Tritium Refueling Drones

[Darth Ender]

Exclusive to carrier owners, there would be a mechanism within carriers to synthesize tritium refueling drones.

What is this mechanism: In carrier management hud, there would be a new option to transfer materials to the carrier as well as some raw commodities. Once all the required elements are provided, the carrier will begin building a drone. A total of 3 drones can be built and exist at a single time. Building time is 10 minutes. Before undocking, the owner can select adding built drones to their wing in this hud as well. The wing is automatically disbanded when docked at the carrier after launching.

What are refueling drones: These are cargo pods with minimal ship-like systems but no cockpit and no pilot. They can mine but their refinery systems are specific to tritium, so they only collect tritium. They can hold 200 units of tritium before being full. They have a top speed of 100m/s and are equipped with an FSD capable of only in-system jumping. They are slaved to the owner's ship and that ship must remain within 8km of the drones. Up to 3 can be included and they interact with the owner's ship like a wing. human's can be included in this wing as well if less than 3 drones are used. They only laser mine, and only collect the ore they mine.

How does using the drones work: Tritium drones have no weapons and no shields. They have a strong hull and mining lasers and the ability to gather the tritium they mine like an npc miner ship gathers mined ore. They follow the owner ship in the wing and will mine tritium containing roids that the owner has prospected. They will remain in formation around the owner until such an acceptable prospected roid is found. The drones will communicate with the wing about their current fill state after each roid is depleted that they've mined. Drones can be interdicted in supercruise, Drones follow the owner when they enter supercruise and when they drop out into the owner's instance. If the owner high jumps, they will be lost and destroyed even if a human exists in their instance in the wing. If the owner's ship is destroyed, the drones will be lost and destroyed. If the owner exceeds 8km from the drones, they will be warned and then shortly after the drone will be lost and destroyed.

Drones cannot be taken into planetary environments. There will be a warning about losing them if you enter the gravity well of a planet.
If you disconnect or de-instance from the game, the drones are not lost like limpets. They leave with you under the same timer rules etc that apply to the player. They will re-spawn with the player with their cargo and hull strength values retained. Already in a wing with the player.
You cannot dock at another station with active drones. They will warn you and self destruct as they cannot approach the station and you will disconnect from them once docked at the station.

What about being attacked: It's advised not to use tritium drones where pirates or hostile ships are active as they have no defensive ability. They are slow and easy targets and time consuming to replace.

Upon returning to the carrier, the drones will auto-dock when the owner requests docking permission. The owner would need to dock and re-request the drone wing to relaunch the drones.
When the drones dock, they will auto-transfer their cargo to the tritium depot. They will not transfer cargo to general carrier cargo so they will retain the cargo in themselves until there is room in the depot to transfer after each carrier jump.

Why: Should be obvious, this allows carrier owners to accelerate their acquisition of tritium without needing to alter the stellar forge again, or to just buff or nerf the process and eliminate the role players provide in the tritium economy. It limits the effectiveness of this solution in scenarios where other players are involved in the tritium trade so it wont change that while simulating that additional help in places where it doesn't exist at some additional cost and effort to the owner. in a way that even creates some new gameplay and adds some additional thought to mining that might improve that experience in general. It also is limited to just tritium, so this can't be abused to get richer ...and because they only transfer to the tritium depot, it can't be used to impact the tritium economy. 200 units per drone ship was chosen based on extensive testing in mining hundreds of rings on about how long one can mine at a single time before questioning ones own sanity.


What do they look like: Tritium drones can have different body styles based on arx store purchases. They are sized smaller than T7's due to not having shields or life support systems. They have no cockpit canopy, so they look very unlike any flyable ships. But there would be varying shapes players can purchase and pick. Upon selecting while docked, all existing drones will appear as the selected style when next launched. They cannot be changed while not docked.



As a bonus, this would be a way to test out game mechanics with "npc wings" that could later expand to player's hired crew. Which could go a long way towards allowing some more widespread usage of "multiplayer" gameplay without requiring getting together with other humans to do so. Something that would potentially greatly improve the ability to create more difficult to win scenarios and balance the rewards appropriately.

 

[gorankar]

I actually like some of it, but , yeah, it would be exploited or become a nuisance trying to limit it enough to not be exploited. It also would, at least seem, to take quite a bit of coding to get done.

