[Kilgs]

A thousand poxes on the Bundle of Holding as I've gone down the Rabbit Hole with SR5...

I know the answer to this is simple but I can't find it:

>A drone can be operated by Remote Control, Rigger Control (jump-in), or through an Autopilot program.
>A rigger can slave a number of drones through their RCC. This is Remote Control.
>A Remote Controlled drone defaults to a Device Rating(x2) being faced with a difficult command.
>Autosofts can boost activities.
>A Pilot (specific Drone) type Autosoft can replace the default Piloting skill...
>Electronic Warfare/Targeting are for offensive actions (weapons/EW) or defense (EW).

So my questions are...
?If a drone does not have any Autosofts loaded... what can it do? Does it have a Pilot program? What is the rating?
?As above, what is the default for a gun-drone to shoot or utilize EW when it has no autosofts?
?Due to the PAN/WAN, it would seem that defensive rolls are based on the RCC stats... but what about the others?

[Michael Chandra]

- The Drone stat-tables all include the Pilot rating of all drones
- A Drone does NOT have a default Piloting skill, it needs software for everything
- Every roll a Drone normally does, is <Autosoft-rating>+Pilot-rating, unless the Swarm Autosoft gets involved
- There are restrictions on how high an Autosoft can be, which streamed Autosofts can override

[Kilgs]

Ahh... I think the Pilot Rating v. Pilot skill was throwing me off. I knew it was right in front of me...

So a fresh-from-factory drone requires Autosofts for everything you want it do autonomously (not jumped in).

[Michael Chandra]

It's going to be extremely shitty at any test done without a skill Autosoft, yes. (Assuming it can even default, slips my mind if they can.)

[BeCareful]

To give an example, I bought a tiny little Kanmushi to crawl up to high windows, or to look around corners, or to watch my back while on my shoulder or something. I don't have a control rig, so I'll need to do the Matrix Action: Control Device if I want it to specifically look for something or break line of sight. Say I bought the best autosofts it can handle: it has Clearsight 3 and Stealth 3 which gives it a total of 6 dice to Perception & Sneaking. Being a microdrone, it'll probably give -3 to Perception to notice it.
Then I crit glitch its Stealth or something, someone steps on it, and that's 4k nuyen down the drain. Ah well. If I wanted it to be able to do complex maneuvers or flee some determined janitor with a flyswatter, I'd have bought the Pilot Walker (not aircraft) autosoft for it. You never know when microdrone races will be important.
(Edits: the kanmushi can't fly. For some reason I thought it could)

[kainite311]

You need Pilot (usually comes stock with drone, can be upgraded per Rigger 5 book)
With just pilot, it rolls pilot level as default for everything (so, yeah, pretty crappy)
Autosofts give it the skill side, so now you roll pilot + autosoft (manuevering, targeting, stealth, evasion... whatever you have loaded) and are model specific
Core Book says you can run pilot/2 number of autosofts at once (you can have more slotted, but takes an action for drone to swap)
Rigger book says they can only run an autosoft equal or lower level then pilot rating

Now this changes a bit with RCC - they can now run as many as you allocated from data sharing (but cannot combo with internal ones on drones)
Running thru RCC, same model drone can "share" a single version of the autosoft (I.E. 4 Steel Lynx can all share a single copy of an autosoft, so say you had one manuevering autosoft for steel lynx, then all  can use that 1 copy and it only takes up 1 of the shared slots...)
RCC also lets you use higher level autosoft then pilot rating (so pilot 3 can now use Targeting autosoft level 6)


That's pretty much the basics for autosofts and pilot rating. Now have fun figuring out what to roll for AR/VR and jumped in opinions will vary... good luck chummer!