Office Hours, Monday, 11/10

[tyler_gone]

Sir Tyler of Narnia -- and yes, he was totally that in his head today -- was at his desk, physically going through the motions of preparing for class this week. Mentally, he was in a different world.

Somehow he, the guy who wanted to blow up cities, had become sworn to protect the powerless. Being trusted with something like that ... it was cheesy. But it mattered.

Life took odd turns. And that was without considering ... whatever the hell was going on with Tony or with Parker.

He was glad he'd gone to the wedding.

Comments

[the_merriest]

Rikku was going to pop her head around the door and hope she wasn't pestering Tyler.

"Hiya!" she said. "Can I bug you? It's just science-fair stuff."

[tyler_gone]

"Anytime," Tyler said, looking up. "I can't guarantee I'll have a good answer, but anytime. Hi, Rikku."

[the_merriest]

"Hey," she said, plopping herself down on a chair and pulling out a few pages of scribbles and scrawled notes. "I have ideas, it's just getting them in any kind of order that's messing me up. And I'm not sure -- like, do I need to demonstrate that it works, mock up a couple of patrol droids, show them off, or just show the blueprints and explain what I want them to do? And do you know if the trooper station is open all night?"

Amazingly, this last point was on-topic.

[tyler_gone]

"I'd like to see at least a working miniature," Tyler said. "Anybody can draw pretty pictures. I can draw pretty pictures all night." Also, he wasn't great at reading blueprints. "And I don't know about the station. I hope so but I don't know."

[the_merriest]

"Oh, I mean, I could have a working droid," she said. "I just can't do the whole system necessarily, like, okay, it's programmed on this path, and the others are over there, all coordinating in."

She pulled out another sheet. Not even a proper blueprint, just some of her personal chicken scratch. "I was thinking about what you said. About how ... if droids are able to attack, then bystanders might get hurt. Kids who can't read, or animals, or whatever. So I kinda tweaked the idea, some."

[tyler_gone]

"Don't even try to do the whole system," Tyler told her. "A working model and plans, and a report on how you want it to work. That's fine."

He leaned over her notes. "What did you tweak?"

[the_merriest]

"The patrol bots aren't going to attack," she explained, circling bits of the design with her finger. "They'll have a camera attached and constant video footage. They'll divvy up the island with separate paths, and they'll have GPS trackers. There will be a spot somewhere with one monitor per droid, and a quick map of where each droid is. They'll send out a minor alarm when something in their range signals violence: just enough that whoever's nearby can peek at the monitors and see what's up, not enough to worry anybody if it's just two squirrels getting into a fight. If the trooper station has someone around all hours, then they can peek at the monitors whenever something there beeps. If it's nothing, they hit a button and let the droid know to go back to patrolling. If it's not nothing, then we've got a good look at it and we know exactly where it is, and who needs back-up in a big hurry."

[tyler_gone]

Tyler raised an eyebrow. This was good work. "Talk to Constable Fraser," he recommended. "See what they have doing this now. You know the dorms are bugged, I don't know about the rest of the island. But this is a really excellent idea."

[the_merriest]

"Thanks," she said, blushing. "Something Reno suggested -- remote-access control for the droids? We could put weapons onto the droids, so long as they're only accessible to whoever is at the troopers' station. That way they won't attack someone who's just tripped an alarm by accident, but the troopers could step in if they had to, with a weapon handy right there. But I haven't added that to the schematics yet because I'm not sure how to make it tamper-proof. And I'm still not sure how to have the droids detect violence, exactly. I'm working on that. So it's ... really not finished? But it's a start, yeah?"

She thought for a couple of seconds. "Do you know when Constable Fraser has office hours?" she asked. "I'm still kinda shocked that I went for an alarm system and not a huge gun. I could have totally gotten away with designing a huge gun, for class."

[tyler_gone]

"It's a really good start," Tyler reassured her. "Violence detector would have to be some kind of sophisticated motion detector. And sorry, I don't track Fraser's schedule. You could give him a call and ask."

He flashed a grin. "You could still ditch this and do the gun instead."

[the_merriest]

"Yeah," she said, nodding. "Not just motion, you'd need some kind of ... way of tracking kinetic energy. Like. Forces and impacts. There would have to be a way to do it, I'm just not sure how."

She laughed. "Nah, I can make a gun any time. I add flamestrike and stuff like that while I'm at work, you know? This is ... different. It's neat. I like it."

[tyler_gone]

"Well, if you wait for there to be impacts you might be pretty far into the fight before the droids kicked in," Tyler said, getting drawn into this. "You'd need chemical sniffers too, to look for bombs."

"What's flamestrike?"