Well, I was saying that for the evidence of Deckplans/Ship Designs in the OTU. MTU will be different...
The MGT ship designs in the published works tend to be sub optimum and poorly designed. Take it only as evidence of a sloppy product.
Why not more Robots?
- Thread starter Greylond
- Start date
The MGT ship designs in the published works tend to be sub optimum and poorly designed. Take it only as evidence of a sloppy product.
Who says there aren't more? Robots don't have to be humanoid in appearance, nor mobile.
- Perhaps the steward is assisted by a robotic washer/dryer that sorts and loads laundry, transfers it from the washer to the dryer compartment, then sorts it by the name on the label and folds it so all he has to do is deliver it to the right room; or a service wall that serves measured portions of ordered food from internal compartments onto a plate before covering and dispensing the plate from the service port; or a beverage cart that moves independently from table to table preparing and serving mixed drinks from an assortment of spigots served from internal containers. There will most certainly be entertainment systems that respond to voice command.
- Perhaps the engineers are assisted by robotically controlled waldos build into the drives that can obey orders to select and use the appropriate tools to open compartments and test, repair or replace components of the drives.
- Perhaps the medic is assisted by a med robot-bed with build-in diagnostics and an assortment of robotic "hands" of various sizes, allowing him to apply his knowledge with the benefit of real-time diagnostic interpretation and while performing procedures with a precision far beyond the capacity of human hands through incisions far smaller than any human could manage.
- Almost certainly, if the world is TL 12 or better, the dock itself makes use of robotic cargo handlers to handle massive multi-ton cargo containers with precision and speed.
"Sentient", if you mean AI, is beyond even Imperial tech norms. They are just beginning to experiment with AI systems, sometimes with unfortunate results, so it's not something one expects to run into except in an experimental context. I understand the Hivers are much farther advanced there.
Other than that, robots aren't cheap, not under the available design rules. Even a fairly simple lower tech bot can cost anything from as much as a new car to as much as a small house, still cheaper over their working life than a human until you consider that the humans are more versatile: your steward bot is not going to be much good for fighting off hijackers or delivering a baby in a pinch. Lower-tech robots are idiot savants - capable of handling a particular set of tasks but pretty much at a loss outside of that set or if something unusual occurs. They need to be supervised, but they could be as endemic and mundane in spacefaring life as power tools are in modern life - assuming someone can afford them. So, most common where there's money to spend on such things.
Higher tech autonomous robots are able to work relatively independently within the scope of their programming, even to learn new skills within the limits of their data storage and to respond to novel situations to a limited extent, but they are correspondingly more expensive, perhaps several times more expensive, and therefore correspondingly less common.
In a nutshell, your free trader might manage to afford a robot food wall or laundry, and the drives might include some robotics as part of the package, but the better robots are going to be property of wealthier people and larger corporations with the capital available to invest in such things.
Nope. Just union rules.
Maintenance for the weapons systems - that's the gunner's job, not the engineer's. So you may have a Gunnery command brainbot, and a gunnery maintenancebot, but at least one of those has to be mobile.
ONLY if the gunner has electronics skill. Otherwise, NO. Fighter plane's weapon systems aren't maintained by the gunner... These aren't 105 howitzers we're talking about ya know.
Hey Greylond. This is something that I wondered about since I first picked up the game in 79 or 80, and I thinkn Aptollard nailed it. It's a game about people, and what our actions say about us and our friends. I think Marc Miller mentioned or alluded to that in the interview that was posted here some eight years back or so.
WARNING; MAJOR GEEKNESS COMING REGARDING PSYCHOLOGY AND ROBOTICS
Geek hat on; what's interesting is that if you were to map the human psyche, and place on that map various aspects of our persona, and how doctors deal with abnormal thought processes, you'll find a startling parallel between the chaos of the Vargs enclaves, the "honor" or "male machismo/honor" or the Aslan, the invasiveness of the zhodani as a means to get at what you're thinking, the manipulativeness to get you to do something as per the Hivers, the fanaticism of the human spirit characterized by the K'Kree, and so on (not sure about the Sols/Terrans...it'll come
).And that's really what a lot of sci-fi is about. A lot of commentators state that sci-fi addresses social issues, sometimes political issues, and a kind of general group-situational awareness or group-think dynamic. But the "truth", as seen by social psychologists and sociologists, is that bad leadership and social plagues stem from bad thinking or poor mood/persepective. That's not really always true, but that's what the experts will tell you.
So what the heck does this have to do with Robots in Traveller?
Well, again, the game and its adventures are about people taking actions, and not so much about machines or monsters; even though they are an inherit part of the genre, they're not the focus. It's about what you, as a player, are going to do. What your frame of mind is, and can you sync that up with the story unfolding. The various aspects of human psychology act as themes for adventures; i.e. pirates can be anybody, but Vargr corsairs emphasize the practice and aspect of human piratical thinking, coupled with pack mentality. With Aslan it's all about putting a good face and sense of honor on annexing other people's lands. With the Zhos it's about keeping someone who thinks you're hiding something out of your subconscious, and so on.Also historically travellers of all stripes have been independently wealthy. People who could afford to leave a nine-to-five job, travel the globe (or portion of the galaxy in our case) and visit far off lands with different customs, and the means for defense should the natives get restless, or should their problems bleed over into your party. That should beg the question of why there aren't more warbots or synthetic soldiers on the scene in Traveller. I imagine they are, it's just that the military and security apparatus we deal with in Traveller is still primarily comprised of human soldiers.
