The ultimate drone R&D thread

[Loadout]

BrotherLazarus Firstly, welcome to Drone R&D we have cake over by keptick 's corner and the punch bowl is by mine. Please remember to leave donations so Thalanor can finally build a drone and stop making us look bad with his superb logic devices.


My comments as follows in Red.

... After some experimentation I decided to start my own drone R&D (you guys are seriously ingenious, but I don't like outright stealing being inspired by other shipwright designs in games) and finally dropped into the forums to make a post about your efforts.

Well it's more like borrowing than stealing honestly. When taking inspiration from others you first copy, then change, and then change again, and probably change it some more until you've beaten it into a shape that you can use. At which point it's almost unrecognizable and completely original. =)

My current rack is really, really simple and poorly done, at the moment it carries six of my prototype combat drones and requires a series of delay blocks to actually disgorge all of them properly (if I don't use the delay, my wireless blocks get wonky and 2-4 of them will randomly not take off).

Take a peek at some of the earliest drone racks we've all built, not many of them are very pretty. xD Admittedly we all start somewhere and yours are a great start. =)

It's intended to be attached to the aforementioned extension arm on my upcoming light assault carrier, which will normally keep them inside the hull behind two layers of blast door (not to mention the shields) until it's time to launch them, when docking the carrier to its berth on the shipyard station, the station's berth will end up with small shipyards that basically just fab it and put it right in line to hop into the core and dock without having to move at all. At least, that's the plan. So far my experiments have resulted in more explosions than working product lines, but that's half the fun.

Tip:
It would probably be easier for you to move the outer walls with the rack as opposed to trying to logic them together. While it can be done either way, it will most likely save you a lot of time, wiring, and headaches as well.

As for the issues I have with the area detector/area detector controller not functioning at all for me issues, I'm just operating under the PEBCAK assumption until I know more.

Docked entities do not activate area detectors on their own mothership. I know, I've tried 1001 ways and they all invariably fail. =(

This one is actually misleading, as I had to rebuild the logic system there because docking activated the wireless receiver and button due to proximity... or something. Anyway, first design actually caused it to undock the drones while docking the rack. At the moment, the timing present here lets me do away with the push-pulse method, as there's about a second delay between each launch if everything goes right.

From the looks of it your logic system could be condensed into about half that size and work a little easier for you. I'll make some pics of what I mean if you're interested. =)

...(after binge reading the first 30 pages of this thread doing my due diligence and researching drone tech)...

Lol'd at this one. Due diligence indeed, =P ah but yes, there's alot of information on the first 20-30 pages of this thread I am sure most people have either skipped or passed over. At least you've taken a gander at how drones have progressed. kudos for that. =) /impressed.

But the wall of text in the spoiler blob is beside the point... the question I pose is how one might go about making a drone look more visually appealing? I've got less space to play with (I'm trying to avoid breaking 9x9x15, and would prefer 5x5x9 (to pack more drones into my carrier), so the few aesthetic tricks I would use on a capital ship I can't... really get away with here. And until I have a final drone size and rack built, I don't want to start making the carrier since I'd rather have one universal bay size for combat parasites (bombers, fighters, and drone racks), even if I do intend to have several arms per bay to handle docking differently sized parasites (a wing of drones on a rack will take up a different amount of space compared to one of my gunships, and I have a weird thing about trying to use hangar space at least -somewhat- efficiently, plus it fits back into the RP-side concept of a "truly universal" hangar bay).

My question for you is... got a download of it? I can safely copy/paste refurbish that little beasty in about an hour and have a prototype in mind already. One serious thing to consider though, drop the advanced armor. It's about 6x the cost of standard and only twice as good. Honestly not worth it when you've gotta rebuild all your drones from scrap.

Edit... again:
I use OBS. Decent recording software and free. It's not professional grade but it does the job. This would have been in the body of my first post but I completely missed your comment there until I checked the boards this evening.

Have downloaded and will be checking out soon. Thanks for the info.

 

[Loadout]

So I was playing around with 5x5x9's and in about 5 minutes or so came up with this for you BrotherLazarus.

Could use some more work and the area itself isn't terribly fitting for an eye-pleasing shape. But this does give some examples of what you can do with rectangles. I came to this design by staring at that red arrow on your previously shown drone. Something about that red arrow just seemed mesmerizing. @_@

I'm sure with more work this could be hammered out into something pretty eventually. But with limited space like 5 x 5 it's hard to get a good frontal profile.

