The ultimate drone R&D thread

[epicfacethe3rd]

I'm putting one of these suckers on my cruiser right now.

 

[Xavori]

So while this is cool and all (and I truly hope we can do rail launched drones)...

What's to stop someone like me creating a drone killer that uses lots of internal heat seeker missiles firing from every direction on my ship using logic to automate them while I focus on flying?

Yes, I can't fly in with a fleet. Yes, I can't use turrets on my ships because my own heatseekers would blow the beejeesus out of them.

But mix that system in with my already working shotgun chaff system (same concept...lots of small shotguns firing in all directions off a logic clock), and it's unlikely your drone carrier is any threat to even a small battleship so equipped. And once your drones are dead, jump the battleship out and call in the big guns.

 

[Keptick]

So while this is cool and all (and I truly hope we can do rail launched drones)...

What's to stop someone like me creating a drone killer that uses lots of internal heat seeker missiles firing from every direction on my ship using logic to automate them while I focus on flying?

Yes, I can't fly in with a fleet. Yes, I can't use turrets on my ships because my own heatseekers would blow the beejeesus out of them.

But mix that system in with my already working shotgun chaff system (same concept...lots of small shotguns firing in all directions off a logic clock), and it's unlikely your drone carrier is any threat to even a small battleship so equipped. And once your drones are dead, jump the battleship out and call in the big guns.

I tried that. 40k mass 100% swarm missile ship with 9 different computers VS 150 Soul drones (~16k total mass). The swarm ship won, but barely (with something like 3% shields left).

So, sure, it'll help. But if there's enough drones you're still f*cked .

 

[ltmauve]

You want 30 computers - one every half second. I have a system installed on my crusier that outputs only 40 missiles per second, but that's with 0% slave. I'm not sure how the performance of my computer would scale if I added slave blocks.

 

[CaptainTaz]

Yes, I can't fly in with a fleet. Yes, I can't use turrets on my ships because my own heatseekers would blow the beejeesus out of them.

Heatseekers dont target your own turrets, and Anti-missile turrets dont target your missiles either.

 

[Sgtwisky]

I like how there are still people looking for counters to our drone swarms. Honestly I would love to have a counter to it that requires a purpose built ship. My reasoning is that if we have Anti carriers > carriers > single battleship >Anti carriers. I could see mixed fleets to start to emerge to counter each other. would be MUCH more fun then the current 2 man fights I normally have seen. Kinda a rock paper scissors effect. and hey, its why real air craft carriers are escorted by battle ships !

 

[Xavori]

I like how there are still people looking for counters to our drone swarms. Honestly I would love to have a counter to it that requires a purpose built ship. My reasoning is that if we have Anti carriers > carriers > single battleship >Anti carriers. I could see mixed fleets to start to emerge to counter each other. would be MUCH more fun then the current 2 man fights I normally have seen. Kinda a rock paper scissors effect. and hey, its why real air craft carriers are escorted by battle ships !

Well, that's the whole points of creative combat. Finding a weakness in your enemy and then exploiting it.

Oh, and aircraft carries aren't escorted by battleships. Battleships are all pretty much mothballed because missiles and drones make them unnecessary. Aircraft carriers tend to get defensive-system ships like destroyers and cruisers with anti-air and anti-missile systems.

 

[Mered4]

The only counter to drone swarms is admin rules. MFleet trumps all with that awesome 24 entity docking limit. :D

 

[Sgtwisky]

Hum.... OK Xavori, Instead of "Modern" naval ships I will change it to WW2 ish ships. XD.

 

[Keptick]

The only counter to drone swarms is admin rules. MFleet trumps all with that awesome 24 entity docking limit. :D

You mean that disgusting limit >_>

It just limits design so much...

 

[CaptainTaz]

The only counter to drone swarms is admin rules. MFleet trumps all with that awesome 24 entity docking limit. :D

who says you can't make 200000 mass drones? >: 3

 

[Sgtwisky]

Bring your own battleship yo ! Just add 20 docks on your "Titan Carrier" that are capable of transporting your 20 battleships.

 

[Mered4]

You mean that disgusting limit >_>

It just limits design so much...

Yeah, but it also prevents lag from the idiots who bring a 300 entity titan that crashes everyone's PC when it looks at you funny.

I kinda wish it were higher myself, but Tomino and gang have a lot of experience with people going completely bat-shit crazy with the rules, so they had to draw the line somewhere.

