R&D, in it's ongoing mission to make troubleshooters more efficient and... well, honest, has released what might one day be the replacement for the Recording Officer in the field, the Record-Bot. The Record-Bot (1.1) follows a simple premise, if the troubleshooters don't have to have a Recording Officer, then they have one more team-member who can perform a different role and back up the rest of the team without worrying about pesky camera and audio equipment. While this may seem surprisingly astute and simple... early tests with video-bots showed that the bots tended to be fragile in the field.

Part 1: Straight and Simple
The recorder-bot 1.1 is very simple. It stands about 1 meter high (3 feet) and has a small camera mounted in a protective dome atop a 3 wheeled robot body with external microphones. The camera focuses on any motion as the bot follows behind the team. In theory, the bot should record most of the action going on by simply zooming in and out on areas of motion. The camera can spin 360 degrees and the bot is very mobile on it's tires, with a zero turn radius and the ability to right itself if it tips over by using the front tire, which can extend and rotates up and down. The equipment is fairly rugged and shock-mounted.

Part 2: No brain, no pain
The first problem troubleshooters may note is the sheer simplicity of the bot. It has no real brain, only a simple command chip. This means it is impervious to every sort of influence short of physical mechanical manipulation or intense field generation. It cannot be bribed, cajoled, convinced or threatened. It has no love or hate for the troubleshooters and will do nothing to help or hinder them. This means that whatever it captures on its internal tapes will remain there until it returns to R&D or is destroyed... options the troubleshooters will likely not have to consider very long.

Part 3: The inevitable...
Once the troubleshooters realize that the bot has them in a tight spot, they will rapidly eliminate options until they realize that the thing must be put out of their collective misery. Now, the bot is a yellow level item, probably above any team members, so simply touching it is treasonous. It is also valuable Computer property, so damaging it is more so. Regardless, they will do both. The bot will do nothing to stop them, it will simply record their actions until its no longer functional. It will take a single player several round to blast/pry/yank the bot open, unless he/she has some appropriate skill or a heavy-duty weapon of yellow level or better.

Part 4: Bot? What bot?
The real fun comes when R&D asks for their bot back. There are a number of ways this can play out, but the most fun is to convince the players that the bot would attempt to transmit the video records back to R&D whenever it's damaged. Whether this is true or not is purely up to the GM, but rarely becomes necessary as the troubleshooters begin pointing fingers.