Hard Targets isn't a book I worked on, so I didn't know about 'em until it was published. I couldnlt add things in that I didn't know about! They seem pretty solid, but the reloading drone steps on my intending to not have an Armorer Skillsoft. Not *entirely* since it doesn't actually build things, but.
Ah, that solves another question - if armorer is included in the mechanics catch all for autosofts.
May I ask why you don't want that? It seems rather to be one of the jobs a drone could excel if provided with the right plans.
Wait, Wakshaani, so you're ok with a drone helping to build and repair structures (industrial mechanic), cars and motorcycles (automotive mechanic), and even aircraft and spacecraft (aeronautic and aerospace mechanic, respectively), but guns are too much? How does that make any sense?
A couple of reasons. Armorer work can be *fast*.. switching out clips (magaziiiiiiiines), building bullets (Well, not that we have 'make your own ammo' rules, but, try to future-proof!), or building crude weapons (bats w/nails, etc) vs replacing a transmission or assembling a ship over the corse of a few weeks with a cadre of other drones ... it suddenly creates a financial option for 'runners outside of, well, 'running. See also "Why don't I just mug deckers for a living?" and the same. Trying to get around that was one thing.
Another was related to construction and trust. INdustrial-scale robots rae normal ... they make cars all the time so letting a drone work on your car feels normal. Despite the fact that guns are assembly-line things, people still have a gut feeling of craftsmanship to them and they, like armor, are things that people who use them upkeep, personally, *all* the *time*, without really trusting others. Much as a parachutist always packs his own gear, so to do gun bunnies always clean and prep their own guns and test their own armor... trusting some drone with your gun being clean and not jamming/misfiring or to have your ballistic-ceramic plates loaded in your vest is a life-death call and one that people just don't *trust* a 'bot to handle.
Which brings up the last one ... in teh fluff, you'll note that people have a bit of a trust gap in terms of drones. Crash 2.0 and the Technomancer Scares made people wary of a few things, and giving drones guns, or the ability to make/upgrade them, is just something people are *very* wiggy about. You might notice the lack of any programming Autosofts? Same thing. Letting the machines program themselves, and create programs, can lead to Very Bad Places.
So, the corps keep the machines away from creating guns or programming, despite the efficiency advantage that it'd offer.
So, in the end, it's a cultural thing, with a touch of gamey-ness behind it. There's no reason it *shouldn't* be something that they could do, and it's hardly game-breaking, but, sometimes you want to go a different direction. This was one of those times. While you can simply create it for your home game (The Skillset Autosoft is a dead-simple mechanic to copy), it's a bit more fun to add a bit of prejudice to the game (Because, you know, we don't have enough racism) ... have the armorer at a Lone Star precinct house snort about "Trusting some damn bot" to keep a bulletproof vest up to par, or make sure that most security drones are non-lethal sporting types, with people getting freaked out if a drone with a *real* gun walks in, even if it's just some hold-out pistol instead of a taser.
(And yes, there are obvious logic hoels in there. Drones dropping industrial-level weights onto heads, slipping poison into food, etc, but, the gross view is always one that gets seen before the subtle. Heck, even the drones section talks about people forgetting that cars are, really, drones themselves and *vastly* more dangerous!)
Hopefully, this makes sense.
