dapper wagon
alot of people have began speculating how drones would be like lately, but hear me out here:
fully customizable modular drones
they would work like the custom units in mindustry Project Unity: one part that has the blueprint of the drone, an outsider that constructs the drone with materials before pushing the finished thing when told to
basically, mini ships you can construct mid battle
fallow wave
looking forward to people playing reactor drone explosions as a strategy
marsh shale
You could have drone blueprints in your ship folders, and load them into the drone deployers like launchers. Then have a few types of drone part factories (say for armor and shields, propulsion and control, weapons) with the drone components requiring those parts for assembly. Turn the deployer-launcher off and deconstruct the drone to load another blueprint.
Give drones very simple ai (like launching when within 1k distance of enemies, and attempt to go back when below 20% ammo or power), and attack patterns can be set with attack defaults. Maybe even have specific tall blocks to act as runway tiles, with the runway ends specified for take-off or landing. Drone ai would need to be very good at predictive motion to land on moving carriers.
winged wind
looking forward to people playing reactor drone explosions as a strategy
I think they should be powered by batteries only, personally; they should return to the mothership to recharge. That's what distinguishes a drone from a missile, or from a self-sufficient ship
rain token
I like this in concept, boxes that pass their product to another until it's ready to spit it out, but I'd like it to lean more modular. Not the way mindustry does it with having drone ranks.
Best option IMHO would be to make a drone of your own design, much like the ships. Then the number of drone parts would require an assembly line for that drone. You could choose to prefab certain parts and use them on different drones, so a prefab line could supply different assembly lines.
This way a drone ship wouldn't just be a carrier with launchers, like the missiles, but a manufacturing ship with a sprawling network needing crew. The assembly line would work like a modular weapon, sending out drones in real time, instead of having a bunch of preloaded launchers. There should still be options for drone hangars, but that should be the limited space optimal option, for smaller support ships, not for sustained fire.
If they could use existing resources, that'd be great.
HE for maneuvering, EMP for tiny shields, Nuke for energy storage, TC for speed, mines for kamikaze option, ammo for burst damage modules and steel for basic chassis. Mini ships.
fallow wave
the idea of having drones that require crew sounds terrible imo, cuz this would mean that u cant really use them for any one time purposes
instead id prolly suggest that u have some kind of "drone capacitor" that is loaded with a number of batteries on load, and then the drone flight duration depends on when it runs out of power
and maybe u could allow this to power any adjacent structures like weapons etc, and have those operated by some kind of robot crew (prolly make these expensive so that u cant push out millions of ion beam drones)
rain token
the idea of having drones that require crew sounds terrible imo, cuz this would ...
While I love the idea of having fighter pilots, I'll double this. Crew as an expendable resource should be reserved to boarding.
marsh shale
Crew are already an expendable resource for any and every ship. Just make a drone pilot role and give them the lowest auto-hiring priority. If crew can board to disable/capture ships, they should be able to disable ships from afar using ship and drone weapons.