I have couple of questions.

1. Should CCTV cameras be available for Rogue Traders to install according to their availability? If yes in what quantities?

2. What is the chain of communication between Rogue Trader visiting for example a cave on a planet and his starship? What devices make that possible?

I believe that RT has a micro-bead which needs a vox caster somewhere nearby (how close?) to amplify the signal, which then gets to his starship? Am I right?

I have couple of questions.

1. Should CCTV cameras be available for Rogue Traders to install according to their availability? If yes in what quantities?

If it has no sound, I'd use the availability of a Micro-bead. If it has sound, then up the rarity by one. Quantities stay the same as in the core RT book.

2. What is the chain of communication between Rogue Trader visiting for example a cave on a planet and his starship? What devices make that possible?

Either an Astropath, or, as you mentioned below, a Vox-caster. Note that it probably can't go through an entire mountain to reach a ship.

I believe that RT has a micro-bead which needs a vox caster somewhere nearby (how close?) to amplify the signal, which then gets to his starship? Am I right?

Yes, you are correct. They could probably be synced together. Use rules for Micro-beads found in the core RT book on how close you have to be to reach the Vox-Caster. and then the rules for the Vox-caster to reach the starship. You already knew the answer to these questions though, didn't you? You sly little devil. You almost made be spill my plans for world domination. .....

Oops.

Assuming we're not talking about tiny near invisible varieties, variates that are invisible to scanners, varieties with complex cogitator tracking systems or preysense/dark sight etc I'd say they're pretty much ubiquitous on any technological Imperial planet or installation.

Remember the Imperium is a totalitarian police state in many ways especially on hive worlds there is no way the various factions and agencies are not going to be placing them everywhere. In fact whenever my players want to break into Imperial places security vidcams are one of the most common hurdles I throw at them alongside motion trackers, locked doors, cyber hounds and armed guards. I think it can even be fairly safely assumed that high security areas of the ship should probably have a few without the players having to expressly install them.

Use your best judgement for really specific sorts or applications but my personal opinion is yes there should be CCTV cameras in RT but remember to call them something like "security vidcams" because "tv" much like "computer" or "paper" is not the flavor appropriate terminology.

Also bear in mind that all of the technology is broken forever for everyone forever, which is why macrocannon are loaded by (many) hand(s). CCTV is, generally speaking, frequently fragile, and if you executed every crewman who broke something (which I assume), you end up needing new crew- who is stupid and will break more things and get executed. So while I would be willing to accept that at least some of the ship is wired for Security Scrying, I'd require a crew to get an upgrade (a la servitor crew and turbocannon) to get the complete package.

That's just me, though. Do what you want.

It's my RT that wants to keep an eye on a corpse of fallen striking scorpion. He's beginner RT and I was wondering what to do with those CCTV cameras when he mentioned them.

Thing is that he wants to hide the corpse so that his crew (and unnecessarily curious Imperial Adepta) wouldn't know anything about xeno presence on the moon they visited.

The craftworld eldar wouldn't like that. They would convince a harlequin to steal the body, retreive aspect armour from it's former owner and make the corpse visible for all the crew members... Probably in a very dramatic way. That would solve three problems: show other striking scorpions that there is no respect for those who are arogant enough to attack humans on their own, even after their (stupid) death. Show the crew of RT's vessel that they have something to fear of and there are more secrets around tchem than they might suspect. Finally, they would get the aspect armour back.

It calls for a stealthy approach however...

I think that those cameras may require Tech-Use test to be installed properly.

Meh. I'd assume that part of the acquisition test would be paying sufficient tithes to the local AdMech to get a team out their to handle the installation. Asking the players to make Tech-use rolls to wire the entire ship for pict-augery? Given ship sizes, that's a hell of an extended test.

The Mechanicus shouldn't even be required I don't think. I guess it comes down to personal interpretation but if a tech priest had to be called in every time a new light fixture had to be installed or the captain's mini-fridge broke down then Technomat wouldn't be a tradeskill. My interpretation is that if you can call some guy on the phone who will show up at your house in a panel van full of tools to do something in the real world then doing that same thing is probably below a true tech priest in 40k.

I guess it also depends upon just where you think that the mystification of technology and physics kicks in, personally I think it's mostly just the real crazy stuff like warp drives, power armor, artificial intelligence, advanced genetic engineering etc. I strongly suspect that a decent tech priest could actually explain to you how your toaster works with total scientific accuracy. Remember that the Machine Cult's primary objective is actually to try and de-mystify most of what they work with, if they haven't actually figured out simple **** like electron theory or torque tables then the Imperium wouldn't function at all.

Well argued. Hire a bunch of technomats, then. The point remains that the extended test for doing it themselves would be extreme, doesn't it?

For a single player or even the entire party to rig up the entire ship by themselves? Yeah that would take months but the other thing is that whatever bits of it they did themselves would probably be more secure as a result of fewer people being in the know about it.

As for hiring tons of Technomats that's probably not necessary, of those thousands of voidsmen I think it's safe to assume at least a few dozen are experienced electricians with working knowledge of the ship's wiring and buses. To get the job done really well you might want to bring on a few consultants from the company that makes the vidcams so that they could help troubleshoot any problems and set up the viewing stations. Assuming you do that you could probably rig the whole ship during one medium length shore leave although at that point you have alot of different people who know where all the cameras are and how they're wired and have been to all those places and seen whatever was there.

Ok so what about servo-skulls? Can they be remote controlled? Is it possible to use tchem as scout drones with video image transmitted in a real time?

I tend to assume that servo skulls can be remote controlled if they're built for it, and that using them as a scouting or surveying tool is a fairly commonplace technique. I also tend to assume that the feed from them tends to be pretty crap, which is why so many remote-controlled servo skulls sent into space hulks and mysterious installations are suddenly destroyed with no warning beyond a frame or two of 'somethings coming at it.'

'Remote control' is actually fairly rare in 40k. If it were prevalent then there wouldn't be such a need for machine spirits and MIU interfaces.

Things like servo skulls are largely autonomous and use their machine spirit (low level AI essentially) to make decisions on the fly according to pre-programmed behaviour.

So that servo skull with a camera feed can be commanded to fly over behind that building and record anyone that walks in or out of the tavern, but it's NOT a remote control spy camera and how good it is at any requested task is dictated by programming it has received.

Of course you could have a tech-priest wire it so that rather than recording it is transmitting the grainy vid-feed to his data-slate so that he can watch it in real time while issuing new orders to it via vox-feed

It's vague, we kind of treat the servo skulls like crappy UAVs in my game in the sense that they usually work like Kasatka says in the sense that they have either really good scripts or poor AI and that they constantly send audiovisual media to the tech priest who can look at it on a dataslate or whatever if they feel like it. However I also allow direct control of a single servo-skull within microbead range but the user is stuck with every one of the skull's crappy stats while doing so except intelligence which they get to continue to use their own for. They also don't get to move their own body at all while doing so, the assumption being that they're fully occupied driving the skull.

There is an alternate rank you can buy though that lets you fully inhabit servitors and give them really complicated on the fly commands. Personally if I had a character appropriate for it I might just go for it.

Welp. I'd buy Kastaka and Larry over me- Kasatka describes what I meant better than I did, so there you go.