Ptah and Fritz88, are you still working on the Robot Design Sequence?
On a second note, I was thinking about what was wrong with LBB8 in the eyes of most people. And that was, IIRC:
1) Unnescery over-complexity (too many parameters, too many steps, little of which gets to a useful end result).
2) Too long URP (you could drop the number of appendages, head size, number of applications and a few other things you could easily get from the short dexcriptive paragpraph).
3) Bad locomotion/suspension rules (solved by Hyphen IIRC).
4) Large number of typos and ommissions (especially the TLs of several items; partially solved by the errata).
5) Components too big, heavy and expensive by RL-equivalent standards (quite easy to solve by creating a new table).
6) Brain design completely unrealistic, and thus unnerves players with IT background.
7) Robots are overly expensive, especially if you want to design something simple (such as the turrets seen in the Director's Cut version of
Aliens).
Robot configuration (other than contourted and pseudo-biological) could be ignored - no game effect that warrants the cost/weight. Either Weight or Volume could be ignored. The one ignored could then be guesstimated from the one not ignored (similar to the way you compute volume out of weight with Striker aircraft). The power plant could be combined with the Transmission system, with the (comparatively miniature) power requirements of non-energy-weapon, non-locomotion systems ignored; robots without energy weapons or locomotion would have a "basic power requirement" listed as a "stationary" in the locomotion table.
So my suggested design sequence (weight-limited) will be:
1) Choose Chassis Size (price/max weight, also determines volume)
2) Choose Armor (in absorbed damage dice, as in
my combat system)
3) Choose Locomotion (Wheels, Tracks, Legs, ACV, Rotor/Ducked-Fan, Jet, Grav)
4) Choose Energy Weapons (if any)
5) Drop in Power Plant (Battery, Fuel-Cell, Fusion or Internal Combustion) to satisfy the needs of the Locomotion and and Energy Weapons.
6) Add "components" (appendages, heads, non-energy weapons, sensors, devices); all have a Weight and a Price; Weight cannot exceed the Chassis' Max Weight.
7) Design the Brain (CPU+RAM+Storage? I'm at loss here, as IT science is a weak spot for me)
8) Add Software (start with OS (combine Logic and Command into a single program); then add applications).