Going to be honest, the best idea I have ever heard for tritium replenishment has been to allow NPC to slowly fill buy orders for tritium, (and only tritium), on your FC. But, only if you are in a system that has mineable tritium, and you have a buy order in for market avg. or above price. The more mineable tritium in system, and the more you pay above market average, the faster they replenish it for you. Even outside the bubble it is reasonable to expect that you did not fly out there alone in your FC. So there would still be NPC out there to fill you buy order, just slower.
You are paying fair market or better, so no exploit, you are just not relying solely on mining it yourself or other players to fill your buy orders. Easier to code because you are essentially running a few slide rules based off market average, tritium availability, buy order price, system population, and system state, to come up with how fast your buy order would be filled.
I do not remember who to credit this idea to, but it's not my own.

Oh, and for the love of whatever, please allow us to remote transfer tritium. It feels stupid to have an alt on my FC at all times who's only purpose in life is tritium transfer.

 

[Tividar]

For this to increase the rate of mining, you either need the multiple instancing of the 'roid to get fragments per "wing-member" and/or you need to accelerate the rate of pick-up (e.g. more limpets). NPC miners are glacially slow - having the drone act like an NPC miner would not appreciably effect your time spent per tritium gathered. You might pick up a little efficiency by allowing the drone to make independent trips to the carrier, but the gain is going to be slight if you're already using a Cutter for mining.

When I'm serious about mining, I use a wing of 4 ships. One ship (Corvette) is the designated prospector and has the largest array of mining lasers. This ship locates a rock and lasers it. One ship is the designated collector (Cutter). It's got twelve collectors and two medium mining lasers. It gets moved into position once the rock has been identified and starts lasering/collecting. The remaining two ships (Pythons) each carry 2 medium mining lasers. They get moved into position last. This is basically brute-forcing your drone idea, but with better lasering efficiency than an NPC (and a lot of switching between computers...).

Here's an alternate idea:

• Make asteroids targetable, and/or make deposits and fissures targetable and/or make prospector drones attached to an asteroid targetable. The fighter-control system needs to have a valid target to issue orders against (e.g. attack my target).
• Add a new hardpoint "Ship Control module." You could use this module to allow a crewmember or multicrewmate to pilot any ship in your fleet that has both a Supercruise Assist module and an Advanced Docking Module with an interface similar (Identical?) to the SLF interface in multicrew. Medium Hardpoint gets you one slaved ship, Large gets you two, and Huge gets you three. No limit on the number of hardpoints, but you can't slave more ships than you have crewmates to pilot. You set the slaved ship from the outfitting screen and can only change/select ships in the hanger at your current location.

The slaved ships wouldn't show up in Supercruise. Instead, they'd automatically wake out / wake in whenever you made the transition from/to real space. With a little more programing effort, the entire wing shows up as a single ping in supercruise.

Benefits:

• You now have the ability to let your friends essentially borrow your ships in multicrew at the cost of sacrificing a hardpoint on your ship and two small optional on the others.
• You now have more uses for buying additional ships and customizing them (and more reasons to spend ARX on cosmetics that you can actually see).
• If #1 is done, you could put together a mining focused wing and quadruple the speed at which you deplete a 'roid and collect its fragments, but this would be no faster than existing wing-mining and would make multicrew mining viable (but not optimal unless multicrew asteroids were instanced as per wing asteroids).

Potential problems:

• General encounter inflation. Someone more PvP-minded could assemble a Gank-squad more easily. This is offset by traders being able to include escorts in the same way.
• Lag issues. Not sure how big of an issue this would actually be as we're talking about a maximum of 4 ships in the wing plus at most 3 fighters piloted by NPC crew (As you can hire a maximum of 3 crew).

 

[Darth Ender]

I actually like some of it, but , yeah, it would be exploited or become a nuisance trying to limit it enough to not be exploited. It also would, at least seem, to take quite a bit of coding to get done.

How would you exploit it? It's limited to tritium only and that tritium mining is limited to at most 1000 tons (the tritium depot limit) and 600 total units (the sum of the cargo space in each of the 3 drones). You can't stockpile it...and you can't deliver it to other carriers. Only the owner can use these and they only dock on their home ship. They have no weapons or defensive utilities.

So how do you exploit anything with them?

Going to be honest, the best idea I have ever heard for tritium replenishment has been to allow NPC to slowly fill buy orders for tritium, (and only tritium), on your FC. But, only if you are in a system that has mineable tritium, and you have a buy order in for market avg. or above price. The more mineable tritium in system, and the more you pay above market average, the faster they replenish it for you. Even outside the bubble it is reasonable to expect that you did not fly out there alone in your FC. So there would still be NPC out there to fill you buy order, just slower.
You are paying fair market or better, so no exploit, you are just not relying solely on mining it yourself or other players to fill your buy orders. Easier to code because you are essentially running a few slide rules based off market average, tritium availability, buy order price, system population, and system state, to come up with how fast your buy order would be filled.
I do not remember who to credit this idea to, but it's not my own.

