Drone Beacon Block

[GRHayes]

The purpose of the block would be to simply guide drones back into landing bays and feed them onto a rail system. In short one would put the beacon on the inbound side of the bay at the start of any rail system.
The beacon would tell drones then where to orient itself outside of the ship and line up then move towards the block where it would dock.

When activated the beacon block would attract any friendly drones with in X Kilometers.

It might also be smart to create an assignment for drones so they know which ship they belong to.

 

[Parameter]

The purpose of the block would be to simply guide drones back into landing bays and feed them onto a rail system. In short one would put the beacon on the inbound side of the bay at the start of any rail system.
The beacon would tell drones then where to orient itself outside of the ship and line up then move towards the block where it would dock.

When activated the beacon block would attract any friendly drones with in X Kilometers.

It might also be smart to create an assignment for drones so they know which ship they belong to.

We already have a beacon light block. Perhaps you could c-v it to a bobby AI module or a wireless logic module and it would perform the proposed homing function, but for a specific drone?

Then, when the beacon block is on, the drone returns to it. When the beacon block is off, the drone does its normal thing. You could even have multiple beacons assigned to a drone and it could home to the nearest active one.

 

[Rixxan]

I really like this, and if you have things like flight pods you have the beacon C-V'ed to multiple AI's and rails you can have a recovery system, or even have things like the auto-deployment system also be an auto-recover. AI Powered landings would be a great thing, less material loss from ai drone swarms that you just ditch.