad of a deal no? If that secondary market can absorb 200 units per day, the factory owner is in heaven. Now, lets take it the other way. The factory owner decides to buy enough robots to cut his labor costs by 50%. He's laid off a fair number of his workers, and they can't find a job. Not now, not ever - they were all IQ 4 people whose training consisted of boozing-1, whoring-1, G-ball appreciation-5, and couchpotatoism-4. I forgot the drug use and/or gambling, but you get the picture ;) In any event, the factory owner discovers to his dismay, that because his whole world is economizing with robots, that instead of being able to sell 100 units per day on this world, he can only sell 20 units per day on this world. As fate would have it, he can sell his units for 150 credits per unit, and ship it 2 parsecs away for 170 credits per unit. This is cheaper than what it costs to make on a non-robotic world, and edges out competition there. Since the market can absorb 200 units per day, that absorbs ALL of his production, and the factory owner is still one happy dude. He's unaffected by the unemployment issues on his home world, and he's still making the same level of profit as he did before - or, if he didn't drop his prices much, he's making MORE profits.

Those unemployed individuals? In order to ever have a hope of getting factory jobs, their wage costs have to drop below that of the robotic costs.

Mind you, I'm using "Factory jobs" as our current day analogs, as opposed to saying "unskilled labor" or "relatively unskilled labor". Robots who can handle unskilled labor can do so because the job requires almost little or no skills to do the job. A computer program that can replace a skilled practioner of a job that normally required mathematical abilities has just removed that job from the job pool. A computer that can spot weld machines has just removed that job from the job pool. Each subsquent job removed from the job pool - without a corresponding "unskilled or repetative job or relatively unskilled" category means that those who are at best, suited for unskilled positions, will be forever doomed to being shoved aside by machines that eventually can replace them.

If you're optimistic that computers will never reduce all of the unskilled positions from laborers, then that works out fine. If you believe however, that sooner or later, there will come a point where there is nothing a sophant can do manually that a robot can't do - then all unskilled manual labor will become best filled by robots. Those who can't handle being robot operators/mechanics or can't find jobs in sectors that service robots - are all going to have to hope that those books they write, those songs they create, those pictures they create using the latest artistic tools - will bring them in a lot of money. There are only so many service jobs available in the service sector that can be filled with unskilled labor. Imagine if you will having a roboburger joint that proclaims "Roboburgers, where not one germ dares land on the burger during the process between when we take your order to when your order is packaged and deposited in your hands in our highly automated food production system". Not a single living sophant exists within Roboburger because robots can move the burger patties from the freezer to the conveyor belt. Machines can discern via voice recognition what was ordered. Preprogrammed machines monitor the burger's progress through the conveyor belt as it gets sterilized, then cooked, then placed on pre-prepared bun, then wrapped, and set into the bin that will be delivered to the customer. Oh, I forgot. Someone's got to fill the robo joint with the food and take out the garbage right? Oops, they have cleaning robots to do that chore. They have delivery trucks (Possibly robot piloted) with a robotic system for offloading what was required. The position of "maintenance man" for the robojoint might require some menial training - maybe.

As was stated - it all depends upon the degree by which robots are permitted to take over jobs. Maybe by custom, service sector jobs are culturally the domain of living sophants. Maybe the custom is such that each robot laborer is taxed by a specific amount. The more robots you use instead of sophants, the more the tax is - sort of like a sin tax for the benefit of those you no longer employ. Maybe the world is heavily roboticized and all factories are owned by the government, who in turn use the proceeds to subsidize the unemployed? This is TRAVELLER - where anything that can be imagined might actually work ;)
 
What you're describing is essentially the same effects as "offshoring", insofar as you're moving your factory over to a different labour market that effectively shuts out the local market. It puts downward pressure on wages and as a global system requires a foreign market to absorb the goods in order to remain profitable. It also forces the local labour market to adapt to a primarily service based economy.