 

[Loadout]

Gone for a week and I come back to all this lovely drone discussion. =) I should take more programming hiatus' me thinks. Anywhooo...

So while this is cool and all (and I truly hope we can do rail launched drones)...

What's to stop someone like me creating a drone killer that uses lots of internal heat seeker missiles firing from every direction on my ship using logic to automate them while I focus on flying?

Yes, I can't fly in with a fleet. Yes, I can't use turrets on my ships because my own heatseekers would blow the beejeesus out of them.

But mix that system in with my already working shotgun chaff system (same concept...lots of small shotguns firing in all directions off a logic clock), and it's unlikely your drone carrier is any threat to even a small battleship so equipped. And once your drones are dead, jump the battleship out and call in the big guns.

Shotgun Lasers? Or shotgun cannons? cause your own shots CAN hit your own missiles, kinda nerfing the whole ship... Otherwise as long as your ship is reasonably equipped it could as keptick mentioned withstand a sizeable swarm. The problem is drawing the line so to speak... 2 reasons, with logic as follows...

1. Size! How big must the ship be? If it's gotta fly solo, that necessitates big, it means you need to be able to handle everything coming your way cause you have no backup. That's a pretty big proposition.. catch the drift yet?

2. Faction E-V-E-R-Y...pause for breath... T-H-I-N-G! cause yea, swarm missiles should really just be multi-lock missiles which fixes an entire host of problems, but currently they are not buddy viable, drones are. A drone carrier escorted by virtually anything else, 'destroyer', a 'frigate', a 'cruiser' with really any weapon selection available will conquer any number of these buddy-less ships. Particularly if equipped with anti-missile shotguns. Knowing that you're going solo, could you possibly use your own set of factioned drones? Every Drone I personally make is factioned, not just for the armor in front of the core either, it offers up a host of design possibilities on all of my fleet. It can be taxing to re-faction everything though, hopefully that'll be changed in a coming patch like AI was...(see structures tab)

Heatseekers dont target your own turrets, and Anti-missile turrets dont target your missiles either.

This was a setting under server config not too long ago, has the default been changed lately? Referring to the AMS specifically here, the heatseekers part was forever and a day ago of course.

who says you can't make 200000 mass drones? >: 3

Well... you Could do that... but that would make them mini titans wouldn't it? Such large drones are kinda hard to swarm with. I suppose a VERY well supplied fleet could do this, but it'd be a bit moot. By the time you have enough resources in theory to make 20 of those (current minimum swarm size), you'd pretty much own the galaxy you're in. Probably even the next one over as well.

I believe it was something like 12 pages ago where most of us drone-maniacs agreed that drones are better off being small and highly numerous than larger and less numerous. Some exceptions here and there but very few really. 200k mass is simply too big. 2k mass is still too big. 200 mass sounds like a more swarm-able limit, but that's 1/1000th of what you proposed. =P

Whole idea of drones is to take an Ant farm approach, or become more zerg-like, as opposed to...

"Cap'n we gotta make um bigger! Bigger! and Bigger!! ahahahahahahaha!!!!" (<-crazy laughter)

cause that mentality just does not work out all that well... <_<

 

[Xavori]

LoadOut,

My chaff systems works flawlessly. It's very difficult to get missiles to hit my ships with it installed. If I went crazy and checkerboarded the inside of my hull with cannons, it might very well get to impossible. Except from the front.

From the front, I can't use the chaff, because as you pointed out, I'd kill my own missiles. But as a general rule, I don't fly in straight lines towards my enemies. This makes getting one of those scary head on shots with a missile very difficult.

The best part of chaff is that single gun cannon single block missile slave takes so very little energy each that you really can go crazy with them.

 

[Loadout]

LoadOut,

My chaff systems works flawlessly. It's very difficult to get missiles to hit my ships with it installed. If I went crazy and checkerboarded the inside of my hull with cannons, it might very well get to impossible. Except from the front.

From the front, I can't use the chaff, because as you pointed out, I'd kill my own missiles. But as a general rule, I don't fly in straight lines towards my enemies. This makes getting one of those scary head on shots with a missile very difficult.

The best part of chaff is that single gun cannon single block missile slave takes so very little energy each that you really can go crazy with them.

Hopefully your own missiles don't fly off in crazy directions like my own swarm missiles do. Because yeah, they tend to go in whatever direction they feel like, so chaff isn't terribly reliable with that.... In any case some of my latest drones aren't concerned with swarm missiles. Just look at my Gryllos drone, each of them sports 4x shotguns, at 1:1 that's 80 rounds per drone and they have a nasty(for enemies) habit of taking out missiles very quickly.

