Editing FederalSpace:Technology (section)

==== Computers and Robots ====

As mentioned, sapience is restricted—volitional AI requires a dedicated neural net—but a sapient computer can be as smart as any mortal, and probably can access its databases far more quickly and more reliably than human memory. 

A quick rules check: a tiny computer can run a single high-quality translator program, which is nicely convenient. The ability to run several languages at once requires a bigger unit, though. 

I won't be using microbot swarms, and definitely not nanobots… but note that many functions could be handled with larger robots. I don't mind bigger, visible drones roaming around; it's nice color. 

I have to cheat just a little when it comes to the efficacy of unmanned probes. I assume that, somewhere, there are scout ships with lots of probes, dutifully charting all the uninhabited rocks of the galaxy. But this is boring, so we focus on those wonderful times that the explorers discover a world with a population. Intelligence is not duplicable in this setting, so we can't simply send a cheap AI probe, THS-style—and if the people have technology (and why wouldn't they?), they'll pick up our telemetry signals if we try remote control—and in any case, we gotta send down people eventually to say, "Hi."