The ultimate drone R&D thread

[Gerion]

Drones do damage, everything else is a bonus... Also, thanks to how Starmade works, you can equip literally every ship with at least one drone or more.

Or a rack

Or a rack container

Or you just fire drone racks with timed activators through a warpgate. That be fun

 

[Ciggofwar]

Power modular reactors are OP With having to upgrade my Titan to accommodate for the newer content I have to build it bigger by 2/3 across the board to make it the same thing as before, so now I'm up too 50 power modular reactors, that would be a huge amount of emp drones just to combat that and for the cool down timer vs max ticks or smaller but faster ticks, your not going to be effective enough, included is the survivability of the drones, your going for a ratio of drones that will be required to do the job after survivability. Mistakenly you keep thinking all your payload drones will make it to there destination,

Pretty plane engines, but you noticed there something else there and that is rows of heat seekers being that this only one engine bay out of four, fired in salvo groups in multiple direction with 5000 meter range on the EE server how close do you think you need to be launch your cargo?
Titan size ships can carry equally amount of defenses lunched at them, and there are even bigger Titans than mine! This would be a small outdated Titan compared to some out there that are now being built, I have an older out dated model! The heat seekers will now target move if the target gets taken out, the remaining will seek the next target in range rinse and repeat until there dispersed, and there are varied set up's that one can use for activating launching.
This is only the rear defenses, If I launched them all at once you would laggg severely, some use that as tactic's by warping in and out and crashing your client! Some think that's "winning" ?

That's not a ship beside the shop that's the bottom turret, some might think that's a big "ship' from there perspective of gameplay, as we all did at one time, range is 12000 meters on the EE server, with punch through and it goes through an abandoned station from the heaviest side across some space and goes through an asteroid and continues out the other side, will do the same thing to your drones with small amount of shielding, You have to get your carrier into the same sector of space I occupy, that's the first problem.

I could dock this to my ship fill full of fake heavy shielded turrets and hurl it at you and your drones? or could be my anti drone "drone" defense platform with all kinds of toys in there leave me much ample time to pick off all the drones while there being taken out by the hundreds.

I assure you size does matter in pvp and what you can cart around with you, can't really do that with a 60k mass ship now can you?
Titan vs Titan, now your on the same page!

 

[Thalanor]

Your barreled turret looks nice, the other one is basically THE definition of doombrick. Looks neither like a ship nor a turret, completely independent of 'perspective of gameplay'. If I was a server admin I'd go /destroy_entity on that thing, sorry. If you want to know how to make large turrets look good, check out NuclearFun's ships in community content.

Turrets in any shape, way or form are completely inefficient drone countermeasures though; heatseekers are viable when launched via logic + delays between barrels as long as you are not flying with an allied fleet. That is known knowledge thus far.

Everything can be "countered" by some sufficiently large doombrick ten times the size of your intended target fleet or drone swarm... please don't contribute to even more doombricks in the universe, there are enough of them already and you are hardly going to earn much praise for advanced-buildmode slapping system bricks into a hull brick.

 

[Keptick]

I'd just use more fucking drones to counter you, the end result would be the same: Your death. Ciggofwar

Again, you're basing your whole argument on size difference. An equivalent mass of drones to your ship would wipe it on the floor so fast it wouldn't even be funny.

 

[Thalanor]

I have the sudden urge to bump my dedicated drone carrier up in priority. I just realized that I have no to-date damage drone technology and must fix this :D

Plan: guided missiles (primary) and stop beam (secondary) - classical proven combination. Of course some skoomdrone rapidfire launcher will also be present.

 

[Loadout]

I have the sudden urge to bump my dedicated drone carrier up in priority. I just realized that I have no to-date damage drone

technology and must fix this :D

Plan: guided missiles (primary) and stop beam (secondary) - classical proven combination. Of course some skoomdrone rapidfire launcher will also be present.

my kuwagas actually use the opposite to great effect. damage beams to chew through hull armor and stop rockets to provide area stop effect. either way missiles + beams + stop in any combo feels quite pleasing.

Drones do damage, everything else is a bonus... Also, thanks to how Starmade works, you can equip literally every ship with at least one drone or more.