On another note I've been trying out OBS and it works pretty well with starmade. Though I'm having trouble getting the audio just right. x)

 

[Sgtwisky]

Well Loadout, I am assuming your looking for something on the cheep (or free) which is something I did for quite some time. I wanted to do some videos of MC just for me and my friends. I ended up getting frustrated at the overall quality and capability of most of those programs. Once I got a job I went and bought Fraps, and hooked up an old hard drive (500GB) to store recordings. Ive done a couple starmade vids and it works great. IF you have the money and the hard drive space for the Uncompressed .Avi Files, then I haven't found anything that works better.

On the free side I had some luck using Bandicam and Hypercam. The down side was that I had to start recording audio (from my mic) with audacity, as those programs had issues with my headset. Though if I remember right bandicam is branded unless you pay them.

Hope this helps. Would like to see some good drone vids. TBH I had the same idea a while back, but have always been lacking in time and.... well time. SO would love to see someone else succeed and have some popular drone vids. If you have any spacific questions for me on videos feel free to ask. I can't say I'm a pro by any means but I have dabbled in it enough to get my feet wet on the video editing and such.

P.S. I know this is a bit off topic, but I posted it with the idea that it would help further drone fleets by having tutorials out there.

 

[BrotherLazarus]

So I was playing around with 5x5x9's and in about 5 minutes or so came up with this for you BrotherLazarus.

Could use some more work and the area itself isn't terribly fitting for an eye-pleasing shape. But this does give some examples of what you can do with rectangles. I came to this design by staring at that red arrow on your previously shown drone. Something about that red arrow just seemed mesmerizing. @_@

I'm sure with more work this could be hammered out into something pretty eventually. But with limited space like 5 x 5 it's hard to get a good frontal profile.

On another note I've been trying out OBS and it works pretty well with starmade. Though I'm having trouble getting the audio just right. x)

That does look quite nice. I've been babysitting a 30 gig download over the last three days so I haven't had the spare bandwidth to hop in and upload anything yet but I'll go about taking care of that later this evening after I update the StarMade client (I've got a one megabit up/down connection so those big guys take a while). Any preferences/required spots for me to upload incomplete blueprints?

I'll admit, I was at a loss on how to decorate the Warrior prototype so I ended up pulling a book off the shelf and using the first Norse rune that popped up as the frontal emblem.

 

[Thalanor]

Nice to see drone R&D alive as ever! And welcome to all new technicians and inventors.
I still haven't come around to making a rack and deployment system for my fold-out drones

 

[Loadout]

Sgtwisky
Thanks!

I've got the video down packed right now, but... I need to practice what I'm going to say. Otherwise I'll spend 15 minutes rambling about how drone lasers vs drone missiles can ruin your afternoon. :p

Any preferences/required spots for me to upload incomplete blueprints?

I'll admit, I was at a loss on how to decorate the Warrior prototype so I ended up pulling a book off the shelf and using the first Norse rune that popped up as the frontal emblem.

Dropbox or Google docs are both free and work quite well. Dropbox is especially nice if you have the app on your computer as it will auto-update all connected folders. Google docs does do roughly the same thing but requires a plethora of other google intrusions into your brain. Skynet Google does love to just interconnect everything.

If the Norse rune inspired you then go with it! Sometimes the most random things can lead to awesome ships.

I would know, hell I based one of my drones off a moth my dog tried to eat.:D

 

[BrotherLazarus]

Sgtwisky
Thanks!

I've got the video down packed right now, but... I need to practice what I'm going to say. Otherwise I'll spend 15 minutes rambling about how drone lasers vs drone missiles can ruin your afternoon. :p




Dropbox or Google docs are both free and work quite well. Dropbox is especially nice if you have the app on your computer as it will auto-update all connected folders. Google docs does do roughly the same thing but requires a plethora of other google intrusions into your brain. Skynet Google does love to just interconnect everything.

If the Norse rune inspired you then go with it! Sometimes the most random things can lead to awesome ships.

