The ultimate drone R&D thread

[Loadout]

lol, in my case there's barely any work involved. Just installing rails on the ship and a docker on the rack I'm currently using, along with some logic changes. Well.... that and redocking all the drones onto the rack -_-

idk about barely any work, take a look at these before & afters of my marsh racks.

New on the left, old on the right.

Better one here...

...and here.

There was a lot of forced wasted space on the old racks. Now you can skip mass enhancers and connect anything to a single block, which in itself greatly reduces rack size. But! Because there's no more limits on placing them closely I was able to cut my rack size by almost a 3rd. That's just the marsh too, hoping I can eventually do the Savannah that way as well and maybe eek in a few more drones while I'm at it.

What's more is there is no longer any push beams on the marsh at all, the rack itself doesn't have to detach. The wireless logic undocks the drones and they fly off willy nilly till death do they explode. Once the rack is spent I can safely recycle it at my leisure and save myself a few blocks. This means I can make fancy racks and not have to worry about losing them.

 

[Keptick]

^ congratz on being the 1000th reply!

 

[Mered4]

^ congratz on being the 1000th reply!

That's ridiculously awesome.

 

[Keptick]

gotta love rails

The system is upgraded btw, rails, new docks and wireless logic. And it works better than before, the time between the button press and the ejection is just 1 second now (to give time for the door to properly open). All I need to do now is to add a door that closes off at the end of the rack entry point.

 

[Keptick]

I LOVE HOTBAR LOGIIIIIIIIIIIIIIC

 

[Loadout]

....gotta love rails

The system is upgraded btw, rails, new docks and wireless logic. And it works better than before, the time between the button press and the ejection is just 1 second now (to give time for the door to properly open). All I need to do now is to add a door that closes off at the end of the rack entry point.

That gif... is that super speed? if not how'd you manage to get your racks to move so quick? :/ Mine are super slow(enhancers did nothing even with 1k of them).. so I went with a different method.

...I moved the drones instead of the rack. :p

 

[Sgtwisky]

ive run into the slow drone rack issue myself and can't seem to find a way around it. At this point I'm almost ready to opt for a non-rack version and hope that fleet control comes really soon.

 

[Keptick]

There's an issue with mass enhancers not taking into account the mass of docked entities. So they'll only compensate for the mass of the rack, but not the entities docked on it. The issue is being looked in afaik.

In the mean time you can fix it by modifying your configs to give rails a higher "free" mass (mine is set at 1 million). It's not ideal but it makes the rails useable until an eventual fix comes out.

 

[Sgtwisky]

Interesting issue. I wonder why they would need to take the mass of the rail into account? I assume the only thing we need them to think about is the mass of the object that the rails are transporting. Glad to know its a bug and is being looked into though. I assumed it was working as intended and we were not meant to move large objects!

 

[Keptick]

Interesting issue. I wonder why they would need to take the mass of the rail into account? I assume the only thing we need them to think about is the mass of the object that the rails are transporting. Glad to know its a bug and is being looked into though. I assumed it was working as intended and we were not meant to move large objects!

They don't take the mass of the rails into account, I think you misread :P (why would they need to?). They won't compensate for the mass of chain docked entities, so say you have a 100 mass object docked to a rack, which is itself docked to rails, there's no way to "enhance" the rails for the 100 mass of the chain docked object.

 

[Sgtwisky]

OH ok. well ether way I'm glad its a bug lol.

 

[Keptick]

OH ok. well ether way I'm glad its a bug lol.

Yea me too, I was just going "WHAAAAAAAAT" at first :P

 

[Thalanor]

So it is really confirmed to be a bug and not a feature?
PS: Congratulations kep :D

 

[Keptick]

So it is really confirmed to be a bug and not a feature?
PS: Congratulations kep :D

It's actually not a bug since it's caused by the way the system works. However, it wasn't really an intented behavior (from what I know) and is being looked into. Definitely not a feature though :P

 

[Feed]

Hi I'm new here and too lazy to read all the 50 pages of this topic.
I'm trying to make a Battlestar Galactica like Fighter Launch tube system, and I was wondering how you launch your drones.
Do you use Push Beams or something? Do they take damage and how do you set the AI?

Edit: Okay so I have a push beam thingy but my fighters wont fly in a strait line, how do I launch them without them spinning out of control?

 

[Thalanor]

It's actually not a bug since it's caused by the way the system works. However, it wasn't really an intented behavior (from what I know) and is being looked into. Definitely not a feature though :p

I would wish its not intended behavior, but that does not sound as definite as I would want. I would advise not building anything that cannot be refitted should we not get multilevel enhancing yet; with the newer more relaxed enhancer settings you only need 3% of the docked mass in enhancers compared to 20% in the dev builds before that.

 

[TheGeek007]

Congrats to Keptic on his Council position! And if I may suggest the first thing to lobby for:

Change the rail system so that an entity on a rail can move onto a rail on another entity without having to undock. A picture will help explain:

The rail on the left is the "main ship". The Rail on the right is the "reloading rack". The cores and dockers on top are the "drones". The bit of logic at the end undocks the drone when it reaches the end.

This design wouldn't work with the current way rails are implemented, as a docked drone can't move from a rack on docked entity to a rack on the main ship without undocking and redocking. If this worked, you wouldn't have to worry about racks at all, simply have a long rail on the inside of your ship, and refill it with a rack as needed. This would also allow for cool things like aircraft elevators as seen on aircraft carriers. It also could potentially be used to replace turrets easily if you had a mechanism to direct the turrets to the right positions.

I have begun to redesign my TIE Fighter racks, and am learning a lot as I go. I'll be sure to post pictures and tips that helped my racks work correctly.

Here's something i whipped up to "dispense" AMS turrets for easy placement on my larger ships:

With an activation of a ship remote module, I can "dispense" one AMS turret from the rack. The logic then switches the rack motion to bring forward another turret, then once a turret reaches the end, the logic switches the rack back to "stop".

 

[Gerion]

Chain shielding.... Now those turrets are actually viable, thats nice.

Also, hangar doory that can be opened? Brilliant, I am back in ship design, lets sacrifice some Isanths for PROGRESS!

 

[Loadout]

In the name of Drone tech, progress shall continue until the beatings improve!

err.... wait.. that didn't sound right. Anywho! Gif of my newest drone launch technique using the new rails...



comments? questions? absurdities?

 

[Loadout]

So my Drone R&D facilities have been spitting out ideas pretty consistently so far... some new things I've come up with below!

A drone turret. Literally it's a turret mounting for any of my drones that turns the basic drone into a fully functional 360 degree ship turret.

Spoiler: Drone turret pics

Shown below with a Dragonfly G2 (G2s use rails that's about all that's different)...

Up next I have... docking clamps! So it's not entirely a new idea but these ones are flush, reusable, and easily setup. They've also taken over the Locust design, and my espresso machine..

Spoiler: Docks, Clamps, and Locusts!

Finally, last but certainly most awesome... Idk what to call it... GIF!!

Spoiler

That is actually the bottom half of the new Savannah design opening up to reveal an internal launch bay. It's not exactly high capacity, but it's still really cool looking.

Edit: Forgot to mention these...

Spoiler