Or a rack

Or a rack container

Or you just fire drone racks with timed activators through a warpgate. That be fun

that last part... my favorite for sneak attacks.

speaking of which, Ciggofwar it's not like it's a challenge to sneak a fleet of drones up on your titan. I can literally come up with half a dozen ways from the top of my head that could deploy 1000s of drones beside your titan and well inside effective range. truly basing your calculations on the xxx weapons you have or how big you are is pointless. mainly cause i can simply build an equal size carrier with mega emp cannon to shut all your turrets and shield regen offline permanently. speaking of which i am already in the process of building a multimillion damage emp weapons array on my fleet carrier.

 

[Thalanor]

Turns out, beams don't suck that much for removing hull indeed - thx Loadout , I gave them a chance and it seems a multioutput array of many small low damage beams obliterates system blocks.
That is on an experimental unfinished new smaller drone design though. Being considerably smaller than the (Loadout ) Kuwaga or the Soul drone, it will likely not be able to use two weapon systems at once, so I will split it into several drone versions and have mixed-variant racks. The idea is to not have any missiles at all (new approach) in order to be able to overwhelm a cannon-turreted ship. Of course that will tone down the hull damage, but I plan to fix that with pure drone quantity.

New guidelines for my drones: front armor = the faction block, all hull is basic hull only. Small amounts of shields (to simulate some armor), but nothing major (like 2k shields or such). Rather a small size to dispense more of them. Possibly a "torpedo" look.

The plan is to make use of the newly discovered n-depth racks (n>1) to dispense a large amount of drones (64 is a nice number). The carrier vessel would be pretty dedicated and optimized for jumping close, releasing drones and possibly jumping away right after.

Now I want to see your guys newest drone designs and multilevel racks :D Ill be contributing to that later on, nothing show-ready there yet.

 

[Loadout]

Turns out, beams don't suck that much for removing hull indeed - thx Loadout , I gave them a chance and it seems a multioutput array of many small low damage beams obliterates system blocks.
That is on an experimental unfinished new smaller drone design though. Being considerably smaller than the (Loadout ) Kuwaga or the Soul drone, it will likely not be able to use two weapon systems at once, so I will split it into several drone versions and have mixed-variant racks. The idea is to not have any missiles at all (new approach) in order to be able to overwhelm a cannon-turreted ship. Of course that will tone down the hull damage, but I plan to fix that with pure drone quantity.

New guidelines for my drones: front armor = the faction block, all hull is basic hull only. Small amounts of shields (to simulate some armor), but nothing major (like 2k shields or such). Rather a small size to dispense more of them. Possibly a "torpedo" look.

The plan is to make use of the newly discovered n-depth racks (n>1) to dispense a large amount of drones (64 is a nice number). The carrier vessel would be pretty dedicated and optimized for jumping close, releasing drones and possibly jumping away right after.

Now I want to see your guys newest drone designs and multilevel racks :D Ill be contributing to that later on, nothing show-ready there yet.

Explosive beams are excellent at block removal, just dont ever give them punch or piercing, those have no effect on beams. They can actually go through armor and damage systems behind the adjacent armor blocks in kind of a mincraft tree shape. strange how explosive works but it's quite effective.

I'll be sharing some pics of my latest works when i get off work tonight, but that won't be for another 5 or 6 hours as of this post. Got plenty of designs to share and even some cheapo refits of my older drones as well.

 

[Gerion]

With AI being able to actually use their ranged weapons effectively, you have the perfect venue for being annoying: With the default sector size, you can dump Cannon/Beam and missile/Beam drones into a sector close to your target and watch them pling at it. Accuracy for the cannons isnt great, but given a large enough target (say, a station) they will hit it. Danger for those drones (aside from a clean-up crew) comes only from cannon/beam (wont hit them), missile/beam (will take a while to destroy them all, plus might get shot down) turrets and AI ships flying over to destroy them.

As you can imagine, these drones are not good for short range, but on long range, they are nice support fire and can even snipe some smaller turrets and ships. Bonus points for virtually no danger to the carrier. Warp in, Deploy drones, warp away. Dont worry, they wont fly towards an enemy, they will just dodge around and take potshots.