I would know, hell I based one of my drones off a moth my dog tried to eat.:D

Warrior prototype and original rack prototype

Since I was recording a video for another title, I haven't gotten to logging into StarMade to modify this guy any further. I never got around to switching from the advanced armor to basic hull either, but since I do my prototyping in creative mode I often overlook that stuff until I've got a finished ship (and my ships are never done, always something new to cram in there). It's.. awfully boxy for my tastes, and doesn't fit my original prototype nanodrone rack very well. I do love the rail setup though, as using a single rail block keeps them from turning and buggering up the whole works, which makes it more useful than my first parasite-equipped concept. Still, I included my initial rack prototype as well so that you can see what I did with it as well, without the timer blocks I just can't get them to consistently disconnect when using 4 or more 6 drone racks. It's looking like the final rack size for the modular system will only use 3-4 Warriors instead of 6+, as that rack size is edging close to my heavier manned parasite craft dimensions anyway. The Warriors also have a shield grid, I had spare power and space so they've got around 2k shields and seem to do pretty well about not taking anything past shield damage when under fire... now if I could just get them to finish nuking stations instead of getting all lazy after they destroy the turrets....

 

[Loadout]

BrotherLazarus

I did some testing and peeking about at the internals of your drone and I have a few suggestions to improve upon the designs. The rack you shared as well...

The rack doesn't need all those wireless blocks, in fact you can undock by simply putting the button you already have connected to each of the rails.

End result it will 100% of the time, barring severe lag, undock all your drones easily. I noticed that you had that wireless block inside each drone as well, since you can safely remove that(and it's accompanying button), that's -2 blocks on your drone and -12 blocks on your drone rack.

By mirroring the docker block like so onto the bottom of the drone...

you can free up all the space here marked in green...

Doing so allows you about 14 more blocks of space for shields, weapons, etc.

If you swap all your advanced armors for standard you free up almost 20 mass. Which clearly makes this a medium drone. Which is just about where it fits on the scale of drones.

After extensive testing against other missile drones I figured out why this drone survives...

That block. It's a single advanced armor block that buffers all directly oncoming damage away from the computer blocks. While it would be useful, further testing reveals against beam/cannon based opponents it's not as effective.

Some other tips;
-switching to standard armor makes this guy about 1/4th the cost, and about 2/3rd the weight.
-having 58% cannon slaved to your weapon is kinda... odd. Going the full 100% reduces the cooldown time to about 1 second. Instead of 7 seconds. If this was to keep some of the aoe, I'd suggest adding an explosive effect, it's more effective that way.

On another note, the most successful counter to this drone is actually much smaller, lighter, and cheaper.

I built it based on a rune I saw once and you're more than welcome to use it directly or take inspiration from it.

Spoiler

Lacks coloring atm but I have no idea what color scheme you prefer so...

 

[BrotherLazarus]

BrotherLazarus

I did some testing and peeking about at the internals of your drone and I have a few suggestions to improve upon the designs. The rack you shared as well...

The rack doesn't need all those wireless blocks, in fact you can undock by simply putting the button you already have connected to each of the rails.

End result it will 100% of the time, barring severe lag, undock all your drones easily. I noticed that you had that wireless block inside each drone as well, since you can safely remove that(and it's accompanying button), that's -2 blocks on your drone and -12 blocks on your drone rack.

By mirroring the docker block like so onto the bottom of the drone...

you can free up all the space here marked in green...

Doing so allows you about 14 more blocks of space for shields, weapons, etc.

If you swap all your advanced armors for standard you free up almost 20 mass. Which clearly makes this a medium drone. Which is just about where it fits on the scale of drones.

After extensive testing against other missile drones I figured out why this drone survives...

That block. It's a single advanced armor block that buffers all directly oncoming damage away from the computer blocks. While it would be useful, further testing reveals against beam/cannon based opponents it's not as effective.

Some other tips;
-switching to standard armor makes this guy about 1/4th the cost, and about 2/3rd the weight.
-having 58% cannon slaved to your weapon is kinda... odd. Going the full 100% reduces the cooldown time to about 1 second. Instead of 7 seconds. If this was to keep some of the aoe, I'd suggest adding an explosive effect, it's more effective that way.

On another note, the most successful counter to this drone is actually much smaller, lighter, and cheaper.

I built it based on a rune I saw once and you're more than welcome to use it directly or take inspiration from it.