You might hand wave it away by saying that humanoid robots and synthetic humans are essentually truly the thing of sci-fi, as the energy to get those things to operate is actually beyond science, or, better yet, at tech levels above 15, 16 and so forth. Therefore, even in the 3I and afterwards, they're still truly the stuff of science fiction.
Years back I was interested in robotics when I was pursuing an engineering degree, and "muscle wires" had just come onto the market. Some six or seven years before I caught a Sunday afternoon tech show that discussed the innovation, and that said wire was something like one-hundred times as strong as a human muscle fiber. All you had to do was to apply a small voltage across it. Simple enough, but that's just one. To make a "robot muscle" you'd need many of those wires strung together like a human muscle, and you'd need to apply X-number of times the voltage across all those wires. And that's just for one muscle. Imagine trying to do that for a synthetic version of a human being. You'd need a portable fusion power plant like an PGMP or FGMP, and even then there's no guarantee you'd come up with a workable synthetic. Or, if you did, how long would its power last?
Therefore there's probably more "C-390" type robots with lower power servos to keep them animated and moving, or wheeled robots designed to do specific tasks.
Geek Mode off.
Phew.
Just my take.
Fighter planes don't HAVE gunners. SHIPS do, and the gunners maintain their own systems. Not the engineers. The engineers maintain the engines and related equipment. So your gunner WILL have to have electronics skill. Unless you have only one gunner and a horde of techbots, and even then, that gunner better know what those bots are doing. If not, he'll never know how his weapons are aligned and set up when he goes to use them. There are reasons why most operators in real world ships are also at least the initial technicians and maintenance personnel for their systems. Often, they are the only ones on the ship doing anything with that system. If they can't handle it, they don't call Geordi, they call the techrep.
Yea, I agree it's about People. The idea that I had was that the PCs would be in the foreground but I don't see a reason why the ONLY crew on a ship have to be PCs or NPC Biologicals. Just like in Star Wars or other Sci-Fi featuring Robots I could see mechanical crewmen doing the DDD (Dirty, Dull and Dangerous) jobs on a regular basis. And possibly a character now and then that is a Robot.
WARNING; MAJOR GEEKNESS COMING REGARDING PSYCHOLOGY AND ROBOTICS
~snip...
No worries, I really liked that section of your post! One of the things that I've always liked in SciFi is a subplot of Humanti and Robot Interaction.
DangerousThing
SOC-13
I agree with your reasoning, especially with your last sentence.
However, IMTU, robots do not look humanoid. They are generally talked about as "automated fill-in-the-blank", as in an automated star ship (this means that many of the devices and drives can run themselves without much human intervention).
Start IMTU..., not connected with the OTU at all...
This is, of course, in one polity, the Confederation (around 13 systems) and just starting exploration after the Shattering. The Confederation has a manpower shortage but also a prejudice against humanoid robots (we should do it ourselves rather than make a robot to do it). However, there is no shortage of automated machines using expert systems in order to do everything from cleaning the floors to fixing jump drives. As long as these machines don't look human, it doesn't bother anybody.
And like you said, for the most part, these things are just a part of life. They're in the background.
I don't have much in the way of nanotech though. IMTU, vat nanotech comes in at TL 12, which they're not all the way through yet.
There are, however, fabbers, which are advanced 3d printers and can use most materials including metals to fab with. The ship is a trade pioneer and can use the a fabber to create small or medium sized trade goods, though we're not talking about fast turnaround time here which is why the players will have a full cargo hold of various items to entice low-tech systems to trade.
End IMTU.
Heh, thanks. Roddenberry did it with Star Trek. All the story formulas are out of psychology 101, and Lucas kind of did it with Star Wars, though his was more of "the power of positive thinking" approach.
Just from a practical standpoint I think synthetic humans and more human like robots are probably just highly expensive. So there're probably more C-3POs than there are Datas running around the 3I.
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
I agree with several of the above posters:
The OTU didn't have the rules for robots until quite late.
It's less of a headache for the GM to 'bot' a NPC than to design a robot that the PCs will immediately attempt to subvert.
'Automated systems' robots are more efficient than 'mobile humanoid replica' robots for routine tasks and in the OTU robots don't have the intellect to match human versatility so there is little point in building humanoid replicas. The machines are there but they don't look or act like us. This automation is why you only need one engineer per 35dt of drives. (How many techies do you need to keep a TL7 fighter in the air, and how many dt is that?)
Nanotechnology, like robotics, is in the background - that's how the sophisticated automation works.
A robot-controlled ship isn't Fireball XL5, with bright corridors full of bustling 3-CPOs and Twikis, it's a dark, evacuated machine with three just-in-case techies playing D&D in a habitation module. Then they lose the plot and scheme to kill each other for real...
