The ultimate drone R&D thread

[PriZm]

I use carriers as ammunition for my mass driver

 

[Loadout]

I would say we aren't entirely dead. Hibernation is a good term for it. I can't really progress or honestly do much of anything besides hull work on my ships until the power update is released.

I have reservations about using drones for actual pulse weapons. From my testing and experiences against community made versions they are extremely hit or miss. As guided torpedoes though they would be spot on! Since they mostly just ram stuff idly anyways. I'll probably make a kamikaze flea that does just that.

As far as carriers go I'm still working on the second version of my Prometheus which uses a combination of drones + salvaging turrets.

Also working on my Herakles Titan which should house, I'm hoping, around 250 drones. Or I might reduce the number to be something more reasonable and give it 8/9 frigates instead. Each with their own compliment of drones.

No matter what though it all comes right back around to that power update we've been waiting on for the last 8 months. Once it is out, I am sure there will be plenty of discussion on what setups produce most effectively for drones.

 

[BrotherLazarus]

I would say we aren't entirely dead. Hibernation is a good term for it. I can't really progress or honestly do much of anything besides hull work on my ships until the power update is released.

I have reservations about using drones for actual pulse weapons. From my testing and experiences against community made versions they are extremely hit or miss. As guided torpedoes though they would be spot on! Since they mostly just ram stuff idly anyways. I'll probably make a kamikaze flea that does just that.

As far as carriers go I'm still working on the second version of my Prometheus which uses a combination of drones + salvaging turrets.

Also working on my Herakles Titan which should house, I'm hoping, around 250 drones. Or I might reduce the number to be something more reasonable and give it 8/9 frigates instead. Each with their own compliment of drones.

No matter what though it all comes right back around to that power update we've been waiting on for the last 8 months. Once it is out, I am sure there will be plenty of discussion on what setups produce most effectively for drones.

Question: how do you efficiently manage the launch/recovery sequence of a "Russian nesting carrier" like that? Wireless logic? I'm working on (off and on) something between destroyer and frigate size with several of my Sledge Mk2 interceptors, and four of the new skirmish corvettes both adding thrust (the new inherit thrust feature makes certain designs kind of interesting to tinker with) and visually appearing to be engine humps. Depending on how that all works, I might build a relatively stripped down jump-ship to carry a few of these guys around.

 

[Loadout]

Question: how do you efficiently manage the launch/recovery sequence of a "Russian nesting carrier" like that? Wireless logic? I'm working on (off and on) something between destroyer and frigate size with several of my Sledge Mk2 interceptors, and four of the new skirmish corvettes both adding thrust (the new inherit thrust feature makes certain designs kind of interesting to tinker with) and visually appearing to be engine humps. Depending on how that all works, I might build a relatively stripped down jump-ship to carry a few of these guys around.

Simplicity is often the most effective thing. Nesting racks while fun are generally unnecessary. If I had to do it I would make each of them dock in a line. Such that rack A's butt lines up with rack B's head. In a long chain of sorts. That should allow them to recover fairly well. Regular docking mechanisms have in the past had a bit of an odd quirk where they will only recover to the place they were sitting at previously. So if your loading dock is several blocks away it may or may not actually dock correctly. That said, jump sticks are nice but you may want to look into using warp gate racks.

By using the warp gate you can control exactly where you want a rack to go (to a sizable distance as well), added bonus they won't load if it's far enough away until you approach. Which means you can take your time and dump numerous racks there over the course of an hour or so. Once you load in the logic to release will kick in and then jettison them all at once. If the distance happens to be too far away or you've already conquered the area the gate was set too you can always build another gate and conquer the next area. Using single jumps requires much more aim and patience and ground work than just building a small gate wide enough to pump a single drone rack through. Mind you only the core actually needs to fit through the gate to start the warp. So having a long stick with the core on the end and the rack behind it means you only need a 5x5 gate to work this magic.

Wireless logic has a bad habit of failing when there are too many around, say 20+ wireless blocks and suddenly they begin to lose their connections. It's something that has been addressed several times but keeps popping back up. Try connecting an activator to the dock itself and set your logic from there.

If I have time later tonight I'll post a few example pics.