Spoiler

Lacks coloring atm but I have no idea what color scheme you prefer so...

The 58% cannon ended up being the balance point where the power regen was -just- ahead of the firing drain, so it doesn't zero itself out while moving and with shields. Mostly just a matter of tinkering to see what I could do without a tertiary effect computer. Given that empty space present after your tweaking, the faster firing rate could be made up for with more reactors or I can cram more shields in, etc. The docking racks, I had issues with at the time I put 'em together, but from the rebuild you posted I think a lot of that was a PEBCAK issue--my workaround to get it to function was to have the drones undock themselves rather than move the basic rail, but I see the difference in your rebuild and feel a little silly.

I'm wholly unsurprised that the survival of the little guy against purpose built craft is less than assured--for the most part Isanth waves can't even dent my smaller ships, but they're not put together by a crack R&D team either! :P

It looks like I've got my work cut out for me after I finish the queue of videos I still have to record.

 

[Loadout]

BrotherLazarus

That makes sense, I've done similar things to balance out power regens in the past. Usually I end up just adding more power once I've got a good solid weapon though. I suppose you did it in reverse. :p

Ah I see, although I think you may want to change from rockets to lock-ons. A lot of the reason (pretty much the entire one honestly) my scratch built craft won was simply yours missing it. I would post a video of it but a short battle of 30 on 30 took about 20 minutes. Most of which was spent with random missiles flying all over the place.

AI can no longer reliably aim dumb missiles (rockets) for whatever reason. A Simple switch and you could readily improve the potency of your design. I actually did try that option with your drone as well, when I balanced out mass they steam rolled the old design pretty quickly. Even numbers though, it was a 45 minute draw @_@, never seen that, which is pretty weird.

As a suggestion I would recommend testing your further drone designs against some of the ships in the Community Content. I rigorously test mine against Thalanor 's posted designs. For some reason I derive great satisfaction from exploding his beautiful ships to bits.

Crack R&D, hehe, that made me giggle a bit. This whole thing is mainly trial and error, as you gain experience you'll reach "Crack" level in no time. Especially if you stick around us R-&-'Dealers'.

 

[BrotherLazarus]

BrotherLazarus

That makes sense, I've done similar things to balance out power regens in the past. Usually I end up just adding more power once I've got a good solid weapon though. I suppose you did it in reverse. :p

Ah I see, although I think you may want to change from rockets to lock-ons. A lot of the reason (pretty much the entire one honestly) my scratch built craft won was simply yours missing it. I would post a video of it but a short battle of 30 on 30 took about 20 minutes. Most of which was spent with random missiles flying all over the place.

AI can no longer reliably aim dumb missiles (rockets) for whatever reason. A Simple switch and you could readily improve the potency of your design. I actually did try that option with your drone as well, when I balanced out mass they steam rolled the old design pretty quickly. Even numbers though, it was a 45 minute draw @_@, never seen that, which is pretty weird.

As a suggestion I would recommend testing your further drone designs against some of the ships in the Community Content. I rigorously test mine against Thalanor 's posted designs. For some reason I derive great satisfaction from exploding his beautiful ships to bits.

Crack R&D, hehe, that made me giggle a bit. This whole thing is mainly trial and error, as you gain experience you'll reach "Crack" level in no time. Especially if you stick around us R-&-'Dealers'.

If I can ever find the time while juggling experimentation with the huge download queues that rack up while I update the bigger stuff (anything 20+ gigs basically ties my net up for several days, as I run a 1 megabit up/down), I was thinking of putting together both guided and nuke variants so that I could seed them in something like a 3:2:1 ratio (dumbfire:guided:nuke) on the generalist rack. For raw throw weight, while they miss a -lot-, the basic Warrior prototype was doing a great job shredding nearly stationary targets with massed rapid fire (4 projectiles per drone every seven seconds can certainly get pretty visually impressive when there are a number of them) while my initial nanodrones were simply not doing much of anything at all--that much I know is my fault, as I'm still not very good at building small weapon arrays--it's frequently been go absurdly huge or go home (I was sold on SM when I found out about blowing up planets and the bulk of my initial playtime was trying to make an efficient planet cracker!) so I really need to sink some time into figuring out the low end. If I can retool the design well enough I may drop the dumbfires entirely because while I don't have to pay for each missile if I can get more effective dakka I probably should (but dat ain't very orky, wut iz you, ona dem humie gitz?!), but there's something appealing about a cloud of drones spewing fire fairly rapidly. Efficient... not really. Deserving of evil cackles? Of course!

