Mining drones leaving me stumped.

Tassyr · Apr 13, 2016

I recently tried to make a mining ship as I've never done it before. Got it designed, no problem.
I make a small drone to use as a template for the miner. No problem.

I go to figure out how to make them play nice.
Big problem.

I don't know the first thing about fleets, drones, docking rails, rail paths, or ANY of it.
And the big problem is- all the guides I can find are either someone yammering annoyingly into youtube or "Advanced Drone Theory 303" or such.

Is there a SIMPLE "Do this, do that" guide to this stuff ANYWHERE?

Phillzor · Apr 13, 2016

talk to me on chat, and ill explain it to you next time your on. (ill be pretty much on all night and im on most of the time as well)

Jay_do · Apr 13, 2016

I also dont have a lot of experience with them. However after a lot of trial and error I figured out that the Capital Ship (The first ship in the fleet) Will not mine. So Make sure your mining ship is not the Capital.

kurosawa · Apr 13, 2016

As i see it, mining drone are very sensitive do bad or missing programming, like basic path finding and self knowledge of size of the drone in question. This cause the drones to do crazy stuff like ramming asteroids, trying to get to the dock point straight true the mother ship, and inability to activate mining lasers because it prepositions it self all the time
[DOUBLEPOST=1460564739,1460564677][/DOUBLEPOST]oh i have success with small 5x5 drones, still massive path finding issues and you can only mine 1 sector at time and so on, but they mine

Urza der Gehasste · Apr 13, 2016

My expiriences so far: Problem with the new rails and the call back order

Now I am using a ship from the community content page.
But like kurosawa said: they still have a horrible pathfinding and stop to mine from time to time (no the storage is not full). But at least they do dock as intended... eventually.

kiraen · Apr 13, 2016

I have gotten into the habit of ordering 'Idle in Formation' before giving the call back order. It seems to work better.

Urza der Gehasste · Apr 13, 2016

kiraen said:
I have gotten into the habit of ordering 'Idle in Formation' before giving the call back order. It seems to work better.

my drones where ideling... I never reached the point to let them actually mine anything.

kiraen · Apr 13, 2016

Not 'Idle'.
'Idle in Formation'
This forces the fleet to take up formation around the mother ship, even if it's on the move. (this is also good for a retreat)
It's actually kind of misleading, because the ships/drones will continue to move in order to maintain formation.
This bring all the drones close to the mothership in a line formation, essentially organizing them before you re-dock them. They tend to run into each other much less and never into the mothership.

This has nothing to do with mining, just the callback.

Urza der Gehasste · Apr 13, 2016

Thank you I will try that.