Re Brad Vender's questions on robotic brains running the gunnery
stations on starships:
I often include robotic gunnery controllers in private ship designs, but I
also include normal control panels for a human operator's use. Robotic brains
do occasionally malfunction, you know, and somehow they always seem to wedge
just before a couple of pirate type T's emerge from the sensor-shadow of a
nearby moonlet. (If they didn't, the PC's could out-fight anything from the
Spinward Marches to the Solomani Rim, just by buying lots of levels of Ship
Tactics for their gunnery controllers and piling on the tactics-pool DM's.
This is bad.)
Also, if there are no control panels, it's impossible to calibrate the gunnery
program. I assume that the robots need to be "fitted" to the ship by having
dummy sensor input fed in from the ship's computer and recording the robot's
responses, then tweaking the program's parameters, similar to the way a human
gunner gets the "feel" of a new weapon by running drill tapes from the
computer's memory and letting it grade his performance.
Regarding semi-intelligent computers, _Starship Operator's Manual_ indicates
that all high-TL starship computers have some synaptic circuit elements and a
limited capacity for AI. This is done to increase productivity (e.g., the
watch officer, concerned about possible unrest among the middle passengers,
tells the computer to "alert me if anything unusual happens in the passenger
lounge area," and trusts the computer to come up with a sensible meaning of
"unusual" based on archived sensor data and programmed parameters of
acceptable passenger behavior).
Seth "the Lesser"
[email removed]