You have crews because you need a certain amount of labor to run/maintain
things. Robots can easily manage things at the nominal levels (most new
airliners today--late Tech 7?--can pretty much fly and land themselves; the
human crews, if they wanted, could let the jets fly themselves and stay on
only as an emergency redundant system; as for repairs, a CD rom disc
probably has enough room for "The 10,001 Things Most Likely to Go Wrong
on Your Spacecraft, and How to Fix Them" files, so your maintenance crews
are probably not a problem, either). This is the easiest thing to do;
if your player wants a fully automated spacecraft, a robotic brain would
cost five times (and double mass) for what regular controls cost (and
double this cost if you are tearing out existing controls instead of
simply building a new ship--this covers the additional labor costs, etc.)
At least, that is how I have it set up. Mind you, this does not include
any additional costs for special maintenance facilities that you might
want on an automated ship (or any ship) making very long voyages.
I have a feeling that the reason why the rules are set up include the
following:
1) People have not thought through the potential for robotics,
especially for jobs that are mostly tedium, but sometimes require
real creative problem-solving (ship crews, etc.)
2) If you can have everything done by robots, it limits what player
characters can do. It's hard to start off an adventure by shipping
out on a free trader with a motley crew if the credit-strapped
captain knows that robots will work harder and longer and complain
less. (They will cost more at first, but any good businessman
with the initial credit for a spacecraft could get the additional
5% he would need to buy an entire robotic crew, knowing in the
long run it would be far more profitable--you don't have to pay
robots once you own them.) The easy out is to assume that there
is a limit to how good one can build a portable mechanical brain;
if there are obvious limits, then robots can only be so smart,
and certain jobs will always remain the territory of humans.
(I have a feeling that our real future with robots will end up
with different classes being built--most robots will be about as
intelligent as mice, or not even that smart, so they can handle
jobs that are dangerous or tedious, but will have the basic
creative problem-solving abilities that will let them deal with
unusual situations pretty well--an industrial accident that
doesn't kill anyone because all the workers are robots is a
good thing, but if the robots are too stupid to get out of the
burning factory, and you lose 500 million credits worth of
robots, it is a very bad thing. Other robots may be true AIs,
as smart as we are, and they will be given rights, etc. The
other option, for a Traveller-like civilization, one that has
had time to go through the growing pains of robotic influences
on society, might be to outlaw the creation of robots that can
totally replace humans, as this is a technology that creates
some pretty serious strains on society. By the time of
Traveller, people would have developed robots that are very
smart, smarter than people even, if it is possible to do it,
and we would have learned what having a new race of sophont
beings does to our society. We might also end up as a race
of "gods"--human beings would control enormous armies of
robots, which can be programmed for loyalty no matter how
smart they are (and "police" robots can take care of any
robots with bad programming) who would do all the things
that people do now. Or the robots will just kill us off
as part of the "natural evolution from carbon-water life
to silicon life.")
Enjoy.