[Snail]

They were drones in FreeSpace 1.

[griffon67]

Maybe developers in the freespace universe didn't manage to get intelligent drones
that could be a reason. Imagine you're chasing a drone and then, the drone does something fancy cause he doesn't know what to do.
A good example IRL is freespace itself : just look at how the AI react even on maximum difficulty. We can't put that type of AI into a fighter, a human is far more intelligent.
But if we had correct AI and good implementation inside fighters, why couldn't we use them ?

[ShadowGorrath]

Because no AI can beat human creativity. And AI doesn't have a feel of survival. In other words- AI pilots would be kinda like FreeSpace. But people have emotions and etc. - they can come up with something an AI wouldn't.

[Droid803]

Like...blind rage?

[ShadowGorrath]

Or like that . . .

Your drone fighters might be better than piloted ones, but after all- it's not the equipment, it's how you use it. And pilots can use it better than AI, because they have emotions/feelings, unlike AI, that'd do everything according their calculations.

[Droid803]

AI and living humans both have advantages and disadvatages, so really, its quite balanced. Its easy for a human to shoot down a lot of drones because they're not creative. However, a human can be overwhelmed by stress or shocking experiences whereas AI is more or less stable.

But yeah, the most likely reason they don't send in waves of drones is because they can be hacked.

[Spicious]

Thank you all for your input of "they can be hacked" without any suggestion of how that might happen.

Also, the assumption that AI technology would be the same as it is in games today (or ten years ago) is pretty absurd.

[Droid803]

But but...those Amazons suck at dogfighting!

[CaptJosh]

They're training drones, just meant to give a rookie a feel for things. It's not like they're full combat AI. But I can give you another reason we don't use AI pilots. Mass. When you get right down to it, there's just nothing as efficient as a human brain for computational ability vs mass of the computer. And most of the computations are done without conscious thought. That's why an outfielder can do what they do to catch a high fly. They're doing trajectory calculations in their head without even knowing it to put them in the right place at the right time to catch a ball.

[S-99]

Whatever the answer is, Drones weren't used in FreeSpace in any known combat situation, so there was probably a very important reason like, "they can be hacked"

I in no way implied there were drones in fs aside from the training POS's. The fact that they could be hacked is still pretty non-elborated upon. Is it easy to hack them? Or is it hard to hack them? I would imagine hard because drones are pretty complicated and advanced technology even so today. The other thing is in which situation would they be vulnerable to hacking? Can they only be hacked locally or over a great distance? Could you hack into a drone in midflight if you had the right technology as the enemy on the ground? Or is the only time a drone can be hacked when it's just on the ground put away until next sorty?

The thing that sucks about the fs universe is that we don't get to know too much about it because of where V left off with it and what else they didn't build upon the fs universe. Perhaps in really far away backwater systems where there's fighters and not enough pilots. That those people may use drones. But, i highly doubt it, it's in no way fs likeness or style.

[jr2]

Mmph, as far as EMP blasts go, Faraday cages help... but not so much, because you have to have a point where EMP can get in because you have to have a point where electricity / data / communications can be exchanged, and that is the weak point in the Faraday cage.  I'm sure there are ways to sort of "surge protect" that gateway, not sure.  Try reading here (Global Security) or here (Wikipedia).

[Kie99]

You'd have to make the AI harder or more expensive to hack than it would be to bribe or subvert a human pilot, when you consider how many rebels there were in the NTF, that wouldn't be so difficult.

[MarkN]

That may be another reason for not using drones. If you subvert a pilot, that pilot will defect. If you subvert an AI programmer, then any drone AI he designs will have some sort of back-door. Hacking on it's own in not a threat (no combat drone would execute remotely supplied code as that is far too much of a vulnerability), but if the programmer of the target-identification code was subverted, for instance, then a small peice of could could be inserted which would result in a particularly programmed IFF transmitter being identified as freindly, no matter what orders are given to the drone, or even worse a particular IFF coding would be identified as hostile no matter the orders received.
Giving orders is another reason for having a human pilot instead of a computer, as historically it has been known for an enemy to try to send military units false orders. The most extreme case of this in real life is during the second world war, when British bombers would transmit on German night-fighter frequencies, with false direction instructions, popular radio shows, and even bits of Hitlers speeches, and this often resulted in the night-fighter pilot losing the bombers. A human brain, being adaptable to a very wide variety of situations is actually quite capable of coping with this and similar tricks, but an AI, programmed specifically for a job wouldn't be able to cope unless it had near-human intelligence in all fields.
The ideal use of an AI is a simple mission in which all of the parameters are pre-defined before launch. Today it is a cruise missile which will follow the terrain to it's target and then explode. In the future it will be a bomber which will fly a complex route avoiding enemy fire (and even suppressing it), attack it's target, and then return to base where it will recieve new mission parameters in a controlled environment.
In Freespace AIs would be ideal for flying the Boarnerges or Ursa, and least suited to flexible, multirole fighters such as the Myrmidon.

[ShadowGorrath]

The heavy bombers are expensive ( the Ursa is at least ), so I doubt Command would make them AI piloted, as they wouldn't want to loose them.

[griffon67]

AI piloted things aren't less skilled than piloted ones. They have less creativity but higher precision, faster and all things that makes computers better than human in many domains. (NO I'm not heretic.....)
See the yukikaze anime for examples of what I mean.

[ShadowGorrath]

Or Animatrix. . .

But people piloted craft is still more effective.

[Spicious]

Again, please stop using fiction as your evidence of AI performance.

Also, please refer to cryptography/network security, specifically to the parts about ensuring you're whoever you say you are.

[General Battuta]

AI piloted things aren't less skilled than piloted ones. They have less creativity but higher precision, faster and all things that makes computers better than human in many domains. (NO I'm not heretic.....)
See the yukikaze anime for examples of what I mean.

Yeah, I agree with spicious. Why are we all going on about 'AI is this way', 'AI performs according to these parameters'? How do we have any idea? No true AI has ever been developed.

I just want to point out, again, that drone aircraft are in common use today -- receiving signals from remote pilots as well as performing certain functions on their own. There does not seem to be a major problem with hacking, so far.

[BengalTiger]

Make this stuff complex enough and the discussion about computer based AI might become totally pointless.

[castor]

I just want to point out, again, that drone aircraft are in common use today -- receiving signals from remote pilots as well as performing certain functions on their own. There does not seem to be a major problem with hacking, so far.

Maybe drones aren't interesting enough? That might change if you'd load them with nukes, or anything with substantial destructive capacity.