Culture Combat Drone

Universe: The Culture (novel series).

Description: Heavily armed and hyper-advanced robot the size of a baseball ball.

Requirements: N/A.

Powers/function: The militarized drones used by the Culture, though not uniformly equipped, usually have all of the following:

-Anti-Gravity: Used for flight. Drones can easily break the speed of sound using AG impulse.

-Coherent Radiation Emission Weapons System (CREWS): Energy beam of variable output (can be lowered enough to cauterize microwounds during brain surgery) and wavelength. By shifting the beam to the invisible wavelengths of the spectrum (xaser and maser), the weapon fire becomes invisible to the unaided eye.

-Electromagnetic Effector: A powerful tool that is both a highly advanced sensor package (capable of identifying the chemical composition of drugs in somebody else's organism) and a sophisticated weapon. An effector can be used to remotely hack into computer systems, even sentient ones, or to disable the internal mechanisms of machinery with focused EM pulses (which can be made powerful enough to outright destroy the attacked mechanisms), as well as mess with the neural activity of living beings to induce unconsciousness or paralysis (it can also be used to read and alter thoughts, but non consensual mental violation is taboo to almost all Culture AIs, including combat drones).

-Forcefields: All Culture combat drones have an autoshield that protects them from attack which is generally capable of withstanding anything less powerful than a small nuke. Moreover, the drones can generate forcefields of variable characteristics to use as manipulators, ranging from cutting forcefields that can be used as scalpels (or to cut somebody in half) to bubble fields raised to protect others. They can even make mirror-like forcefields capable of reflecting weak energy attacks back to their source.

-Knife Missile: Semi-autonomous drones about as smart as a very clever dog, roughly one centimeter in length, which can fly and attack the enemy on their own, generally using cutting forcefields to do so (hence their name). A standard militarized drone appears to carry three knife-missiles.

-Soligram Projection: Drones can alter their outward appeareance putting holograms around themselves that gain an appeareance of solidity thanks to forcefield and density manipulation. It is unknown if they can mimic smell, but otherwise the mimicry is reportedly perfect down to functional sexual anatomy when they cover themselves with a human soligram.

Disadvantages: N/A.

Comments: Following the re-organization of lists, this probably should be sent to the character list and/or removed and replaced with one of the named drones like Skaffen.

Relevant links:
http://rumblers-league.wikidot.com/culture-combat-drone-quotes

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