The devil makes work for idle hands. If you need any humans at all on a ship (and you do at all Traveller TLs) you need to keep them occupied. The standard Traveller crew component is obviously the optimum mix of human and machine function.
The OTU didn't have the rules for robots until quite late.
It's less of a headache for the GM to 'bot' a NPC than to design a robot that the PCs will immediately attempt to subvert.
'Automated systems' robots are more efficient than 'mobile humanoid replica' robots for routine tasks and in the OTU robots don't have the intellect to match human versatility so there is little point in building humanoid replicas. The machines are there but they don't look or act like us. This automation is why you only need one engineer per 35dt of drives. (How many techies do you need to keep a TL7 fighter in the air, and how many dt is that?)
Nanotechnology, like robotics, is in the background - that's how the sophisticated automation works.
A robot-controlled ship isn't Fireball XL5, with bright corridors full of bustling 3-CPOs and Twikis, it's a dark, evacuated machine with three just-in-case techies playing D&D in a habitation module. Then they lose the plot and scheme to kill each other for real...
The devil makes work for idle hands. If you need any humans at all on a ship (and you do at all Traveller TLs) you need to keep them occupied. The standard Traveller crew component is obviously the optimum mix of human and machine function.
I guess the main reason ship crews are kept so small in Traveller is precisely because most of th ship is automated (either we call it robotic or computer controled), so allowing the single Pilot (as most of the time the ship goes under automatic pilot, just calling the sophont as needed), the single engineer in small ships (ditto), etc, while most of those systems need constant monitoring.
In this sense, I think where the crew is smaller for what I envivion is in the passenger crew, as a single steward could be in truble should a pesky passenger come aboard, calling him at any hour (after all I pay for that) and making his live miserable, even not allowing him a healthy sleep time, and so worsening his mood as days pass...
I also feel it paradoxal (to say the least) that the version (among the ones I know well enough to talk about) that alows for most automatization and robots from the begining (MgT) is also the one where a single Pilot is not considered full crew, and a single engineer would have problems to keep with all engineering sections (due to the multiple specialties in engineering), so requiring a larger crew for a tramp freighter...
In this sense, I think where the crew is smaller for what I envivion is in the passenger crew, as a single steward could be in truble should a pesky passenger come aboard, calling him at any hour (after all I pay for that) and making his live miserable, even not allowing him a healthy sleep time, and so worsening his mood as days pass...
I also feel it paradoxal (to say the least) that the version (among the ones I know well enough to talk about) that alows for most automatization and robots from the begining (MgT) is also the one where a single Pilot is not considered full crew, and a single engineer would have problems to keep with all engineering sections (due to the multiple specialties in engineering), so requiring a larger crew for a tramp freighter...
I haven't found that so far in games I've played. The Engineer characters that I've seen have been either 3 or 5 term characters and they've had multiple specialties to cover all the bases. Usually characters that I've seen have 12+ different skill levels so if you make up an Engineer character you usually have all the needed skills to take care of something as small as a Free Trader with just the one character.
Now, I always figured there'd be a lot more R2-D2s than C-3POs. They're much more useful.
In order to have the 5 Engineering specialties that ingeneering has in MgT at level 2 (so able to handle difficult or quick tasks with a fair chance to succeed) you'd need that the engineer has a total of 10 skill levels in Engineering. So even your 12 skill levels character will have few othr skills, being a quite specialized (and so, IMHO not too fun to play) character.
I've seen no characters with 10 levels in single skill (even one with that many specilaties), neither as player nor as referee. In fact, characters with more than 3 skill levels in a single skill have been rare in all the campaigns I played/refereed, and that will just mean level 1 in 3 specialties and level 0 in the other two.
EDIT: See that this was a major issue in the thread about repair Robots vs drones I told you about earlier in this same forum
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These are store-bought characters? Not random dice?
A level 10 skill?! Never gonna happen with random dice character gen. Level 5 is pretty much the max without breaking the game mechanic. The ref could fudge an NPC though. But normally, a ship just pulls in somewhere for repairs while the crew finds trouble in town.
DangerousThing
SOC-13
Is your TU Dalek-, er... Handicapped-Accessible? R2-D2 might have trouble with all those vertical hatches unless the ship was in zero g.
And yes, all the robots I've made were more like R2-D2 than anything with legs. I have a really neat idea for something with legs now, but I don't have the time or money to build it. I want to build a hexapod "wheel" chair for my wife.
Assuming you mean "Why not more autonomous self-propelled mechanical entities?" the answer could be pure selection bias. PC-run ships have as many ASMEs as the players want to have (and can afford). Beyond that, we've only seen a handful of NPC-crewed ships and they turn out to have been crewed by neo-luddites.
Well, OK, the very construction of ships (with all those volume-gobbling crew staterooms) implies a dearth of ASMEs involved in the running of spaceboats and starships, but as for planetside employment of rob... excuse me, ASMEs, how many socities have we actually seen described in such detail that the absence of them is unmistakable?
Hans
