Chapter 17, Page 9
Taken from ATUHM user manual:
[Unit Malfunction—Manual Operation Mode]
In the event of unit malfunction during manual operation, immediately activate the ISF (Instant Shutdown Failsafe) switch located directly above the operator’s control board. The ISF will terminate all base functions and the ATUHM will cease movement within 3 seconds. Manufacturer restart will be required following this procedure.
Danger Zone One. Story by Midnight. Art by Tanabata Usagi.
Why is warning/attraction shots are always fired in the air? Shoot them somewhere non-lethal, leg or hand or whatever… Wasters of bullets…
If there wasn’t someone inside, I’d agree but you probably got to worry about a ricochet potentially hitting the person inside the cockpit or someone nearby.
The kill switch needs to be one of those large knife switches of yore which completely opens the main electrical circuit. This smacks a bit of the flaw in fly-by-wire which has no backup mechanical linkage.
Yeah. And the wording “will terminate all base functions and the ATUHM will cease movement within 3 seconds” should have been an instant red flag to anyone with some idea of how this should work. And when buying tools, any business with some sense of good business should have people reading the documentation before buying: one person with some (preferrably as much as possible) knowledge of how it works, as well as at least one of those who are going to use it (can be the same person but it is good to have more than one person reading it if possible).
I’m amazed how incompetent the people in charge of businesses in this world appears to be (everyone supplying tech, everyone buying tech, i.e. absolutely everyone). Is every single business too large to know what they’re doing, with absolutely no competition? One of the upsides of capitalism (quite possibly the root of any and all such upsides) is that a competent business tends to capitalize on others incompetence very quickly. Only monopolies are exempt, in the case of a few large incumbents and really high barriers to entry it just takes a little longer until one of them acts on the opportunity. I wonder what makes the DZO world different in this regard.
Or maybe this world has somehow been purged of absolutely everyone with any technical knowledge. Then the only way to do a better job would be to hire a bunch of people with some inclination and set them to study and research until they’re getting somewhere – which would take at least four or five years, maybe a decade, since there is no one to teach them. Still, that is an obvious good business move in such a world, but maybe this is near to the end of such a five-year engineer-less period?
I get the impression that the world of DZO is primarily run by corrupt megacorps that just don’t care, especially when it comes to safety. Now that I think about it, it’s a common theme in cyberpunk fiction. Bubblegum Crisis had robots that went berserk all the time, but were still being manufactured by a massive, almost untouchable corporation. Robocop’s another prime example.
In the immortal words of Dick Jones “I had a guaranteed military sale with ED 209. Renovation program, spare parts for twenty-five years…Who cares if it worked or not?”
I think “corrupt megacorps” has been mentioned even in-comic, and just a few pages ago the extra info had a note alluding to their (at least Syren) being dangerously untouchable. Still, I thought there were multiple megacorps, and it should be pretty easy for any of them to steal massive amounts of marketshare by simply delivering something that actually works as intended. Maybe they’ve managed to make so much money that they don’t even care about making more?