Drones coming for powerplay

[Bokugo]

You perfectly summed up pretty much every response ever to every new feature ever in any online game

Well if 100 drones went out and collected chunks of 10% palladium, you would only get 10t of palladium. And if the drones are 1k you're only getting 3-4k per ton, not too mention you will blow though drones like candy and have to leave before filled up. Considering the lack of info, this has all been speculation whic in turn leads to misguided conclusions. I'm just trying to show you the other side.
As long as they are dirt cheap, I can send out an army, and chunk %s have been tweaked I'll be mostly fine at least.

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One of the modes was collect all items in range, which could be the 12 or so chunks you get from an asteroid whilst mining
To quote you I wish people would take the time to read fully on what they are commenting on.

I was talking about reusable drones.

 

[Hexicube]

As mentioned in the update there is an area collect mode - release the drone and it will collect what it can within a a given radius for its lifetime.

Michael

That still sounds like the drone is consumed after use, though, or are you specifically stating the drone will be re-usable after collection?

 

[Hexicube]

What are you mining?

I'd like to know what you're mining if you can match the income of even a cobra making a trade run, because I can make about 100kCR in under 10 minutes (something like 1.1kCR profit per ton, I didn't look far), which is over .5mCR in an hour. Bear in mind trading only gets more profitable with a bigger ship like a T9, whereas mining is limited by scoop rate.

 

[Michael Brookes]

That still sounds like the drone is consumed after use, though, or are you specifically stating the drone will be re-usable after collection?

That is correct.

Michael

 

[Magic Man]

I'm one for giving things more complexity, more skill required, more steps and procedures to undertake rather than the "give me a button to do this" type but as long as these fit logically with me in terms of the imagined real universe we are meant to be in then that's fine.
And they do. They make sense.

 

[Kyokushin]

I am excited, because when i will be run out of fuel it will be not a death sentence

 

[MahdDogg]

I really hope FD avoids Reddit like the plague. Nothing but a group of self-entitled kids who think they know better about everything and couldn't be more wrong.

Whilst I certainly agree with your assessment here, you do actually see the irony of posting this particular statement on the FD Forums where the sense of ridiculous entitlement is also at epic proportions?

 

[ATrifleMiffed]

That is correct.

Michael

The former or the latter?

 

[Michael Brookes]

The former or the latter?

The drone is is one shot - so cannot be reused.

Michael

 

[Ian Phillips]

If I was a moderator on here with all the shizzle they have to put up with, I would have gone insane.... the devs too, but then at least they get money for it, where as the mods do it for the community. (AFAIK)

Have you seen my forum title? Maderator says it all

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

The drone is is one shot - so cannot be reused.

Michael

Michael, can you specify - will these drones will look like drones we have seen in the past in one peek of the week and 3D mockup? Or these are different ones

 

[Magic Man]

The one shot use makes perfect sense from a programming/implementation point of view, working similarly to the limpets as others have said.
You buy as many drones as you can fit in your cargo hold and basically "exchange" a drone for a cargo item they return.
No need to faff around with maintenance nor degradation of the drone over a lifetime of re-use, they are simply a once use time saver instead of scooping yourself. You take a small hit (the cost of the drone) to obtain an item for the benefit of the time saved.
Simple, logical, works well.

 

[Kayweg]

The one shot use makes perfect sense from a programming/implementation point of view, working similarly to the limpets as others have said.
You buy as many drones as you can fit in your cargo hold and basically "exchange" a drone for a cargo item they return.
No need to faff around with maintenance nor degradation of the drone over a lifetime of re-use, they are simply a once use time saver instead of scooping yourself. You take a small hit (the cost of the drone) to obtain an item for the benefit of the time saved.
Simple, logical, works well.

Exactly, all it needs to do before it dies is to gather enough chunks for the refinery to produce 1t of commodity. Sounds pretty straight forward to me too.

 

[Tall Paul]

Why not consider an intermediate and advanced cargo scoop. Basically scoops that have a tractor beam of sorts that, as you approach the canister/ore will pull the item into your hold.