 

[BrotherLazarus]

Simplicity is often the most effective thing. Nesting racks while fun are generally unnecessary. If I had to do it I would make each of them dock in a line. Such that rack A's butt lines up with rack B's head. In a long chain of sorts. That should allow them to recover fairly well. Regular docking mechanisms have in the past had a bit of an odd quirk where they will only recover to the place they were sitting at previously. So if your loading dock is several blocks away it may or may not actually dock correctly. That said, jump sticks are nice but you may want to look into using warp gate racks.

By using the warp gate you can control exactly where you want a rack to go (to a sizable distance as well), added bonus they won't load if it's far enough away until you approach. Which means you can take your time and dump numerous racks there over the course of an hour or so. Once you load in the logic to release will kick in and then jettison them all at once. If the distance happens to be too far away or you've already conquered the area the gate was set too you can always build another gate and conquer the next area. Using single jumps requires much more aim and patience and ground work than just building a small gate wide enough to pump a single drone rack through. Mind you only the core actually needs to fit through the gate to start the warp. So having a long stick with the core on the end and the rack behind it means you only need a 5x5 gate to work this magic.

Wireless logic has a bad habit of failing when there are too many around, say 20+ wireless blocks and suddenly they begin to lose their connections. It's something that has been addressed several times but keeps popping back up. Try connecting an activator to the dock itself and set your logic from there.

If I have time later tonight I'll post a few example pics.

I was thinking less "disposable jump rack" and more "stripped down capital ship"... there's this old microgame called WarpWar, where there were system ships and jumpships. The latter were capable of warping between systems, the former were not and had to hitch a ride. Something like that, where the real combat power of my little pocket fleet (keep in mind I'm not thinking of PvP-capable craft, just something to putter around a private server in) comes from the system ships clinging to the bigger framework vessel's flanks.

I thought that might be a fun diversion, and a nice way to incorporate the design into something I'll use beyond testing the design against pirates.

 

[Loadout]

I was thinking less "disposable jump rack" and more "stripped down capital ship"... there's this old microgame called WarpWar, where there were system ships and jumpships. The latter were capable of warping between systems, the former were not and had to hitch a ride. Something like that, where the real combat power of my little pocket fleet (keep in mind I'm not thinking of PvP-capable craft, just something to putter around a private server in) comes from the system ships clinging to the bigger framework vessel's flanks.

I thought that might be a fun diversion, and a nice way to incorporate the design into something I'll use beyond testing the design against pirates.

If your goal is to just have smaller frigate sized ships dock to a much larger ship then don't worry about drone-ception. Having all those matroska docking sequences will just give you head aches, believe me they are arduous and time consuming to say the least.

Side note: those Russian dolls that are stacked inside each other are matroska dolls btw

To be honest, whatever your frigate is carrying is better off being scrapped on the field and rebuilt at a ship yard. Drone survival rate is abysmal at best, so the chances of any recovery operation save for mining drones is highly unlikely to be fruitful. I would advise against recovery all together. As long as you save A blueprint at A shipyard Somewhere, you will be able to replace all the drones on the ship with a simple repair visit. I think a lot of us have overlooked the nifty repair feature of these beasts. With repair you can immediately replace any lost drones faster than you can probably dock most advanced rack setups.

 

[BrotherLazarus]

Well that's... disappointing. I suppose half of my recovery/launch setup is purely for the aesthetics--it just looks neat to see them slowly lock into their individual bays, have the doors slam shut, and then a "locked and cocked" light pop on--though the Sledge Mk2 is fairly durable, at least against AI craft. The MiniBlaster not so much, but those were an experiment that I didn't quite think through properly and scrapped after their first combat engagement (when a cloud of eighty drones can't even scrap an Isanth properly, there's an issue, though they did chew up a station nicely enough).

 

[Loadout]

Well that's... disappointing. I suppose half of my recovery/launch setup is purely for the aesthetics--it just looks neat to see them slowly lock into their individual bays, have the doors slam shut, and then a "locked and cocked" light pop on--though the Sledge Mk2 is fairly durable, at least against AI craft. The MiniBlaster not so much, but those were an experiment that I didn't quite think through properly and scrapped after their first combat engagement (when a cloud of eighty drones can't even scrap an Isanth properly, there's an issue, though they did chew up a station nicely enough).

