 August 6, 2016 - 11:47am | Just took the girls to Museum of Science and saw the displays on the RoboBee and Robo Cheetah. Very cool stuff. Couldn't help but wonder about down the line what's next? (In other words if RoboBees are cutting edge today what would they have in the Frontier?) I'm envisioning 10 mm single purpose robots printed with a 3D printer and solar cell coating to supplement a battery and deployed in small swarms. Pollinating fields where normal pollinators have suffered colony collapse or on new colonies to ensure proper crop pollination. What about robo mosquitos with a drop of poison? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 August 6, 2016 - 11:54am | Robo mosquito would work... I think there was a robo little dragonfly in Lexx that was used to sabotage the security of the evil brain government executions. "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
August 6, 2016 - 12:19pm | Robo mosquitos would be programed to simply seek out and sting members of core four or only sting one specific species. To make them light there is no battery- they purely run on solar radiation and become dormant during darkness, though on a planet tidally locked to face the sun they would operate continuously. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 August 6, 2016 - 6:49pm | You need a whole different set of robo rules for those. Joe Cabadas |
August 7, 2016 - 10:39am | Might just treat them as tiny creatures or as a swarm of small or medium size. Sonic beam and flame weapon effective against them. Swarm has 1 robosquito for each point of stamina. Randomly assign 1d10 robosquito to each character, if there are more in swarm than the number that get assigned then attack continues next turn and again 1d10 robosquito per characters this will continue until all characters are down or all robosquito are destroyed. A character not holding any thing may swat as many equal to the number of hand to hand attacks he is allowed to make (1 attack per pair of arm and legs with dralasites having the potential to do more hand to hand attacks than anyone else). Procedure is simply a RS check for each attack and success means one robosquito destroyed. Other means of destroying them: fire and sonics (not sonic melee weapons). Smoke grenades force robosquito to the outer edge of the smoke effect. Each robosquito that is not swatted automatically attacks delivering their poison or sleep juice STA save to resist each round. Once a robosquito makes 1 attack it ceases to operate. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 August 20, 2016 - 10:44am | Don't forget the robot spy cockroach from Fifth Element. |
August 20, 2016 - 5:47pm | I did forget that one. Anyone else see Alan Rickman's last staring role in "Eye in the Sky" ? The military deployed a robotic bird that sat on a telephone pole with a camera in its head to watch the bad guys. There was also a robotic beetle that entered the house. Movie was presented as the anatomy of a real world drone strike operation. I've just not aware of these small robots being operational. Alan Rickman is fabulous in this movie BTW. Movie debuted after his death. Helen Miriam is good too. The contrast between the American British attitudes to the use of drones is interesting. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
