 April 17, 2010 - 6:08pm | I suppose if I could some up the main source of my unhappiness with robots in SF, it is that form does not follow function. Many of the security and combat bots are anthropomorphic. They look cool in pictures but are not very practical. There are a slew of images out there of currently used or developed robots look nothing like C3PO or a Cylon. I’ll see if I can’t figure out how to share some images. |
 April 17, 2010 - 6:55pm | Your evauluation is true enough but in the future it may be that asthetics and other values drive robot design for the sake of the comfort of biological units. None the less... Heres a scratch built job I did he's mounted on a 1.5 inch fender washer for a base. Body is not glued in, it rotates 360 and is removable (I planned for swap out bodies to change the robot's configuration but moved on to other projects) The head is actually 2 shoulder pads/armor bits from some Warhammer 40K space marines glued together as a cone- kind of has a retro 50's ish look. one of my favorite miniatures.   I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
April 17, 2010 - 7:43pm | Nice. Would that be an anthropomorphic dral robot? I have wondered how the dral would represent themselves robotically. |
April 17, 2010 - 8:11pm | Nice. Would that be an anthropomorphic dral robot? I have wondered how the dral would represent themselves robotically. Yes that was left un-answered in the rules Purhaps they developed a system of small little chambers/sacks that could be pumped to higher pressure with a robotic brain to control the whole scheme it could minic the look and feel of a dral but without the flexibility of the dral. EDIT: maybe what's needed is a none humanoid shaped body and none heavy duty body for more creativity As it is if you want a SF robot that doesn't look humanoid then it has to be a heavy duty robot. Take the tracked chassis In my pics. It would make a good alternative robot body without being heavy duty I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
April 18, 2010 - 6:11am | I thought that the "standard" robot body did not have to be human shaped, it was just human sized. (Apparently nano-tech was not well known or conceived in the 80's. I personally like the the small droids like on farscape for instance.) I aways assume vrusks had robots in their own likeness. I also assumed that generic 'human shaped' robots would pass as yazirian robots as well. It would take a higher level of detail to distinguish them. Thus the cheaper, general purpose bots would be indistinguishable between the two races. I wondered last week what an edestekai or an ul-mor bot may look like if they ever reached that level of technology. |
 August 24, 2016 - 4:55pm | I thought that the "standard" robot body did not have to be human shaped, it was just human sized. (Apparently nano-tech was not well known or conceived in the 80's. I personally like the the small droids like on farscape for instance.) I aways assume vrusks had robots in their own likeness. I also assumed that generic 'human shaped' robots would pass as yazirian robots as well. It would take a higher level of detail to distinguish them. Thus the cheaper, general purpose bots would be indistinguishable between the two races. I wondered last week what an edestekai or an ul-mor bot may look like if they ever reached that level of technology. Yes, I did not try to tap into nano technology though I did include some smaller robot sizes, plus the light body style had already been introduced in a Frontier Explorer magazine by the time I wrote my story. Joe Cabadas |
