Aliens-like Synthentic?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by RyanW

He's also the only one that can pilot the reserve shuttle remotely, but whether that's "humans can't" or "these humans can't" isn't clear. Ripley had been certified to serve on a spaceship, but if I remember right was communications officer (and her license was revoked and possibly based on obsolete equipment). Nobody else still alive was likely to have had any sort of relevant training. It's very possible that Ferro could have done it if not for a severe case of being dead, but if you do something interesting with it, nothing seen on screen explicitly confirms or refutes "synthetics can remote pilot a shuttle from orbit to ground and humans can't."

While this could be used to justify giving synthetics that status, the actual quote was apparently "I'm the only one qualified to remote-pilot the ship anyway." Qualified implies it's a function of training (or perhaps programming for a synth), rather than something only a synth can do. And regardless of if Ripley were qualified to pilot a civilian spaceship, this was a high-performance military dropship, which is an entirely different beast. In GURPS terms, going off the relevant GURPS Wiki entry, Ripley may have had Piloting (Low-Performance Spaceship) for the Nostromo, while the dropship would have used Piloting (Vertol), which defaults from the former at -5. I'd imagine there's something like a -2 penalty for remote-piloting, so Ripley would have been at -7 relative to her own Piloting skill. "Qualified" implies effective skill of 12 or higher, and I highly doubt Ripley had Piloting at 19+ (or even the 17+ needed if there's no penalty for remote piloting).

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Ripley was a communications officer, so she likely didn't have much piloting skill (if any, and decades out-of-date), and everyone else that was still alive were Marine ground-pounders, their inexperienced Lieutenant, and a corporate representative. And a kid. Not likely to find any pilots among them.

Bishop seemed to have a very wide skill-set as the squad's synthetic, so that he could (and did) step in to fill in an important roll when they lost their existing specialist.

[Rolando]

if I recall correctly, synth in space marines platoons where support units, able to treat the soldiers and use technical equipment, the marines where not trained to pilot shuttles, the pilots did that (and the one they had died).

Synths are science officers, medics, techs, etc. So the marines can concentrate on the tactics and a** kicking. Those synths on the other hand can't use weapons of any kind.

they where the bug stompers, Bishop was doing some analysis to the alien life forms to understand them and destroy them, probably part of it's programming and purpose in the platoon.

Maybe the lieutenant or a communication specialist was able to handle the dish alignment but I doubt they would be able to remote piloting.

If you can tale a look at the old Aliens RPG for the Fuzion system, it is fan made, but it is very good, well researched, and Fuzion is easy to translate to GURPS.

[Willy]

I remember some old but canonic books in the alien universe, were the synths serve also as marines, seems that normal synths are encoded not to harms humans. Of course unless ordered so, or programmend in illegal ways. So a synth fighter may be also possible.

[Rolando]

at some point in the aliens crisis they made combat synths, some with acid resistant armor and very heavy weaponry. But at the time of the Aliens movie they were only support personnel.