There's nothing wrong with aesthetics. sometimes though we just need to tone them down a bit to make them not cause migraines and hair pulling situations involving oddly working docking blocks, chickens, and drone-babies.

For your purpose though why not make Larger drones? Say enlarge the size of a single drone to be around 21 x 19 x 50 (wide/tall/high). That would make each of them a corvette drone and could then be used as unmanned frigates. In this way you can still achieve the larger ship holding onto the fleet, use turrets regularly (without awkwardness), and also have various components of the mother-ship be drones.

Because you have larger long distance mother-ship there's little reason to include life sustaining features like cabins, and recreational rooms inside what will eventually be large drones. Instead you would only need those on the mother-ship itself, the other ships would just have short term lodgings, maybe a bed and bridge. You could also turn the interior of those enlarged drones into service walkways.

Challenge the aesthetic you have to become more, don't get bummed about old work, if it's more than 10 minutes old it's ancient! =D

 

[BrotherLazarus]

While we're on the topic of larger/less "conventional" drones (corvettes and larger rather than interceptors and bombers), has anyone managed to trick the Bobby AI into becoming a functional torpedo yet? I've been wanting to try that for something battlecruiser sized or larger, just for amusement.

Back to something else you mentioned--I'm not sure what's going on, but I've been unable to get shipyards to function properly for anything above about 20x20x20, once I get up into capital ships, it warps whatever is docked to it (large or small) around a dozen sectors away and pops an error message until I restart the server. Makes it quite irritating to reload high-capacity carriers after combat losses (such as my 120-ish meter long light microdrone saturation carrier, stacking 80 drones by hand is incredibly boring even with 20-packs to deploy from!).. so I've been largely focusing on drone systems that I can reload without lapsing into a boredom-induced coma.

Currently the beta skirmish corvette has the guts exposed to the interior, with a pair of access hatches providing a little bit of protection, it's pretty fugly. I'll revise the interiors later to add a little more decoration than a chair and forward viewports but I'm not that solid with micro-scale interiors. At that level, all of my interiors end up being pretty raw and industrial. I'll get some screens next time I boot StarMade, since I need to do some external detail passes to make the Sledge Mk2 look a little better.

 

[AtraUnam]

I see a bright future for drones with pre-charged alpha weapons under the new system.

 

[Madman198237]

Ehhh.....Probably not.

Not unless you've got the drone power to one-shot a hostile vessel completely, or to accomplish some other goal (Bringing down shields in bursts to accompany alpha-strike ship weapon? But then you still need the drones to charge their own power reasonably quickly...)

 

[Loadout]

While we're on the topic of larger/less "conventional" drones (corvettes and larger rather than interceptors and bombers), has anyone managed to trick the Bobby AI into becoming a functional torpedo yet? I've been wanting to try that for something battlecruiser sized or larger, just for amusement.

Back to something else you mentioned--I'm not sure what's going on, but I've been unable to get shipyards to function properly for anything above about 20x20x20, once I get up into capital ships, it warps whatever is docked to it (large or small) around a dozen sectors away and pops an error message until I restart the server. Makes it quite irritating to reload high-capacity carriers after combat losses (such as my 120-ish meter long light microdrone saturation carrier, stacking 80 drones by hand is incredibly boring even with 20-packs to deploy from!).. so I've been largely focusing on drone systems that I can reload without lapsing into a boredom-induced coma.

Currently the beta skirmish corvette has the guts exposed to the interior, with a pair of access hatches providing a little bit of protection, it's pretty fugly. I'll revise the interiors later to add a little more decoration than a chair and forward viewports but I'm not that solid with micro-scale interiors. At that level, all of my interiors end up being pretty raw and industrial. I'll get some screens next time I boot StarMade, since I need to do some external detail passes to make the Sledge Mk2 look a little better.

I used to have a similar issue with docking things, which I'm sure is the same issue. I fixed it by uninstalling and then reinstalling, bit of a pain but after a few tries it worked out fine. I chocked it up to some sort of corrupt game file.

