Less Quick Guides

Drones

Control Methods

A lot of the confusion players face with drones centres on their control methods. There are, basically, three different ways to control your drones; Indirect, Direct and Jumped In.

Indirect Control

Indirect Control uses the drones inbuilt "dog brain" to interpret commands sent to it from the rigger. The commands have to be simple, such as "follow this man" or "shoot anyone who comes through this door", but can be chained together to form a sort of script, such as "shoot anyone who comes through this door, except for this person, until 6pm, then go to this address". The level of complexity can be best judged by thinking, "could a well trained dog understand something this simple", hence the term dog brain. Ignoring practical issues like dogs being unable to fire guns: as long as you think a dog would understand, then a drone would understand. Of course, like dogs, drones can be easily tricked when left to think by themselves too, but we will get to that later. The commands themselves are sent to the drone as messages, like emails, which the drone then carries out the best it can. Because the drone is carrying out these commands, its stats are used for any tests that are needed.

Advantages: You don't need to keep in wireless range with the drone throughout. Once it has its command, it can happily pootle off and do its thing. This means you can send drones in to wireless-inhibited areas, or outside of your broadcast range, or even send them off with their wireless disabled (I'll go into why you might want to later). Of course, if you use the fact that the device doesn't need its wireless, you wont be able to get live video or audio streams from it, but you can always record.

Disadvantages: Smart as they may be for machines, they are still stupid compared to an actual person. A drones dog-brain can be tricked much easier than a human, and they react to the unexpected poorly, often by simply ignoring it.

Direct Control

Direct control is like using a real world RC vehicle. Usually done through AR, the rigger will have a set of virtual buttons and joysticks and the like that they use to manually guide the drone. Because the rigger is issuing commands to the device in real time, two way communication is needed. The rigger is constantly sending commands to the drone, and the drone is constantly sending video, sound and possibly other information back to the rigger.

Advantages: You can use your own stats for tests, rather than the drones stats. You are harder to confuse than a drone ( I hope!). You can control the drone whilst still running about and doing things yourself.

Disadvantages: Although you can switch between which one you are controlling pretty quickly, you can only actually control one at a time. Its also reliant on a proper wireless signal, so you cant send drones into wireless dead-spots unless you are going with them.

Jumping In

Jumping in is the term used for using your control rig to virtually put you into the device. Jumping in is like you are possessing the drone; you see and hear from its sensors, and moving it around is as easy and intuitive as moving your real body around. This gives some obvious advantages over the other methods of control, and is something that sets a proper rigger apart from a simple hacker with a drone. In game this is represented by some major dice pool modifiers. You can further increase these modifiers by "running hot": taking off the safety measures from the simsense to get that little bit extra performance. This is not without risks though, as the feedback caused by a drone being damaged whilst hot rigging can cause physical damage to the riggers real body.

Advantages: By far the most control over the drone, with some impressive dice pool modifiers to reflect this. This can make a rigger hot-rigging a combat drone a lethal weapon.

Disadvantages: Like direct control, you need two-way communication with your drone to do this, and you can only jump in one drone at a time. Also, this is the only form of rigging where your real body is in any immediate danger.

Security

Like with cyber implants, an often-overlooked element to drone rigging is security. Unless you intend to ride your drones into battle, you will need to be communicating with them via wireless, whatever form of control you opt for. Because of this, enemy hackers are going to be as much of a risk to you as enemy combatants: Ok, so the big troll with the autocannon might blow your fancy combat crawler to pieces, but the sneaky hacker in the building next door could take your drone over and kill all your mates with it. There can be few things more embarrassing than being shot with your own guns.

So what can you do about it? Well, first off, make sure that you are using the right control method. If you are sending the drone off to do a specific task and come back, why not indirectly control it, and get it to turn off its wireless entirely until its finished? A hacker cant hack it if there is no way of communicating with it. Of course, a lot of the time, this approach isn't practical. The enemy hacker can't communicate with it till its finished, but then neither can you. So what if you need to be in direct control?

Well, this all comes down to electronic warfare. For starters, as an absolute basic necessity, you need to slave your drones to your comlink. In laymans terms, this means that the drone will only take commands from your comlink, and any hacker wanting to mess around with it will need to either hack your comlink first, or spoof your comcode, so the device thinks the commands are coming from you when they are not. This is such a basic thing, and there is no reason why you wouldn't want to do this, that I assume that you have unless you specifically say otherwise.

The next step is encryption. Either buy the encryption software yourself, or get a friendly hacker to sort it out for you. Encrypting the communications between your comlink and your drone stop people spying on the data traffic, and mean that anyone wanting to spoof commands to your drone also needs to decrypt your communications. Of course, in the world of Shadowrun even the fanciest of encryption can be beaten given very little time, but that time can be all you need to be alerted of the hackers presence and do something about it.

The next level of nastiness, program wise, is called a databomb. Like the encryption, this is either bought yourself or installed by a hacker, and sits in the communication link between your drone and your 'link. When the nasty hacker gets past your encryption, and manages to spoof your link, there is a chance of him setting off the databomb.

The final level of program evils you can do, is to install ice. These programs can be as simple as tracing the hackers location, to as nasty as the Black Ice that copies itself to the hackers comlink, sends itself to everyone on the hackers address book, and kills them all with simsense feedback. Nasty.

Of course, the most simple security measure is the Electronic Warfare skill. With this, you can mask the signal of your drones so evil hackers cant find it. They cant hack what they cant see.