Oh, and for the love of whatever, please allow us to remote transfer tritium. It feels stupid to have an alt on my FC at all times who's only purpose in life is tritium transfer.

This solution is designed to be only useful far away from markets. It's not effective where there are pirates ...which is within a few thousand ly of inhabited systems. Since the drones would be a constant easy target for attack and theft / destruction.
And people that close to markets, do not need another tritium solution, they have it with other players and direct purchases. This solution is for when both of those options aren't available.

 

[Darth Ender]

For this to increase the rate of mining, you either need the multiple instancing of the 'roid to get fragments per "wing-member" and/or you need to accelerate the rate of pick-up (e.g. more limpets).

Every member of a wing can mine the same roid at the same time and get a full amount from that roid. That's how things work in a wing and utilizing this effect is the intention of the drones. They multiply what you would get alone by up to 3x. So that is potentially 3 times less quantity of roids you need to visit before topping off your carrier's tritium depot.

This means instead of a soul sucking 6 hours or so of mining to load up tritium to refuel a depot from near empty, you can do it in about 2. Or what will likely be more common, simply topping off a hundred or two ton for another couple jumps, would take maybe 15-20 min.

It's not mean't to increase the efficiency of mining beyond that. It's not about maximizing the efficiency beyond what multiple human ships can do in a single roid, it's about reducing the dead gameplay time spent between roids - hunting for the next good one. And npc ships can do that just fine this way.

It's all of the empty time spent not doing anything helpful that has such a negative impact on players. Not necessarily the time spent gathering or having to wait a bit while the npc drones finish mining because they're a bit slower than a min-maxed human ship.

Here's an alternate idea:

• Make asteroids targetable, and/or make deposits and fissures targetable and/or make prospector drones attached to an asteroid targetable. The fighter-control system needs to have a valid target to issue orders against (e.g. attack my target).

prospectors are targetable. The tritium drones only mine roids that have tritium and a prospector. The intended sequence would be shooting the prospector, finding a tritium roid, you lasering it, your drones also lasering it. You gather any additional types of trit ores (surface/subsurface etc) ...and you fire a prospector once depleted to the next. The drones may take a bit longer to finish depleting the roid than you, but it wouldn't be significantly longer.

Asteroids wouldn't need to be targetable, since it's limited to the roids that are prospected. And prospectors are targetable. But you dont have to command them to do anything, they'll do it automatically. All you would need to do is start lasering a prospected roid for the drones to initiate their process. This ensures they dont start mining roids with tritium % you feel is too low to bother.

• Add a new hardpoint "Ship Control module." You could use this module to allow a crewmember or multicrewmate to pilot any ship in your fleet that has both a Supercruise Assist module and an Advanced Docking Module with an interface similar (Identical?) to the SLF interface in multicrew. Medium Hardpoint gets you one slaved ship, Large gets you two, and Huge gets you three. No limit on the number of hardpoints, but you can't slave more ships than you have crewmates to pilot. You set the slaved ship from the outfitting screen and can only change/select ships in the hanger at your current location.

I consider the drone ships something between a limpet and a SLF. I would prefer if they were effectively normal ships and the logic being used is something we could see in real npc crew piloted wings in the future. But i think this would need to be something a bit hybrid and special due to the complexities of the normal ship unit.

I dont think any commands need to be given to ships or any features such as that. "crew" doesn't need to control these ships. They operate on a slightly more complicated limpet logic. They do not contain enough processing and navigational control logic to function independently, so they rely on the control ship (carrier owner ship) for all of that.

But they are not piloted. remotely or otherwise.

Though, i think there is room for something like your idea ...if not hardpoint, then module related for some future expansion of npc wings or other kinds of drone ships (other than as fighters) where we would want more flexibility and customizations to behavior. But i dont think these are needed for the tritium drones.

The slaved ships wouldn't show up in Supercruise. Instead, they'd automatically wake out / wake in whenever you made the transition from/to real space. With a little more programing effort, the entire wing shows up as a single ping in supercruise.

Benefits:

• You now have the ability to let your friends essentially borrow your ships in multicrew at the cost of sacrificing a hardpoint on your ship and two small optional on the others.
• You now have more uses for buying additional ships and customizing them (and more reasons to spend ARX on cosmetics that you can actually see).
• If #1 is done, you could put together a mining focused wing and quadruple the speed at which you deplete a 'roid and collect its fragments, but this would be no faster than existing wing-mining and would make multicrew mining viable (but not optimal unless multicrew asteroids were instanced as per wing asteroids).