I really must ask at this point, what is the minimum module count for a guided missile array where it will actually deal enough damage to be worth fielding in a nanodrone? Actually, since there's mention earlier in this thread of a listed series of drone classes, I should ask what are the minimum module counts for an effective weapon array in each? My 2/2 guided array in the first wee drone models was.... pitiful to say the least, when over 100 drones armed with that can't even break an NPC station's shield regen--I believe the total tally was 140-ish of the Mk1 guided array drones, 10 Mk2 shotgun drones (based on a comment from earlier in this thread), five each Mk3 and Mk3B drones (both guided arrays but larger than the Mk1 wee drone), and then the station finally started to fall when my 20 Mk4 Warrior prototypes were live and opened fire. I'm thinking my arrays need some work, as nearly 200 drones should be able to crack a station like a walnut, but I'm not quite sure where I'm going wrong on the small ones--perhaps trying to cram two or more barrels on a 5x5x5-7x7x7 block drone is pushing it quite a bit.

For the time being, I'll go back to experimenting with smaller weapon arrays until I start figuring out what works, since that's something I need to nail down for my smaller manned parasites anyway. Something else I wanted to ask is how a few folks have gotten those huge mining drones to operate. Logic arrays connected to the salvage beams that feed into plex storage, using our friend Bobby to keep it hovering and level? The idea of building a larger Scav drone class, possibly using wireless logic to activate, to start stripping a de-clawed station just hit me and I'm wondering if there's a logic workaround we could use to market an entire line of reclamation craft for post-battle cleanup! >.> I'm not lazy. Really.

 

[Loadout]

If I can ever find the time while juggling experimentation with the huge download queues that rack up while I update the bigger stuff (anything 20+ gigs basically ties my net up for several days, as I run a 1 megabit up/down), I was thinking of putting together both guided and nuke variants so that I could seed them in something like a 3:2:1 ratio (dumbfire:guided:nuke) on the generalist rack. For raw throw weight, while they miss a -lot-, the basic Warrior prototype was doing a great job shredding nearly stationary targets with massed rapid fire (4 projectiles per drone every seven seconds can certainly get pretty visually impressive when there are a number of them) while my initial nanodrones were simply not doing much of anything at all--that much I know is my fault, as I'm still not very good at building small weapon arrays--it's frequently been go absurdly huge or go home (I was sold on SM when I found out about blowing up planets and the bulk of my initial playtime was trying to make an efficient planet cracker!) so I really need to sink some time into figuring out the low end. If I can retool the design well enough I may drop the dumbfires entirely because while I don't have to pay for each missile if I can get more effective dakka I probably should (but dat ain't very orky, wut iz you, ona dem humie gitz?!), but there's something appealing about a cloud of drones spewing fire fairly rapidly. Efficient... not really. Deserving of evil cackles? Of course!

I really must ask at this point, what is the minimum module count for a guided missile array where it will actually deal enough damage to be worth fielding in a nanodrone? Actually, since there's mention earlier in this thread of a listed series of drone classes, I should ask what are the minimum module counts for an effective weapon array in each? My 2/2 guided array in the first wee drone models was.... pitiful to say the least, when over 100 drones armed with that can't even break an NPC station's shield regen--I believe the total tally was 140-ish of the Mk1 guided array drones, 10 Mk2 shotgun drones (based on a comment from earlier in this thread), five each Mk3 and Mk3B drones (both guided arrays but larger than the Mk1 wee drone), and then the station finally started to fall when my 20 Mk4 Warrior prototypes were live and opened fire. I'm thinking my arrays need some work, as nearly 200 drones should be able to crack a station like a walnut, but I'm not quite sure where I'm going wrong on the small ones--perhaps trying to cram two or more barrels on a 5x5x5-7x7x7 block drone is pushing it quite a bit.