/edit: Use Turret setting for the drones. They stop dodging, but they also dont follow enemies who move away from them. Maybe that auto-logic-mover might work for them to still be able to dodge? Something that makes the drone "jump" when it shoots?

 

[ltmauve]

Well, you'd have to be nearby for the sectors to be loaded. I'd imagine a bunch of lock-on missiles on the carrier would be nice for damaging anything that tries to get close to the drones.

 

[Gerion]

Well, you'd have to be nearby for the sectors to be loaded. I'd imagine a bunch of lock-on missiles on the carrier would be nice for damaging anything that tries to get close to the drones.

Well yes, maybe stay close with a cloaked ship. Shouldnt hang around with a carrier, those things are hard to hide and an enemy will go right for it.

 

[Loadout]

---Transmission Incoming---
From: Our spies at Liquid Systems Nano-Yards

Media Stream Initiated...

@Breach Detected. Signal Jammers set: [On]

Project Name: Atlas Lau....

Spoiler: @Buffering@

Ob.ect.ve: ... launch ... 12 Dro...s and ... Lig...t Crui...r ... range ... 6 sectors from ... mount...
Goal: Ac...plished...suc..ss...w/ min....fai...ur...

---------------------------------------------

Projec... : .... man...s ligh...cruis...

Spoiler: @Buffering@

Object...: ...(???)
Goal: ....(???)
Armament: ...(???)

@Security Breach Contained.
---Transmission Terminated---

 

[Malacodor]

Bonus points for virtually no danger to the carrier. Warp in, Deploy drones, warp away.

I wonder when the first disposable drone carrier (with a small jump ship to get back to base and bring the next one) is developed...

 

[Thalanor]

Malacodor well that would be a jump capable drone rack then :D
To accomplish the same, an undockable drone rack on a carrier (undocking of the rack causes the rack to undock drones automatically) is better for that purpose and allows some structure (interior, jump systems, shields) on the carrier without wasting it. Jump-deploy-Jump carriers need at minimum 2 jump drives of course.

 

[Keptick]

I can't wait for the rails, sliding the drone racks in will be much less of a pain...

 

[Gerion]

Ok, this is getting out of hand.... One drone with active jammer (or was it cloak?) and cannon/beam could stop ships from warping around in a damn huge radius (jump drives dont work when you get shot at). Sadly, bobby hasnt learned the intricacies of pressing a stealth/cloak button yet. Can you logic-wire that?

Also, a in-out long range drone deployer really only needs 2 jump drives, enough power to use the jump drives and then as many dockers as you want drones/racks. You dont really need shields, because if you get shot at upon entering a system, you are probably too close for the drones anyway.

 

[Thalanor]

No way to make BOBBY use defensive effects yet. Some can be logic wired with very marginal effects (push and pull for example, and the effect is not constant and less powerful), but cloak and jam are not AI compatible for now.

 

[Gerion]

No way to make BOBBY use defensive effects yet. Some can be logic wired with very marginal effects (push and pull for example, and the effect is not constant and less powerful), but cloak and jam are not AI compatible for now.

Well damn. Ok, just throw this little guy out, he will do well.

"jettisons drone out of the next airlock"

 

[Loadout]

No way to make BOBBY use defensive effects yet. Some can be logic wired with very marginal effects (push and pull for example, and the effect is not constant and less powerful), but cloak and jam are not AI compatible for now.

ion works at full capacity but must be logic wired. the armor effect also works but likewise needs logic circuit goodness. they are constant while you're in the area, once you leave though it pretty much resets itself.

instead of shields you can use a jammer. ai will not target anything which is jammed. cloak is prohibitively expensive even after you shed about 40k mass in drones. otherwise a quick jammer, jump in, deploy, jump out works quite well.

edit: should be noted that jammers work best if active before being spotted. if you're spotted with your jammer off turning it on wont do you much good at all. the ai will pretty much have you at that point.

 

[Keptick]

Cloaked/jammed drones, oh the tears >: D