Dogs are pretty neat, and thanks to the changes in place in experimental involving pet carriers and storage, they’re a lot more useful. Still a bit weird and hard to manage, especially when they get into that close-dodge stupidity loop when you’re trying to sneak around a town in the dark, but workable.
Reading about some of the cool stuff DARPA has been doing for the army, though, gave me some ideas for improving that better.
First off, armor. It’d be nice if the thing you mount on your dog contributed armor and was visible on look. You could even make survivor dog armor that had storage and used k-9 harnesses as materials.
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Some variants would be neat; Both with storage (more encumbering) and without (less encumbering). Cloth, leather, scrap, Kevlar, and high tech stuff.
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Better version of the dog whistle for giving better commands like “don’t stand there getting stuck in a passive-agressive loop and follow me.”
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Doggy nightvision and IR goggles?
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For mid and late game, there could be variants that are as encumbering as the storage variants but don’t have storage, instead electing to place electronics packages on them.
That way, you could integrate lightweight-ified versions of vehicle remote controls and a pda tracking device, a radio, stuff like that. You wouldn’t be able to directly remotely control them, but you could remote into the dog and see what they’re up to, give them commands like ‘flee’ ‘attack target’ ‘go here’, and you could see their location on your map. -
Late game stuff you could do involving heavily modified power armor, enhancing their natural attacks, implanting them with cbms, mutations even? Mount a robot control with a gyroscope’d submachinegun. Lots of possibilities.
Even saw this recently, http://www.gizmag.com/dogstar-tailtalk-translator/39732/
Could enhance their intelligence with late-game CMBS and gps and stuff to tell them to path-find to a specific place even. Watch them do it or have the game offline simulate it and have them appear at the location after a set time calculated on the distance and threats in-between.
Edit: in the end goal, tl;dr, I guess it’d be a progressive enhancement of their usefulness over time, and late and super late game you’d either be turning them into a remote robotic cyberdog companion or mutating them into basically a dogboy from RIFTS pnp (and essentially making them a dog-themed npc companion)