surreal zodiac
For a ship with no cargo bay, maybe a new kind of gameplay could be external processing? Drones that process an ore chunk outside the ship, then shuttle back the processed cargo to the abstracted processed storage.
So you have this "drone based MPU" that (maybe) doesn't reclaim remass. Could loosen the restriction on having an excavator+cargo bay on player ships!
There are a lot of knobs to turn for balance too, such as consumption rate of drone parts, reclaim efficiency, etc.
austere willow
My concern to address here is thr gameplay balance. We don't want a system that makes all the other MPUs and nanodrones obsolete.
We can probably balance that by adjusting how many drones are used per kg of processed ore
Did you have a number in mind for this proposal?
surreal zodiac
That's a good point. If this module goes in the MPU slot, you can't take the MPU that refabricates drone parts/ammo, so the limiting resource in a dive could become drones left. (I do not think this module should go in a hardpoint slot for this reason, but am not sure how all the rules for what slots can do what are implemented in the game.)
But you are right that this module does a lot of things in a single slot: it does the work of tug/haul nanodrones (a hardpoint slot) and an MPU. So it should consume resources rapidly.
I think if I purchased this module and had the base number of drones (1,000 kg), I would hope to get a near full hold of one type of processed ore. To start thinking about, I think a conservative rate would be 1,000 kg of drones per 5,000 kg of final, fully processed ore.
For larger drone containers, I think this rate is alright. If you take 5,000 kg of drones into the rings, you get 25,000 kg of processed ore. This doesn't sound like a large amount to me. But if you think it is too high, I would emphasize that if you can't reclaim remass, you'll have to be conservative with your maneuvering to find good ores, or go to a Phage-class station to refuel (expensively).
Currently, you can take the top-tier MPU that refabricates drones/ammo/remass and stay in the rings (almost) indefinitely, with the added bonus of being able to have small drone and remass tanks to reduce ship mass. In my opinion, no remass reclaim on an MPU is a severe drawback.
I believe 25,000 kg of processed ore is about a quarter the capacity of a Titan (including its detachable cargo pods)? I think this is reasonable: even upgrading to the 10,000 kg drone container does not allow you to stuff a Titan with this "drone MPU" at this rate.
Overall I was thinking this kind of MPU would exist in order to allow ships without cargo holds to exist, which could allow for all sorts of cool looking designs. It is a way for ships to have less of a mining focused loadout but still pull in some income to stay afloat, in case an anomaly hunting, exploration ship fails to find anything.
upbeat ore
could also make this specialized MPU just that, specialized.
Incompatible with ships that do have a cargo bay, but anything without one? Based
buoyant locust
Building on @upbeat ore 's idea, obviously this system is going to require more hardware than the standard tug/haul drones.
This could restrict it to ships without a cargo hold, or it could take up the entirety of it in ships that do have one.
This way it wouldn't need its own ship
upbeat ore
probably would replace any excavator too
I wonder how such a thing would look on the OMS….
OCP*
surreal zodiac
Yea, having it be specialized like that would be really cool if such a thing is possible.
austere willow
I'm pretty sure we require drone systems to be on hardpoint. From the in-universe perspective, they are the laser array that powers the drones. From gameplay perspective, they need a location that is on the ship.
There are also some extra features for such system that you might not think about - for example, you can pick which resources to process
This needs to be thought out and balanced carefully.
As far as tech/coding goes, this is pretty simple, but I see it would be easy to make this totally OP
surreal zodiac
A hard point makes sense!
If more balancing is needed, I know the haul/tug drones are laser powered, but maybe these MPU drones are larger and also take a stock of remass with them: so the system uses both drone parts and remass.
Or as Eze has said, maybe this is an extremely specialized model: maybe only specific ships can mount this system.
olive wigeon
Maybe require a dedicated hardpoint to work in tandem with the mpu that could help w/ balancing since now u lose a hardpoint
btw how do the repair drones work?
terse spade
My concern to address here is thr gameplay balance. We don't want a system that ...
It would reasonably require heavier, more power-hungry, less ammo efficient drone mount, since it would need to provide both sophisticated enough drones to pick a nugget apart and enough power to let them do MPU job.
It would also reasonably be unable to extract both ore and propellant and have abysmal efficiency compared to enclosed MPU (you might have a separate variant harvesting water only and packing it into small, ball like bladders, so you could run both if you wanted both benefits, as long as you set them up not to clash).