Not sure i would prefer this. I like the idea of the drone ships appearing as regular ships in a wing as far as anyone is concerned since that makes the wing logic unchanged from how it currently behaves.
This also allows the drone ships to be highly vulnerable anywhere there are hostile ships.. which is good because we dont want such a feature to be leveraged where the player based tritium economy is viable (anywhere close to inhabited space)

Potential problems:

• General encounter inflation. Someone more PvP-minded could assemble a Gank-squad more easily. This is offset by traders being able to include escorts in the same way.
• Lag issues. Not sure how big of an issue this would actually be as we're talking about a maximum of 4 ships in the wing plus at most 3 fighters piloted by NPC crew (As you can hire a maximum of 3 crew).

i would not confuse the idea that npc wings could be expanded from this tritium drone idea with the tritium drone idea. Tritium drones would have no weapons, there is no means of creating a gank squad nor would you really want to use tritium drones anywhere there are other hostile players or hostile npcs. They would not be very helpful in such situations at all.

I dont think there would be lag issues where there would otherwise be none. There's a huge difference between synchronizing a dozen clients from different places on earth and a dozen ships from 3 clients. A massive difference. (this would be a scenario where say a single instance has 3 clients each with 3 drone ships (3 separate wings).

 

[Tividar]

Prospectors are targetable. The tritium drones only mine roids that have tritium and a prospector. The intended sequence would be shooting the prospector, finding a tritium roid, you lasering it, your drones also lasering it. You gather any additional types of trit ores (surface/subsurface etc) ...and you fire a prospector once depleted to the next. The drones may take a bit longer to finish depleting the roid than you, but it wouldn't be significantly longer.

The problem is the Asteroid isn't seen as a targetable object. That needs to change for any version of these ideas to work. Allowing deposits, fissures, and attached prospectors as targetable is basically a kludge to get around this basic problem. I don't think the current game logic treats any of these as valid targets (at least your ship or SLF won't try and attack it if you give the order). When I get some time this week, I'll test for a mining-laser equipped ship and see if it will take an attack-my-target order (but I don't think it will). Using existing NPC mining logic won't help us any here because NPCs mine so slow they may actually be putting fragments back into the 'roid.

Asteroids wouldn't need to be targetable, since it's limited to the roids that are prospected. And prospectors are targetable. But you dont have to command them to do anything, they'll do it automatically. All you would need to do is start lasering a prospected roid for the drones to initiate their process. This ensures they dont start mining roids with tritium % you feel is too low to bother.

So I'm responding on the premise that we'd want as little new programing/assets as possible. See above about "targetable prospectors," but you'd need additional game logic to have the autonomous drones fire at your asteroid. Better, I think, to build off of the existing fighter commands.

Though, i think there is room for something like your idea ...if not hardpoint, then module related for some future expansion of npc wings or other kinds of drone ships (other than as fighters) where we would want more flexibility and customizations to behavior. But i dont think these are needed for the tritium drones.

You'd get the functionality of Drones along with a fair amount of additional potential content within the existing structure of the game, and the development cost should be lower given they'd be using existing art assets, existing UI and for the most part existing logic.

Not sure i would prefer this. I like the idea of the drone ships appearing as regular ships in a wing as far as anyone is concerned since that makes the wing logic unchanged from how it currently behaves.
This also allows the drone ships to be highly vulnerable anywhere there are hostile ships.. which is good because we dont want such a feature to be leveraged where the player based tritium economy is viable (anywhere close to inhabited space)

The drone ships/slaved ships would appear as regular ships in a wing for all real-space engagements (just not super-cruise). The only situation where this breaks is if you were to send one of the drones independently back to the carrier. If you're limiting the usability of drones to the 1,000 tons of Tritium for a Carriers Tritium fuel tank, this buys you little (the equivalent of one round-trip with a mining cutter). On the plus side, waking the "wingmates" in and out with your primary ship has the advantage of keeping the whole wing together, and makes it much easier for the group to act as a wing.

 

[Darth Ender]

The problem is the Asteroid isn't seen as a targetable object.

to you as a player. not to the game client and not to what npcs are capable of. them mining roids is evidence of that.

That needs to change for any version of these ideas to work

it really doesn't. they can follow the players direction. mining only the roids tagged by the player. which would only be roids with prospectors as well.