You can just make a sort of reload area similar to how Keptick 's titan loads up drones. He posted a gif of it ages ago, but it basically takes a series of drones and loads them up from a single access point. Mind you if you're loading 80 drones it may be easier to load from several points. But the idea is as follows;

Construction bay for a drone = D

| D - -| - > access point* - - ->| |
--------- | Ship |
| D - - | - > access point2 - - -> | |
---------

Stacking construction areas like this creates drones faster without the above mentioned issue, unless your drones are bigger than 20 x 20 x 20..

On the bobby AI part you use a single pulse to get it in range and basically pack the front of the ship with warheads. Do not add any shields, if you do they'll just ram the enemy until it shoots through said shields. Which takes a while since most vessels do not pack turrets with pulse weapons of their own. Although that wouldn't be a bad idea lately.

Ideally the AI will use friendly fire to damage each other and set off the warheads all at once. Once that happens clusters of torpedoes will set off a huge blast. I've used this so far at best to deal around 250k damage in a few seconds. Not bad for about 20 drones (most of which did NOT detonate).


Industrial is a nice finish but tough to get right. I would suggest using some grates or metal bars (the actual metal capsules), use them to cover up square sections and alternate with actual finished hull blocks. sort of a 2 by 2 block finish. The key to nice access tunnels is actually making them really big but only so they are large enough to not be cramped. 2x3 is a good place to start. You can go either tall and narrow with some sort of exterior view, or wide and short with a pure internal view. Either way usually ends up great.

 

[BrotherLazarus]

I used to have a similar issue with docking things, which I'm sure is the same issue. I fixed it by uninstalling and then reinstalling, bit of a pain but after a few tries it worked out fine. I chocked it up to some sort of corrupt game file.

You can just make a sort of reload area similar to how Keptick 's titan loads up drones. He posted a gif of it ages ago, but it basically takes a series of drones and loads them up from a single access point. Mind you if you're loading 80 drones it may be easier to load from several points. But the idea is as follows;

Construction bay for a drone = D

| D - -| - > access point* - - ->| |
--------- | Ship |
| D - - | - > access point2 - - -> | |
---------

Stacking construction areas like this creates drones faster without the above mentioned issue, unless your drones are bigger than 20 x 20 x 20..

On the bobby AI part you use a single pulse to get it in range and basically pack the front of the ship with warheads. Do not add any shields, if you do they'll just ram the enemy until it shoots through said shields. Which takes a while since most vessels do not pack turrets with pulse weapons of their own. Although that wouldn't be a bad idea lately.

Ideally the AI will use friendly fire to damage each other and set off the warheads all at once. Once that happens clusters of torpedoes will set off a huge blast. I've used this so far at best to deal around 250k damage in a few seconds. Not bad for about 20 drones (most of which did NOT detonate).


Industrial is a nice finish but tough to get right. I would suggest using some grates or metal bars (the actual metal capsules), use them to cover up square sections and alternate with actual finished hull blocks. sort of a 2 by 2 block finish. The key to nice access tunnels is actually making them really big but only so they are large enough to not be cramped. 2x3 is a good place to start. You can go either tall and narrow with some sort of exterior view, or wide and short with a pure internal view. Either way usually ends up great.

The largest drone I have is the automated skirmish corvette, and since it's got no interior to it the outer dimensions are small enough to fit in my 25x25x25 parasite yards. Which, for the record, work properly when I dock to them. It's only the capital yard at something like 200x200x300 that causes issues--going back a few posts there.

The recovery on that mini-drone carrier had four inputs that led into individual launch bays, it was just that when you dock a ton of drones it is kind of a pain, no matter how streamlined your retrieval system is. On the other hand, it's gotten me a lot better at moving small ships around a crowded dockyard at full speed without hitting things, so it's not all bad. Ish. Would have been better if the MiniBlaster was useful as anything other than a dispersed anti-missile system--it does a great job of shooting down every missile launched but is absolutely terrible at actually taking down targets, even with massed fire.

On to the industrial... I don't mean the industrial vibe so much as I mean industrial reality--crawling around in something where the insides are exposed for access and because space is at a bit of a premium. The skirmish drone there is pretty small, probably what other users would classify as a bomber, I think the widest measurement was the 23 block width. There was barely enough room inside for a 2x2 passageway, which runs right along the top of the spinal mount beam array, a single angle block next to the core as a seat, and viewports forward.

