I have a character that through long convoluted devious channels (treachery)
earned herself a custom built starship. She wanted something good enough
to withstand any normal-ship (escorts and down) attack, and extreme endurance
(she wanted to jump out into deep space and stay there for a while for personal
survival reasons...). It also had to be single-crew operable...
The solution was a heavily redundant 600 ton 'Special Lab Ship' [neat cover name
with addl. background that she's a scientist helping...]. It had 3 model
6/fib computers (note the intrinsic redundancy in each system...) and ECP
and such...and each of the main computers was paired with a Best-At-TL15
robot brain, with Pilot, Nav, Engineering, etc. out the ears. My justification
was that the robots were going to be smart enough to handle the piloting tasks,
and each robot had enough talent to handle it all alone...
But this has it's problems. First, if something breaks that the maintenance bot
can't replace, you've only got one person to help with it. If the robots
encounter a totally out-of-ordinary situation, at TL15 they're not really
creative enough to solve it well. Etc. One of the more lethal near-accidents
(lesson 1- if you run for the hills, stay there...) occured when a biological
agent that ate computer components got loose on another PC ship... had the GM
been particularly evil, and my char. unlucky, she would have been sitting dead
in space with an unmanagable pile of junk.
Summarizing:
Use Robots tied to computers as replacement for crew. It makes some sense in
most situations.
Be prepared to have difficulty handling out-of-the-ordinary situations if you
do. Robots aren't really bright at TL15.
- - -george william herbert
[email removed]