For the time being, I'll go back to experimenting with smaller weapon arrays until I start figuring out what works, since that's something I need to nail down for my smaller manned parasites anyway. Something else I wanted to ask is how a few folks have gotten those huge mining drones to operate. Logic arrays connected to the salvage beams that feed into plex storage, using our friend Bobby to keep it hovering and level? The idea of building a larger Scav drone class, possibly using wireless logic to activate, to start stripping a de-clawed station just hit me and I'm wondering if there's a logic workaround we could use to market an entire line of reclamation craft for post-battle cleanup! >.> I'm not lazy. Really.

etz 'Umie mate. Dakkakakakaaa Waaaaaagh!
*face plant*
and now back to being a filthy 'umie again..Erhrm..

Yeah for this lets split it up into three answers.

1st Answer; In regards to megabit / sec connection.

I totally feel your pain. Until just recently I too was stuck at 1Mb/s, thankfully upgraded to a different ISP and now that junk is out the window.

2nd Answer; In regards to Weapon sizes...

This is a tough question, it all depends on how many arrays you're fielding but regardless of size your weapons should be about 30% of your drones block count. It's important to note block count instead of mass because it will likely not be most of your ships mass, that'll probably be armor blocks if anything.

The rest will mainly be power and whatever shields you can cram inside... literally. As for shield regen you need only 1 block. Anything else is gravy.

So to put it simple.. Size = as big as your engines can handle.

Spoiler: Regarding Weapon combos however...

Honestly though which weapons you use also determines size. Hence the difficult part. A list of my experiences is as follows;

Cannons -

slave = cannon. Good solid combo works well even in small sizes, add overdrive as much as your power can handle to really get some oomph out of them.
Size- as big as your engines can handle.

slave = missile. Shotguns need not do more than 20 damage per shot. This is mainly because the primary focus is taking out incoming missiles rather than damage. However @ 20 damage they can still really hurt in large numbers. More can make them really powerful but remember they're a close range weapon for use against biguns/missiles. Plus they have a great reload time! No real need for effects but ion or explosive are always a hoot to watch.
Size - 20 damage per shot is roughly 10 blocks. Otherwise as big as you can get em.

slave = Beams. Great sniper weapon with a solid reload time. Over drive it for crazy block penetration or just leave it as is.
Size- as big as your engines can handle.

slave = Pulse. Awesome power hitter. Long reload time is on par with default missile reload time but these guys can penetrate better than missiles. When it comes to armor...
Size- as big as your engines can handle.

Beams-
They really need to have beam slaves as well (so they can hit stuff before dying). Other combos have far too short a range to be an effective solo weapon and just won't be able to keep up with the range of other weapons if they're paired.

IF you wanted to make a launcher that threw drones into the enemies face. I would say go with beam - cannons on those. They'll rack up hits lightning fast and almost never miss. Add overdrive or ion to those for some crazy fun.

The rest aren't worth bothering on drones. Never enough energy for capital lasers(beam - pulse) and never going to be close enough for scatter lasers(beam - missile).

Size - always as big as the engines can handle.

Missiles-

slave = cannon. Don't bother, you'll never really hit anything with the AI as is. If you made the AI more accurate they'd be useful, otherwise nope.

slave = beam. Really really powerful little guys. And FAST. Oddly enough though you'll probably only want just the computer. That alone makes regular missiles lock-on to enemies. If you do add beams remember you'll be adding power capacitors almost as much as power reactors. They add up damage and power consumption very quickly.

Size - as big as you can handle, which probably won't be very big at all.

slave = Missiles. (DO NOT use MISSILE - MISSILE Combos). These are a terrible, awful, horribly sad weapon. They have no friends, and may even hit the drone they launched from. Don't use em. Really... ever. Some people claim they're great at removing drones but that's only true of the smallest drones out there. They honestly can't handle a true 40+ swarm of drones with decent shielding.

slave = Damage pulse.
Missile - damage pulse can be fairly small and still wreck face. You want it big enough though that the missile isn't stuck at the minimum speed (avoid 1:1 ratio here). If the speed of the missile is less than 80 km/s it will not hit anything but a stationary target(true about 90% of the time). If your goal is removing stations load a few larger drones with these. Note; works best in groups of 2-2. so use Many 4 block groups, that should nuke a large portion of your pirate stations. Bad against shields though, so make sure something else is taking out all those shields first.

I would honestly put the nuke drones on a separate rack and only launch that rack after the shields were down.

