Stealth and Chameleon systems, Perception and Teleoperation

[Crystalline_Entity]

I'm trying to get my head around Sense rolls when one participant is using teleoperated drones with camouflage systems. For example...

Alice is walking down a street carrying a MacGuffin in her hand to deliver to her boss, the criminal mastermind Antonio. Special Agent Bob has been ordered to photograph the MacGuffin using a drone so the boffins can try to determine what the MacGuffin is and try and find a way to counter it.

Special Agent Bob is five miles away, teleoperating a Scout Robot with the Aerial lens (Ultra-Tech 80). The Scout Robot has a multi-spectral chameleon surface (Ultra-Tech 99) to help camouflage it, it is currently set to an appropriate colour scheme for the sky. Bob succeeds on a Piloting (Vertol) roll (at -2 for teleoperation – this comes from Transhuman Space 144 but I can’t find anything more recent) and brings the drone to the street Alice is on.

Alice gets a hearing roll to try and hear the Scout Robot. She has Per 11, and no other relevant skills. The Scout Robot has neither Noisy nor Silence, so I assume it makes the same amount of noise as normal footsteps when it moves. This is about the same volume as a normal conversation, but the Scout Robot is hovering sixteen yards above the street, which according to the hearing table (Basic: Campaigns 358) gives a -4 to her roll. She rolls a success, so she hears something.

Alice then looks around to try and find the source of the noise. This should be a quick contest of Alice's Vision against the Scout Robot's Stealth skill.

Sixteen yards distance is a penalty of -6 due to distance (Basic: Campaigns 550), and the Scout Robot has SM -4. I believe the chameleon system means that there is no bonus for the Scout Robot being in plain sight, so even with Alice’s Per 11, she is rolling at -10. She gets a failure by 13.

The Scout Robot has no stealth skill, so it defaults to DX-5, but it gets +8 against normal and IR vision due to its chameleon system. Final skill is Stealth-13. Bob succeeds by 2.

Alice looks around suspiciously but can’t see anything, so she continues walking. Bob now needs to photograph the MacGuffin. The distance penalty is -6, the MacGuffin has SM of -4, however this time it is in plain sight, so +10, and the Scout Robot has Telescopic Vision 2, which gives a final bonus of +2. The Scout Robot has Per 10, and he succeeds in his roll by 1. He has Photography-12, and succeeds in that roll, photographing the MacGuffin. He pilots the Scout Robot away from Alice, as the photograph of the MacGuffin is transmitted to the boffins in the lab.


I’d like some feedback on a few things here:

1. Am I applying the “in plain sight” bonus correctly? Do camouflaged things not benefit from this?
2. Hearing rolls seem a little fuzzy to me. How do you deal with interference from other sounds? On a busy street it seems there should be some penalty to try and detect a quiet drone over the noise of the traffic, but I can’t see anything in the rules to cover this.
3. Are there any rules on teleoperation I’ve missed? Am I applying the rules correctly by using the Scout Robot’s statistics rather than Bob’s for stealth and Per?
4. Is my assumption that something with neither Noisy nor Silence makes the same amount of noise as a human would doing the equivalent task reasonable?