Using an internal slot, like a FSD Interdictor players will need to plan builds

 

[Loon]

I don't get the hate for drones. My understanding is that they will harvest the chunks for you but you still have to go to the roids, find a good one and then drill the roid. What the hell is the problem with telling a drone to go get the chunk while you pop a few more. Mining like the other professions is meant to be a way to make money we invest time in an activaty and are rewarded by cash on return to a station.
At the moment mining does not offer that reward. The reason is twofold, the time it takes to fill your ship and the value you can sell the goods for at the station. As you cannot change the value as that would impact across the whole market, but you can speed up the processing (collection). Now At the moment I can see two ways of speeding it up. 1 Have mining lasers like in Eve that dump it straight into your refinery at the end of a cycle (a bit like Eve).
2.Speed up the recovery of the chunks. I think the suggestion of recovery drone is a very good compromise as it only takes the fetching away from mix and does not detract form the mining mechanic of the game.
I think recovery drone = a good idea.

Loon

 

[NeilF]

I would prefer them to be reusable not so much for the money consideration, as I would expect them to be fairly cheap if their are expendable. It would just make more sense and feel better to have reusable drones that you have to refuel and repair from time to time, that you care about not losing, and where you have to balance the number of drones with how much cargo space you leave free for minerals or stolen goods, instead of simply filling the entire cargo bay all the time.

They would also be more of a known quantity. ie: You buy a 4t module of drones, maybe containing a pair of them? But you can use them over and over so you're not having to second guess your future cargo usage. What if you buy 16t of these expendable drones and don't end up using them for ages, then you've got 16t of space usuable.

At least with a dedicated module of reusable drones you knwo exactly where you stand all the time.

HOWEVER, this solution is so obvious, there must be a simple (game mechanic) reason why Frontier haev gone down this disposable solution instead.

 

[Quineloe]

I'm not really too concerned about exactly how the drones will work. I just hope they are actually good enough to be used, especially for mining, which is really the part of the game that was most bare bones at launch and received nothing in the first two updates either.

What is important about drones?

- they need to be fast. If they take longer to scoop up the 10 mined fragments from an asteroid than a player would, they're useless
- they need to be cheap. If all your money goes into replacing the drones, they're pointless
- they need to actually last for a mining trip. If you run out of drones when your cargo hold is 25% full, we're really just back at square 1.

Also, refinery needs to remember what was allocated in the slots now. This is a really unfun micromanagement aspect of mining.

 

[Lenroc elisav]

Not trying to annoy anyone but how in the world did you manage to come up with the "one use" feature? Rechargeable batteries and electric motors are used since twentieth century and hydrogen fuel for propulsion is bountiful around the galaxy. Guess deep-space mining (something I've tried) won't be able to reliably use these drones while the others will have to make station trips to restock on drones.

Please reconsider cause this seems a bit forced but I'll admit that I'll take your iteration over no iteration .

 

[ChrisT]

I think we'll have to wait for the Beta/Release to see how this works. My initial impression is, it will work. Tractor beams are NOT in canon, so it has to be little bots doing the going and getting.

I actually think I made a suggestion along these lines some time back. Though it probably has nothing to do with this, I just recalled seeing a mining drone concept in an ancient News Letter and I was wondering when something along those lines would appear.

The problem with mining is parallelising your work, if you have a T7 or T9, its just too hard to fill it in a time frame that = profit, or at least profit on a similar level to others with ships of a value similar to a T7 or T9

So, lets hope we can spray out a lot of drones, and the blow heck out of asteroids, and they do the hoovering.

This mechanic should also work really well with Wings, you can have a wing of one or two miners, that BOTH laser an asteroid and one of the pair, with a big cargo hold and processors, is the one firing out drones to gather in all that ore.

The proof of the pudding will be how more efficient mines will be able to become, given the necessary resources.

I wonder how much gathering a drone will do per use? 1ton, or is it time based?

I guess there is scope for different quality/price levels for drones i.e. more $$$ means more tons gathered, or travel speed, or at the top end, both.

Maybe the really expensive drones would only make economic sense for expensive commodities, such as silver, gold etc.

 

[bamber]

So.....Michael...what I ma understanding is
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I find an asteroid and I fire up my mining laser
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10 fragments are expelled
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I launch a drone in area search
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Drone collect 10 fragments and returns to ship
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Drone disappears
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Can I also assume there has been a change to how the refinery bins work and they will "auto allocate" a fragment to a free bin so we dont constantly have to allocate one gold fragment when we have 6 free bins while in the middle of Mining?