So onto the final answer; in regards to drone mining. It's really just a simple logic clock alternating salvage beams. The clock fires one, then the other, then the first again, repeat repeat repeat. While it does that, it uses a really small push module to give itself some tiny forward momentum. That should eat through most planets fairly easily, oh I forgot to use stop effect cause that cancels out gravity so it won't sink down. No bobby AI involved at all really. =) unless you give it turrets to defend itself.

As for reclamation I've been working on a ship to do that for yarns. Never bothered to finish it though... suppose I might as well though. Got all the time in the world this weekend with the wife away at some convention. :P

 

[The Judge]

Looking into Drone Racks, I'm going for bigger drones (Isanth Size) and I was wondering if I should know anything before starting.

 

[Loadout]

Looking into Drone Racks, I'm going for bigger drones (Isanth Size) and I was wondering if I should know anything before starting.

Pretty much anything goes honestly, but I always find myself asking a few questions before I start another drone...
Have you thought about what kind of rack you'd prefer?
Do you have a ship already, or are you custom building to suit the drones?
Is there a weapon or range preference?
Target preference? Stations, big ships, other drones, medium sized ships, etc.?
Theme preference? this can be tricky cause you may or may not have your own style/theme yet.

Some general tips though...
Keep it symmetrical
Don't put your core access on the same side as your dock.
Never be satisfied, go nuts! ...seriously I've re-re-redone most of my drones at least 12 times.
Read the spoiler in my above post about weapon combos, it'll probably save you a headache or two.

 

[max stripe]

i just came up with a wonderfly unpredictable drone....
basicly you would equip a drone with a logic jumpdrive and let it go... it would randomly jump whenever the drive was fully charged
this would lead to it encountering random enemies

 

[The Judge]

Pretty much anything goes honestly, but I always find myself asking a few questions before I start another drone...
Have you thought about what kind of rack you'd prefer?
Do you have a ship already, or are you custom building to suit the drones?
Is there a weapon or range preference?
Target preference? Stations, big ships, other drones, medium sized ships, etc.?
Theme preference? this can be tricky cause you may or may not have your own style/theme yet.

Some general tips though...
Keep it symmetrical
Don't put your core access on the same side as your dock.
Never be satisfied, go nuts! ...seriously I've re-re-redone most of my drones at least 12 times.
Read the spoiler in my above post about weapon combos, it'll probably save you a headache or two.

Thanks for the tips, I think I'm going to need it.

 

[StormWing0]

Odd isn't the jump drive unable to be charged or fired with logic? Or did I miss something in the patch notes?

 

[BrotherLazarus]

etz 'Umie mate. Dakkakakakaaa Waaaaaagh!
*face plant*
and now back to being a filthy 'umie again..Erhrm..

Yeah for this lets split it up into three answers.

1st Answer; In regards to megabit / sec connection.

I totally feel your pain. Until just recently I too was stuck at 1Mb/s, thankfully upgraded to a different ISP and now that junk is out the window.

2nd Answer; In regards to Weapon sizes...

This is a tough question, it all depends on how many arrays you're fielding but regardless of size your weapons should be about 30% of your drones block count. It's important to note block count instead of mass because it will likely not be most of your ships mass, that'll probably be armor blocks if anything.

The rest will mainly be power and whatever shields you can cram inside... literally. As for shield regen you need only 1 block. Anything else is gravy.

So to put it simple.. Size = as big as your engines can handle.

Spoiler: Regarding Weapon combos however...

Honestly though which weapons you use also determines size. Hence the difficult part. A list of my experiences is as follows;

Cannons -

slave = cannon. Good solid combo works well even in small sizes, add overdrive as much as your power can handle to really get some oomph out of them.
Size- as big as your engines can handle.

slave = missile. Shotguns need not do more than 20 damage per shot. This is mainly because the primary focus is taking out incoming missiles rather than damage. However @ 20 damage they can still really hurt in large numbers. More can make them really powerful but remember they're a close range weapon for use against biguns/missiles. Plus they have a great reload time! No real need for effects but ion or explosive are always a hoot to watch.
Size - 20 damage per shot is roughly 10 blocks. Otherwise as big as you can get em.

slave = Beams. Great sniper weapon with a solid reload time. Over drive it for crazy block penetration or just leave it as is.
Size- as big as your engines can handle.

slave = Pulse. Awesome power hitter. Long reload time is on par with default missile reload time but these guys can penetrate better than missiles. When it comes to armor...
Size- as big as your engines can handle.

