From:	Marc A Renouf <jormung@*****.UMICH.EDU>
Subject:	Re: vehicle combat question
Date:	Fri, 15 Sep 1995 14:35:28 -0400

On Fri, 15 Sep 1995, Jani Fikouras wrote:

[concerning direct rigger control of a turret-fired weapon]

> Well he still needs to pay pne action per remote turret to keep the
> turret going. The rest of the riggers actions can be expended to shoot
> with the turret.

Aaaaaarrrrgh! No, he doesn't. A turret is *not* a vehicle. A
turret is *not* a drone. It is treated as such *only* for purposes of how
many a rigger can control.
Think of it this way: the turret isn't going anywhere, right?
It's just swivelling and elevating to bring the target into the weapon's
line-of-fire. It's directly analogous to a person shooting a firearm.
You just point and shoot. You don't need to spend an action controlling
your arm, you just do it. It's the same with a turret.
The reason a *moving vehicle* requires an action spent on control
is that FASA (rightly) assumes that you need to pay at least a modicum of
attention to where you are going so you don't crash into stuff. You can
even go without spending the action to control the vehicle, but at the
end of your last action, you need to make a crash test. If you pass it,
you're golden. You just scammed yourself an extra action. If you fail,
you wipe.
Now apply this to a turret. If you don't spend an action to
control your turret, it would just have to make a crash test. But what
is a turret going to crash into? Hence, the rigger does *not* spend an
action to control a turret.

> I have a question of my own now. What is the quickness rating of
> a drone ? I mean how much distance can a drone cover in a combat
> round/complex action.

Drones are exactly like vehicles in that they have a listed
speed. The numbers given are for cruise/maximum speed respectively and
they are given in meters per combat turn. As far as how much a drone can
cover in a single complex action, I would merely divide the speed of the
drone by the number of actions the drone got. This is really only
important when dealing with environments where the drone needs to get to
a certain destination (say a doorway) before someone else's next action
(say before the goon closes the door). Otherwise, it usually doesn't matter.

Marc