Heh.
Anyway though, couldn't we also emulate an crewless ship via saying the entirety of the systems are remote controlled at a base or ship, in system?
This would allow a couple of neat concepts:

-The "controller" component of the vessel would be roughly the same tonnage as the crew spaces of your ship if you set the intended deployment time to 0.1.
-Crew grade, and task force training of the ship in particular are capped to very low values, allowing slight improvements via tech research. The starting tech for crew grade would appropriately start off being worse than conscript crew, I figure. -40%? Also, the caps should be strict enough that even max-level tech cannot outmatch onboard human potential effectiveness.
-Morale of the ship would be dependent on morale of the controller-crew, but if they're stationed at a colony of sufficient size their morale stays at maximum. Controller crew must be in the same system as the controlled ship for it to work, though.
-Boarding marines cannot pilot the ship effectively (without technology?), but they can "disable" the ship from the inside. They won't have to roll attacks against anything in particular, but breaking a ship from the inside when it's not made for crew and is potentially boobytrapped means they probably should be taking damage close to how much damage they deal to the ship itself. If the ship is not completely destroyed, control is given to the seizing empire, and the ship's engines, weapons systems, etc are rendered completely inoperable, without chance of damage control repair. If you manage to haul it to a shipyard via tug, and repair it, you can consider it effectively "hacked" and now your empire can use it per normal.
-Damage control speed, and the effectiveness of maintenance space on maint life receives a significant percentage penalty. Freight loading and unloading speed is also diminished, and receives even further diminished bonuses from loading systems and spaceports.
-Hangars on crewless vessels require 30 minutes to dock or undock a ship. Possibly improvable via tech?
-Crewless vessels have similar sensor contact info to precursor vessels.
-Crewless vessels are affected twice as badly by ECM, and cannot use ECM.
-Microwaves can hit the crewless vessel's control module, but rather than frying instantly, it deals damage in the form of cutting the vessel's crew grade further. If it hits -100%, the module is destroyed, the vessel becomes inoperable and immobile, requiring a tug and shipyard repairs to fix.
-Crewless vessels can have life support for survivors and the like, and if the survivors rescued by the vessel break the life support, the vessel continues to function.
-Destroyed crewless vessels leave behind no survivors, and have no traces of usable intel about their parent empire (not even the species) besides the raw technologies of the components detectable onboard. Nothing to be interrogated or dissected.
-Crewless vessels receive a % decrease to it's total size, as the many systems onboard do not need any degree of human in-flight accessibility to operate. Could be improvable by tech, where 5% is the base tech for it.
-Usage of crewless vessels, at all, would probably be a "theory gated" technology rather than available at the start, similar to gravity stealth tech.

Just a handful of ideas I'm throwing out here. The "remote controlled vessel" model allows us to implement a handful of fancy things without having to pick through the territory of "muh rogue AI"

I've seen Star Trek.  Any kind of fancy computer always goes mad and tries to kill the crew.  Always.

More seriously, I suspect that to create a computer capable of controlling a large warship you'd need to have some sort of limited AI/learning capacity.  I agree that if you're just automating sub-systems while leaving a human crew to make decisions, then that's different.

I'd imagine that they could see use on ships such as freighters and the like. Though it would be worrisome to have your 72,000 ton freighter accidentally turn into a KKV due to some glitches, though, if anything, human error would probably be more worrisome in this regard in the long run anyway.

Of course there would need to be a non-trivial chance of the AI going rouge (its pretty much the most enduring meme in the whole of sf).  Maybe every 30 days a % chance of the ship becoming an NPR, same behavior code as the spoilers? The chance could depend on tech level, and how much of the crew is replaced.  So you could, say, safely replace 25% of the crew, replace 50% at a small risk but have a high chance of a fully automated ship turning against you.

Except for something like ship navigation you dont need a conscious AI.  Thats overkill.  And a non conscious AI is no different than AI in modern gaming (cant betray unless told to)

I wouldn't mind this if only because it would allow me to make my cargo containers unmanned.

Not sure high maintainance would be the way to go, as it would remove the advantage of using it for long-deployment vessels. I think costs and some kind of fleet training rating limitations (so that a crack crew would beat an AI) could be nice. Although I'm not sure how to manage fleet rating for partially automated vessels. They should also be sensitive to microwaves.

Well, I could see it in if the cost was high enouh that it wouldn't be worth it except for ships that have to stay a very longtime on station, or for RP reason when designing suicide ships.

I figured Steve would flesh out all those little things I don't know about.  But sure.  I've edited the main posted to address this.

It can be a spoiler tech, which you had to recover.   But I am not sure how crew less ships will be handled by the boarding and prisoner mechanics. 

As one of the included computer controlled races is a machine race this might be something fun to include that can be unlocked only through salvaging their wrecks or finding something in a ruin. 

I just don't like the idea of it being back-shelved to a tech you might eventually get, maybe.   I hope what I'm proposing isn't too difficult of a change, code-wise, because it makes just too much sense for this to be a late-tech, and should be a standard path humans could follow.   We do it already today in this age, and it's all too apparent we will need more and more unmanned vessels and command as space exploration continues. 


Thanks for your responses!