When talking about the Star Army specifically, I feel like animals have to compete with robots and other technologies, like Yuuki said. That makes it an interesting wordbuilding challenge. Robots can work tirelessly, recharge off of solar power or kinetic energy or whatever, they can repair each other, maybe they can even replicate with nanites or whatnot. That’s tough competition. Still, I think you could imagine a few situations where a living, self-repairing, reproducing animal with instincts could still serve a useful purpose.
The Frontier Critter
Animals might also be superior in frontier situations. A very distant colony, a remote outpost, somewhere planet-side where spare parts or replication stations are hard to find. In that situation, a team of draft mules can haul equipment, pull trees, serve as personal mounts, help with construction efforts. If your robot breaks after falling into a canyon, you're in a pretty tough spot unless you have more of them. If your mule gets sick, you may have a team of them back at base that can fill in while the mule gets better. Is it easier and more economical to provide veterinary care for a mule, than it is to repair and maintain a robot?
Ecological Control
Animals could be used as ecological tools, controlling pests and invasive species and so on. For example, what if we found (or developed) an animal that ate the Mishhuvurthyar Slime Tentacle Vine that’s causing problems on Jiyuu III?
https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=planet:jiyuu_iii:flora#mishhuvurthyar_slime_tentacle_vine
You can have manual removal teams of robots working on the issue, sure, but imagine if you also had a population of animal ‘partners’ out there constantly chewing up the vines, reproducing, spreading to places your robots can’t easily get to, etc.
Smell
As a newbie, I don’t yet know how well Star Army technology handles olfactory stuff. An Emrys Industries Basic Sensor Package for Androids, built in YE 34, had these capabilities:
“Olfactory
- Range and sensitivity same as a human
- Discriminatory, able to identify specific scents accurately”
Some android player characters are listed as liking the smells of certain things, so surely Star Army has smell-capable tech, but how good is it? Is it easier to program a sense of smell, or get a bloodhound? I’m less sure about this application, but who knows, maybe in extreme tracking situations like drug detection or Mishhu influence detection, you have a sniffing animal supplementing your technical solution.
So I'm thinking animal solutions may be
supplementary to technological solutions. Construction bots and mules. Ecological clean-up drones and goats. That sort of thing.