Spoiler: Pic..

About two weeks ago I ran a test against missile drones, the Gryllos swarm smoked the other swarm purely because, well, they couldn't hit them with just missiles. Given how easy it is to make these buggars I'd say swarm missile clusters would have to be in the server killing range to actually nail down a relatively decent sized swarm.. Also as you pointed out even a single cannon + missile combo is highly effective. So I'll probably be making a mark 2 version to take advantage of that fact...though I feel a bit cheap in doing so.

In other news last week I had made another new Drone and totally forgotten to even mention anything! So here's my semi-latest creation!

Spoiler: Gunship Drone!

Front..

"Wings"..

Variable Turrets!

 

[Thalanor]

I do foresee some change to point defense in the future, e.g. missile HP.

As it stands, if you checkerboard your entire hull with 1/1 shotguns linked to logic, you will never get hit ever. I just don't do this on my ship as I consider such a cheap (price nearly zero) and 100% effective countermeasure kinda very cheesy.

Glad to see the drone R&Ding is as strong as ever! Your notifications flood makes the Thal happy. Loadout nice, what weapon systems/effects? larger drones could indeed use some fancy combinations. But at this larger scale, you can easily cover more system blocks, it looks smoother that way Personal preference though, I tend to only show weapons and thrusters and only on drones, the rest gets a complete hull.

 

[Loadout]

I do foresee some change to point defense in the future, e.g. missile HP.

As it stands, if you checkerboard your entire hull with 1/1 shotguns linked to logic, you will never get hit ever. I just don't do this on my ship as I consider such a cheap (price nearly zero) and 100% effective countermeasure kinda very cheesy.

Glad to see the drone R&Ding is as strong as ever! Your notifications flood makes the Thal happy. Loadout nice, what weapon systems/effects? larger drones could indeed use some fancy combinations. But at this larger scale, you can easily cover more system blocks, it looks smoother that way Personal preference though, I tend to only show weapons and thrusters and only on drones, the rest gets a complete hull.

Looking forward to real missile HP... and maybe multi-lock missiles... please devs of starmade change heatseekers..... zzzzzzzzzzzz -_-'

Actually been removing effects on most of drones to make them ever cheaper. Most no longer use any special effects at all cause... it takes space, it drives up cost, and warlords on a budget are ever wary of high cost stuff xP So I've been doing just master/slave combos on drones. Anything else though... and it's a free for all.

On the Gryllos, it's shotguns (cannon / missile) and not cheap ones either, they're designed so each shot will destroy a single system block. Should they get under your skin(armor) they will make you butt hurt faster than you can blink. Also features extended range beam-beams for actual penetrating damage. If it still has effects the beams would be explosive but I can't remember.

The new gunship drone depends on the turrets equipped... thinking about removing two of the turrets for more built on weapons but eh... dunno yet. Currently as is, it has....

• On board Cannons, can't remember if they're sniper or rapid fire atm... I'll check later. I Think they're rapid fire doing 200 dps per cannon. Which is enough to eat armor very quickly.
• 4 Turrets each with lock on missiles doing about 2k a piece.

From a design perspective it's still incomplete but I can't think of what specifically to do in order to make it better. It's really a double wide JuGa drone based on a butterfly my dog tried to eat not too long ago. He is.. weird. But yeah, that was my inspiration. :p

 

[Thalanor]

So your drone is dog food inspired? That is a stretch :P
I have personally avoided the shotgun combo not because of it's utility but because of the horrendous non-random biased spread pattern. It is a pain to watch the 15 shots going to the same spot on the right side while the left side of the target is hit by so few shots I always think it regenerates blocks :p.

By the way, the experiment with the 288 drone rack for stationary defense purposes went really well after I switched (...again) to missiles, but kept the idea of an abundance of 7x7x7 drones instead of few larger ones. The cannon based ones worked great in theory - yes they do strip the target of blocks extremely quickly - but really, they seemed to destroy every single block before they finally hit the damn core, taking an eternity to slowly (and painfully) eat large targets. As it stands, for a drone to be a threat to structural integrity, you need missiles or pierce/punch (or rapidfire explosive if accuracy settings allow it).

I am waiting for the docking system before I do RnD for drone application instead of just drone design again, as I really need to know the specifics to have a set value for certain parameters (economic docking sizes after the update, viability/vulnerability/utility of the rails for all sorts of stuff including ejuection...). Currently, there is no way to do serious science in the drone field usage category because too many too important variables are potentially being altered in the future.