Beams-
They really need to have beam slaves as well (so they can hit stuff before dying). Other combos have far too short a range to be an effective solo weapon and just won't be able to keep up with the range of other weapons if they're paired.

IF you wanted to make a launcher that threw drones into the enemies face. I would say go with beam - cannons on those. They'll rack up hits lightning fast and almost never miss. Add overdrive or ion to those for some crazy fun.

The rest aren't worth bothering on drones. Never enough energy for capital lasers(beam - pulse) and never going to be close enough for scatter lasers(beam - missile).

Size - always as big as the engines can handle.

Missiles-

slave = cannon. Don't bother, you'll never really hit anything with the AI as is. If you made the AI more accurate they'd be useful, otherwise nope.

slave = beam. Really really powerful little guys. And FAST. Oddly enough though you'll probably only want just the computer. That alone makes regular missiles lock-on to enemies. If you do add beams remember you'll be adding power capacitors almost as much as power reactors. They add up damage and power consumption very quickly.

Size - as big as you can handle, which probably won't be very big at all.

slave = Missiles. (DO NOT use MISSILE - MISSILE Combos). These are a terrible, awful, horribly sad weapon. They have no friends, and may even hit the drone they launched from. Don't use em. Really... ever. Some people claim they're great at removing drones but that's only true of the smallest drones out there. They honestly can't handle a true 40+ swarm of drones with decent shielding.

slave = Damage pulse.
Missile - damage pulse can be fairly small and still wreck face. You want it big enough though that the missile isn't stuck at the minimum speed (avoid 1:1 ratio here). If the speed of the missile is less than 80 km/s it will not hit anything but a stationary target(true about 90% of the time). If your goal is removing stations load a few larger drones with these. Note; works best in groups of 2-2. so use Many 4 block groups, that should nuke a large portion of your pirate stations. Bad against shields though, so make sure something else is taking out all those shields first.

I would honestly put the nuke drones on a separate rack and only launch that rack after the shields were down.

So onto the final answer; in regards to drone mining. It's really just a simple logic clock alternating salvage beams. The clock fires one, then the other, then the first again, repeat repeat repeat. While it does that, it uses a really small push module to give itself some tiny forward momentum. That should eat through most planets fairly easily, oh I forgot to use stop effect cause that cancels out gravity so it won't sink down. No bobby AI involved at all really. =) unless you give it turrets to defend itself.

As for reclamation I've been working on a ship to do that for yarns. Never bothered to finish it though... suppose I might as well though. Got all the time in the world this weekend with the wife away at some convention. :p

That blurb on weapons is actually -really- helpful--using the wiki pages for the various systems gives broad strokes but not a whole lot of detailed "I've build X, Y, and Z" information, so it's really only been useful for me while building capital class weapons at 1:1:1. The swarm missiles I completely agree on, I have a 10 array swarm rack on the Eagle missile cruiser, but that's also got several nuke and normal guided missile arrays as well for fleet-friendly combat.

30% of my block count, rather than mass--that's a -very- helpful number, actually--gives me a more solid idea of what kind of setups I can use, though after spending so much time trying to build big stuff with interiors I'm going to have several "whoopsies" models for sure.

On the net speed... this is the improved connection--we started with a 500kb/s up/down after finally getting a broadband backbone and upgrading from dialup, now we've got 6 megabit to the entire town but as one of the few power users I get to leech a full sixth of the connection off. Which is kinda nice, but I'm waiting for them to bump it again so that I can skim 2 megabits. It'll be BLAZINGLY FAST. :P

Since I don't have any -pressing- recordings in the pipeline for my channel, I'll do some experimenting tonight and take a break from being all responsible. I had the sudden urge to make a "last wave" microdrone comprised of a spinal nuke launcher. >.> <.< Biiig badaboom.

 

[Lecic]

Odd isn't the jump drive unable to be charged or fired with logic? Or did I miss something in the patch notes?

You used to be able to charge it and let it stay like that. Unfortunately, logic charged drives immediately fire upon reaching full charge as of the most recent update.

 

[StormWing0]

lol this should be interesting for player chasing pirates too.