At a certain level, countervailing forces inevitably obtain. Finding new markets for goods in Traveller would require searching farther and farther afield, increasing trade costs. Also, it would require worlds with strong consumer markets, which means a fairly effective means of distributing wealth.

Service sector jobs are likely to be the only remaining sophont job market. Robots aren't designed with sophisticated social machinery because they don't need to, and most sophonts find robots with social programming unsettling rather than charming. More likely the rich cyber-capitalists will want their coffee served by attractive sophonts (and these will be desperate for work.) Any transaction that requires a social interaction is therefore largely safe from robot labour. But the service sector will not be able to absorb everyone, so a number of different scenarios could emerge:

1) Bijoux State: through cultural or governmental channels, the cyber-capitalist world redistributes the wealth of cybernetic production throughout society. It resembles the oil-rich gulf states of today (like Dubai.) This scenario is increasingly unlikely if the population is too large to spread significant affluence across society. The "citizens" are largely idle, sophonts travel in from other worlds and underbid local labour to take advantage of the enormous concentrations of capital and form a subaltern service class.

2) Cyber-despotism: An idle and restive population on the edge of starvation is kept under control by an invasive security state. Cyber-capitalists are be forced to finance an increasingly large and bloated government security apparatus (police, jails, legal infrastucture, military.) Robots and automated "big-brother" style government is introduced to reduce cost. The population, riven with poverty-related diseases, lives and dies with next to nothing.

3) Ghost world: If the cyber-capitalists are successful in maintaining their privilege, the bulk of the sophont population, essentially existing outside the local economy, will begin to die in great numbers, leaving an automated world with a few sophont slaves and a handful of plutocrats.

4) Parallel economies: Depending on local social and political differences the spectator population will form a series of primitavist (e.g. living off of the land) parallel economies and/or organized crime networks.

I'm sure there are o so many more...
 
I haven't done this in a while so ...

All hands, stand by for ranting!

Man do I hate robots! I will never let a player play one and I refuse to use them as NPCs. They are only window dressing or color (even if it's just gun metal gray).

Just the thought of a robot PC screams "MUNCHKIN!" to me. It isn't enough for some to play an alien, but they have to play a robot! Makes me ill. A gamer I knew in college wanted to play a robot, the GM let him, and he spent most of the game trying to upload himself into the ships computer so he could steal it; what a jerk!

IMTU, androids are outlawed on most high tech worlds and considered abominations in the backwaters; high tech worlds understand the danger and even AI research is discouraged. As such, no robot PC would last long once discovered to be a robot; particularly since an artificial intelligence that spontaneously became self-aware would be a curiousity that any high tech corporation would want to disassemble to find out how.

IMTU, the Empire learned its lesson just like in Star Wars. Robots are purposely never connected to large computer systems but are manually programmed to prevent potential robot revolutions. There were a few worlds where computers had managed to turn on their masters, but they quickly bombed to bedrock by the Imperial Navy and marked as Red Zones. Nobody really wants to be the Computers friend.

Okay, I'm better now. But I still hate robots!
 
I agree to a point with Ran Targas, I find Androids and other fully aware machines are a pain and can be used to disrupt a game by some players.

But I think there is a difference between an AI like some of the Star Wars droids and low level Robots. In my personal view some robots are not a problem (munchkin wise). I have allowed many in my game, but they are more like smart tools and less like humans in tin. Example? Some of my drop troops have a small vehicle that looks like a sci-fi version of the old M274 Mule. This vehicle had a dog level brain so it could follow simple commands. “Follow Jones”, “stay here”, “Come here” but nothing complex. The “Robotic Haler” could never be played by a player nor did it mess up anything in the game.

Now, those smart people discussing the economic impact, is another story. ;)

Daniel
 
One of the things that bothered me about science fiction was the whole thing about robots becoming "sentient" in this very loaded, anthropomorphic way. It's THE only real facet of robots and androids explored in sci-fi to any degree.

This always comes down to some spontaneous, random effect that just "happens" as if these aren't constructed specifically for dependable behaviour and sophont safety.