 

[Loadout]

So your drone is dog food inspired? That is a stretch :p
I have personally avoided the shotgun combo not because of it's utility but because of the horrendous non-random biased spread pattern. It is a pain to watch the 15 shots going to the same spot on the right side while the left side of the target is hit by so few shots I always think it regenerates blocks :p.

By the way, the experiment with the 288 drone rack for stationary defense purposes went really well after I switched (...again) to missiles, but kept the idea of an abundance of 7x7x7 drones instead of few larger ones. The cannon based ones worked great in theory - yes they do strip the target of blocks extremely quickly - but really, they seemed to destroy every single block before they finally hit the damn core, taking an eternity to slowly (and painfully) eat large targets. As it stands, for a drone to be a threat to structural integrity, you need missiles or pierce/punch (or rapidfire explosive if accuracy settings allow it).

I am waiting for the docking system before I do RnD for drone application instead of just drone design again, as I really need to know the specifics to have a set value for certain parameters (economic docking sizes after the update, viability/vulnerability/utility of the rails for all sorts of stuff including ejuection...). Currently, there is no way to do serious science in the drone field usage category because too many too important variables are potentially being altered in the future.

Dog food inspired... uh.... well......yeah a bit. At this point i'm not sure whether he was attempting to play with it or eat it, but he did have it in his mouth for a bit.

Non-random shots do kinda suck on the shotguns/multi-lasers. It's more for missile screening than damage honestly, that's what the lasers are for. Pin-point accurate on those with only the default settings. Hence I was intending to eventually switch over a larger percent of my drone's mass towards those.

Cannons can take a while but not terribly long when using punch. I never use pierce because its IMO broken, 0% shield damage for practically 0% gain. Of course for a single punch-cannon to 1-shot advanced armor it takes around 1600 damage. So cannons in themselves are still a bit too weak. Until I see some sort of use for pierce or just a general cannon improvement(or missile nerf?0.o) I can't really justify using cannons for much on drones at least. Although... larger drones may be more viable for carrying punch-guns...

Having said that, rapid cannons still do strip blocks very quickly. Even if said cannons, do not outright kill a larger vessel in short order they will at least cripple it. Crippling any vessel makes it hardly more than shark-bait, and that can make your carrier or escort vessels lives alot easier. True killing it immediately would be best, but sometimes, it's not about what is best, but rather what is good enough. If having to use missiles to nuke a ship means your drones are potentially crippled by a simple (and common) counter strategy, perhaps being good enough with cannons isn't a terribly bad thing. =)

Economic design...hmm, the 7^3(7 cube) seems pretty darn economic to me, as does using about 4-5 docking enhancers for larger drones. Cubes are the most economic but probably the least visually appealing. It's honestly all in how you make it, a smaller drone size does seem to be more effective than a larger one. So knowing that you only have to decide on how many cores/faction/AI blocks you really want to make, the fewer you're willing to make the bigger your drones will be. The real question is how big is the carrier vessel? I use a standard size docking array so no matter what I make I know it'll fit, but the carrier itself should hold a set amount of drones. Soo.. I think the following checklist should help you figure out the economy part....

1. Pick a standard docking size, example: I will make all my drone racks 100 blocks long and 15 blocks wide.
2. Design a carrier to hold enough racks to launch 40+ drones. We'll say 8 should do it.
3. Pick a drone size: try to keep a standard but you don't have too. Need 40 drones, have 8 racks on the carrier, each rack only needs a minimum of about 5 drones. So they'll be around 20 long, 13 wide, and however tall your rack is.
4. Congrats you now can test how effective they are cost wise by hurling them 40 at a time against a test ship. I prefer a swarm missile ship, but you can pick whatever you wanna fight... Pirate bases, Titans, Mega-awesome-stupendously-designed-super drones, other smaller drones, etc.

The economy part is just finding out how cheap you can make the drone before it can no longer take out the target vessel. Which is all testing really, no amount of updating will change the need for testing.

I disagree on the last part, many many MANY things are completely testable atm. Really only rails and AI buffs (which can only make drones better) will affect our tiny companions. I'd say get a headstart and try to design yourself a nice small drone. Something that fits within the 7x7x7 cube of default space... or even smaller. I have several micro drones that are stackable inside a 3x3x4 area. I actually stuffed 20 of them inside the space it takes for about 2 heavy drones to fit.