. Allowing deposits, fissures, and attached prospectors as targetable is basically a kludge to get around this basic problem. I don't think the current game logic treats any of these as valid targets (at least your ship or SLF won't try and attack it if you give the order). When I get some time this week, I'll test for a mining-laser equipped ship and see if it will take an attack-my-target order (but I don't think it will). Using existing NPC mining logic won't help us any here because NPCs mine so slow they may actually be putting fragments back into the 'roid.

the rate npcs mine is arbitrary. it's set the way it currently is because that's the role they currently play... just background characters that serve no big purpose.

there is no reason to think any of that would limit this new feature.

So I'm responding on the premise that we'd want as little new programing/assets as possible. See above about "targetable prospectors," but you'd need additional game logic to have the autonomous drones fire at your asteroid. Better, I think, to build off of the existing fighter commands.

i don't think any additional logic in the ai routines need to be created, just tweaked. you don't give them commands they follow your lead. they don't need brand new routines to mine, those exist. as do jumping into one from sc and docking. the only real new thing is telling you after depleting a roid what their current capacity is. nothing else is really special.

You'd get the functionality of Drones along with a fair amount of additional potential content within the existing structure of the game, and the development cost should be lower given they'd be using existing art assets, existing UI and for the most part existing logic.


The drone ships/slaved ships would appear as regular ships in a wing for all real-space engagements (just not super-cruise). The only situation where this breaks is if you were to send one of the drones independently back to the carrier.

not something my idea would allow. you don't command them to do anything.. to limit the need for new code.

If you're limiting the usability of drones to the 1,000 tons of Tritium for a Carriers Tritium fuel tank, this buys you little (the equivalent of one round-trip with a mining cutter).

no, this buys you days of sanity. filling up a few hundred tons takes hours and that's after hours and hours of going thru systems looking for a hot spot that aren't useless.

taking that time from hours to collect a few hundred tons down to 1/3 of the roids needed to hit could be days of less time since doing multiple hours of mining tritium has to be spread over multiple sessions just to stay awake if not avoid hating the game.

 

[Tividar]

…
no, this buys you days of sanity. filling up a few hundred tons takes hours and that's after hours and hours of going thru systems looking for a hot spot that aren't useless.

taking that time from hours to collect a few hundred tons down to 1/3 of the roids needed to hit could be days of less time since doing multiple hours of mining tritium has to be spread over multiple sessions just to stay awake if not avoid hating the game.

I’m skipping a lot here because I think we’re talking past each other. If you’re limiting drone usage to filling the tritium tank, that’s 1,000 tons. Being able to send a drone back to the carrier without going yourself would at best save a mining Cutter one round trip as the Cutter can hold more than half the tank capacity. The time to do that trip is trivial compared to the time spent mining. Given the way fragmenting works, you’d want to keep even full drones with you until you filled you cargo. There’s little to no utility in not staying with your drones at all times, so no value in forcing the wing apart to show multiple pings in supercruise.

you could use the same ui for launching SLFs to cause these ships to wake in.

 

[Darth Ender]

I’m skipping a lot here because I think we’re talking past each other. If you’re limiting drone usage to filling the tritium tank, that’s 1,000 tons. Being able to send a drone back to the carrier without going yourself would at best save a mining Cutter one round trip as the Cutter can hold more than half the tank capacity. The time to do that trip is trivial compared to the time spent mining. Given the way fragmenting works, you’d want to keep even full drones with you until you filled you cargo. There’s little to no utility in not staying with your drones at all times, so no value in forcing the wing apart to show multiple pings in supercruise.

you could use the same ui for launching SLFs to cause these ships to wake in.

Not sure why you're saying they would be sent back to the carrier etc etc.

In the idea described in the OP, the drones are not commanded by you. They follow you. They mine the same roids you mine as you mine them and because they're in a wing with you, it multiplies the amount of ore you mine in a single roid by up to 300% more than you would get from that roid by yourself. <-- this is point of them, they reduce how many roids you have to visit while mining and thus how long you have to repeat the mining process. The reduction in mining loops and dead game time hitting useless roids is where the value is.

Once they are full, you would go back to your carrier and they would follow and then deposit everything. then you can decide to go back out mining or continue your carrier journey or do other things.

There is never a case where the drones leave you. They are in formation with you at all times unless they are actively mining a roid and you leave to start another while they finish. And that would require you to be within 8km. This is to ensure as little special coding is needed to support them and also to ensure that they are super easy targets to destroy in any scenario where you are around other potentially hostile ships. Since to do that they must be in your instance since they do not have an instance of their own. And the feature needs to not encroach on the player tritium economy.