Myself, I just don't see much of a need for the notion that man-made organisms and robots spontaneously develop anything. Robots are as alive as human developers need them to be, and there just isn't any practical reason why you would make them particularly alive.

IMTU, when Johnny 5 gets struck by the lightning bolt, he does not become sentient and prone to comedic hijinks. IMTU, Johnny 5 just goes snap, crackle, pop and gives up the ghost.
 
Me, I LOVE Robots. I want a robot to put my shoes on and off, and a robot to carry me to the mailbox...

Robots as PCs? It's a pretty tough role. My only experience with it was in the old FGU game Villains and Vigilantes. I had one superhero robot that had to crime because he couldn't afford to make repairs. Such a character could be a windfall if you have a giveaway GM, but it could be severely limiting.

But in MTU, there are lots of robots. So much that larger ships have a Master of Robots crew position. But in most instances they are only tools. A true sentient robot or android would most likely be a one of a kind or incredibly expensive Hive construct, and no way would a PC get hold of that to run.
 
I like robots and they are common in MTU, on higher tech worlds as drivers, secretaries, low to med security detail and butlers, on lower tech worlds they are used for hard/dangerous labor and as emergency medical providers when available.

IMTU Human labor at higher tech levels is expensive, so almost everyone will probably have a robot hose-maid with only the few very rich (nobles)having actual human servants doing menial tasks, and a noble would never allow a non-human (robot or alien) to perform medical procedures on them.
 
^ Hey, that's not to say that there are no robots IMTU, just none that would be suitable as PC's or even interesting NPC's. There is robotic labor but its very limited in scope and capability.

I wrote a post a long time back about a world IMTU where robotic tanks (Bolos or Ogres and the like) were developed to break a long stalemate between super powers. But the tanks were built too well, got smart, and turned on their masters, eventually converting most of the planet into a radioactive parking lot. When the Empire showed up and tried to evacuate the few survivors of the war, the tanks took up duck hunting, picking off the shuttles as they broke through the clouds of dust and ash. They even learned to fake distress calls to draw the rescue shuttles to them.

This and a few other examples were enough for the MTU's Empire to make up its mind on artificial intelligence. Lucky for me ;)
 
^ Hey, that's not to say that there are no robots IMTU, just none that would be suitable as PC's or even interesting NPC's. There is robotic labor but its very limited in scope and capability.

I wrote a post a long time back about a world IMTU where robotic tanks (Bolos or Ogres and the like) were developed to break a long stalemate between super powers. But the tanks were built too well, got smart, and turned on their masters, eventually converting most of the planet into a radioactive parking lot. When the Empire showed up and tried to evacuate the few survivors of the war, the tanks took up duck hunting, picking off the shuttles as they broke through the clouds of dust and ash. They even learned to fake distress calls to draw the rescue shuttles to them.

This and a few other examples were enough for the MTU's Empire to make up its mind on artificial intelligence. Lucky for me ;)
Sounds interesting. Like a cross between Terminator and Traveller.

Do you know where the original post is? I would like to read it.

Daniel
 
In my games, robots are useful for areas that are hazardous, work-wise, assuming the tech level is high enough. Mining, working in toxic atmospheres, etc.

Companion-bots are useful toys for the wealthy on high-TL worlds, but the vast majority of people will never be able to afford one.
 
Sounds interesting. Like a cross between Terminator and Traveller.

Do you know where the original post is? I would like to read it.

Daniel

There really wasn't much more to it. I used the planet in only one adventure when the players hired on to a mercenary crew on contract to the blockade. During their tour, a distress signal was received from someone claiming to be an aristocrat (with blood ties to the sector's sovereign), one reportedly lost on the world during the war. The call for volunteers was made (the reward money was really good) and a rescue team (including the players) sent to the surface.

Fortunately, they had a local guide available, a survivor who had been lobbying the different mercenary groups to go back to surface for his own reasons! Made for a nice wrench in the works.
 
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