For those torps... at 250k damage, how large were the drones? If I could pull it off with something near the size of a coin-drone that'd be handy. Stack a few dozen of those *shudder* in the load tube, and then fire them off as-needed.

 

[Loadout]

The largest drone I have is the automated skirmish corvette, and since it's got no interior to it the outer dimensions are small enough to fit in my 25x25x25 parasite yards. Which, for the record, work properly when I dock to them. It's only the capital yard at something like 200x200x300 that causes issues--going back a few posts there.

The recovery on that mini-drone carrier had four inputs that led into individual launch bays, it was just that when you dock a ton of drones it is kind of a pain, no matter how streamlined your retrieval system is. On the other hand, it's gotten me a lot better at moving small ships around a crowded dockyard at full speed without hitting things, so it's not all bad. Ish. Would have been better if the MiniBlaster was useful as anything other than a dispersed anti-missile system--it does a great job of shooting down every missile launched but is absolutely terrible at actually taking down targets, even with massed fire.

On to the industrial... I don't mean the industrial vibe so much as I mean industrial reality--crawling around in something where the insides are exposed for access and because space is at a bit of a premium. The skirmish drone there is pretty small, probably what other users would classify as a bomber, I think the widest measurement was the 23 block width. There was barely enough room inside for a 2x2 passageway, which runs right along the top of the spinal mount beam array, a single angle block next to the core as a seat, and viewports forward.

For those torps... at 250k damage, how large were the drones? If I could pull it off with something near the size of a coin-drone that'd be handy. Stack a few dozen of those *shudder* in the load tube, and then fire them off as-needed.

The drones were 7x7x7, but they were packed pretty tightly with warheads. I'd say about half that space was warheads, the rest was thrusters and I believe just one or two reactor blocks. In total about 30 warheads per drone. It was about 8 drones that went off so my estimate is about 1k damage per warhead. That said they're highly unreliable, in a group of 20 only 8 exploded. More testing will be needed to make them more reliable. Once they are I expect a lot better performance honestly.

I did a little more testing, mostly just removed any remaining shielding on them, and it seems each of my explosive drones can do anywhere between 30k and 100k damage each. Seems to depend entirely on the distance from the target and how many warheads actually explode.

Gonna take A TON more testing to determine why some of these drones did so little and others did so much as well as why some only fired off two warheads and others completely exploded.

On the industrial thing, you can use wedges as well as slabs to take up less space. Like so...

This way you can "open up" the area without actually removing blocks. You can do similar tricks with corner blocks as well as heptas. After a while you'll find that even premium space can be made to feel open without losing blocks.

Recovery is always a pain no doubt about that. Reloading units is arduous unless you've got some kind of logic setup to automate the process. I've been working on a hangar to help do that, one entry point but multiple exits. The premise is that I can load each rack into a specific bay from a single point, with only 4 racks the time needed isn't terrible. The single loading point also means I only need to dock it next to the yard where the rack is made and then scoot the completed rack into place once it's ready. A lot less moving involved and generally a lot less painful too.

 

[BrotherLazarus]

The drones were 7x7x7, but they were packed pretty tightly with warheads. I'd say about half that space was warheads, the rest was thrusters and I believe just one or two reactor blocks. In total about 30 warheads per drone. It was about 8 drones that went off so my estimate is about 1k damage per warhead. That said they're highly unreliable, in a group of 20 only 8 exploded. More testing will be needed to make them more reliable. Once they are I expect a lot better performance honestly.

I did a little more testing, mostly just removed any remaining shielding on them, and it seems each of my explosive drones can do anywhere between 30k and 100k damage each. Seems to depend entirely on the distance from the target and how many warheads actually explode.

Gonna take A TON more testing to determine why some of these drones did so little and others did so much as well as why some only fired off two warheads and others completely exploded.

On the industrial thing, you can use wedges as well as slabs to take up less space. Like so...

This way you can "open up" the area without actually removing blocks. You can do similar tricks with corner blocks as well as heptas. After a while you'll find that even premium space can be made to feel open without losing blocks.

