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I was looking over at the Tau and trying to figure out why a few things about the Tau.

They are (used to be?) very drone heavy, and it made me wonder, could most of the Tau Military be remotely controlled?

Do the Tau need to place their Air Caste pilots in harm's way, when it looks like that drone pilots would be something that the Tau would use.

The Fire Warriors have their "honour," so they would still show up in person, but it feels like most of the other vehicles would be pilotless.

I imagine it's an issue of mental speed. Tau AI is quite advance, but still rather slow and dumb in a battlefield situation. Their sniper teams are great examples of this. It seems they are still at a technological level where drones still need on-hand guidance so that decisions can be made quickly.

If I’m right in thinking, one of Farsight’s chums is entirely AI?

I may be misremembering though.

As for their AI, it’s “smarter” and more responsive when it can network with other drones. And I don’t see why, from a battlefield efficiency point of view, they wouldn’t put their top end thinkybits into a Drone. So, battlesuit teams being typically pretty small? Seems entirely possible they just can’t get the drone pilots to network sufficiently.

The Warhammer Adventures series gave us unpiloted battlesuits.
Yay.

I vaguely recall some old snippet of lore saying that long-range remote control isn't feasible on most 40k battlefields because of ECM/jamming/etc blocking it. And that pretty much needs to be the case because otherwise half of the armies would never show up to fight in person.

Maybe that's also the reason why the Guard need to wear a giant backpack just to talk over the radio.