Recovery is always a pain no doubt about that. Reloading units is arduous unless you've got some kind of logic setup to automate the process. I've been working on a hangar to help do that, one entry point but multiple exits. The premise is that I can load each rack into a specific bay from a single point, with only 4 racks the time needed isn't terrible. The single loading point also means I only need to dock it next to the yard where the rack is made and then scoot the completed rack into place once it's ready. A lot less moving involved and generally a lot less painful too.

Apparently I need to scale my designs up in size--I remember my frigates being considered "cruisers" a couple years ago, now my interceptor is a mite and my corvette is smaller than a bomber. The only access tube that fits in the skirmish corvette is a 2x2, the rest of the space is components, and there's not even an access hatch in the Sledge Mk2 because I've been limiting my scale. 7x7x7 is pretty large for my purposes, it would fill a good chunk of the cargo bay in one of my haulers--even the newer ones.

If I have more space to play with (even a room that's only 3 blocks tall), interiors aren't a problem, but unfortunately wedges and corner blocks interfere with rail rotation so a lot of my larger hangars skip decoration entirely. I don't remember if you were in chat when I was posting my station interiors before I converted to lurk-mode, but I did pick up some tricks before I vanished thanks to a fair amount of feedback as I worked.

 

[Madman198237]

Eh, everyone has their own classification system.

Don't be concerned with your scale.

 

[BrotherLazarus]

Eh, everyone has their own classification system.

Don't be concerned with your scale.

Well, it's something of an arms race. My scale was large, so the intention of publishing finished ships to the dock wasn't a problem--folks would grow into them. Now that I'm back in tinkering with new systems, the scale has bloated to the point where my larger warships are very undersized, and while my older freighter is still just fine, it's a sitting target for anything with a pulse making it useless to toss onto the dock for other players.

That's largely why I haven't bothered to publish anything other than pictures--my setups have largely become obsolete before they're even completed, and while some of them look rather nice it's a bear to upgrade them to remain useful. And with the upcoming reactor mechanics, I'm not even laying in hulls at the shipyard outside of bare-bones testbeds for mechanical concepts; though even that is turning into expansion wings on the station instead of mobile vessels.

 

[StormWing0]

Oh if it makes you feel better my faction's ships and stations tend to be ant sized by comparison to other peoples' stuff. At around 20k mass I start building smarter because I have to. The average size of drones these days ranges between 100 mass and about 1-3k mass from what I can tell. That said it depends on the server and the player. I've been snagging larger ships and tacking them onto carriers to see the results for grins.

 

[BrotherLazarus]

Oh if it makes you feel better my faction's ships and stations tend to be ant sized by comparison to other peoples' stuff. At around 20k mass I start building smarter because I have to. The average size of drones these days ranges between 100 mass and about 1-3k mass from what I can tell. That said it depends on the server and the player. I've been snagging larger ships and tacking them onto carriers to see the results for grins.

Again, it's not really that I'm dissatisfied with my designs personally, it's that when I do publish blueprints in a game I prefer to do so with a "bugs ironed out" and "generally useful" platform. So something that will just evaporate under the guns of whatever 'rats fly on the server a player uses just seems counter-intuitive and I don't bother. I guess I could touch up the EHI Bulk Hauler, add a couple turret rings for end-user AMS additions, and upload. It's still a big ol' piggy with enough of space for transporting the entire colony from production end to deployment end. The. Entire. Colony. Raw materials take up so little space that the couple hundred cubic meters of cargo space takes forever to fill, and even longer with final mats. It's slow, but it has a jump drive. And a scanner because.. I forget why.

The 150m frigates though... I guess I could slap on a Bobby core with the faction module, and issue them as Fleet-ready system picket ships, but the Bobby AI won't get the most out of the loadouts (one of them has a broadside array that still works decently with a player, but is worthless with Bobby at the helm). Basically, for the (lack) of power and the large target profile, it would be easier just to lay in a new hull once the newest mechanics come down the line.

I still like them.

 

[Madman198237]

harne12312 Maybe I'm misreading your post, but that link leads to quadcopters/REAL-LIFE drones, this is a thread for the research and development of STARMADE drones.