A drone that can be loaded with cargo and sent to another fleeted vessel on a limited range. The drone is loaded, a locked target is selected, and the drone moves with fairly modest speed and delivers the cargo automatically in the cargo space of the target. If the cargo space is full, the drone automatically delivers cargo in vessel of origin upon return. Or more advanced type of drones keeps doing this on automatic.
Suggested cargo space - in the order of a few hundred M3
Speed - in the order of a few hundred meters per second.
Range - depends on skill in operating “cargo drones”, perhaps some 20 km per skill point.
These drones clearly have applications in mining, ferrying ore from mining vessels to intermediate vessels and onwards to eventual end-point vessels. It would be interesting if inflicted damage would reduce the speed of the drones, all down to zero! Clearly there may be four categories of these drones, i.e. small, medium, large and huge.
The proposal makes good sense from an in-world realism perspective. This should be easy to do and quite commonplace in the Eve universe. Their applications should be gargantuan. Also the animations for these little drones should be quite fun to make.
Since cans can hold 27,500m3 shouldn’t it be too much of an issue for a drone to hold just as much.
Tractor beams and MTUs pull with around 1000m/s, and I don’t see why drones cannot have the same speed.
The drone control range of drones is larger than that of tractor beams, however bonused ships and MTUs can pull at larger ranges and using the drone control range could be just fine.
One problem though, why does it need this? Marauders have a bonus to tractor beams, and cargo drones would give most other ships a similar feature, making the Marauder bonus less useful. Most industrial haulers have room for a tractor beam and don’t really have a need for such a drone, nor do many industrial have the drone bay for it. Then there is the MTU itself, which provides a nice QoL addition to it all. It doesn’t seem like it really needs such drones at this time.
What could be fantastic is a drone capable of ferrying between a moon mining belt and the attached station. Really doubt that would happen but being able to keep an Orca boosting a moon mining belt while a drone shuttles the ore to the station (maybe to the corp delivery bay?) would be fantastic… This could even be setup as a “service module” that consumes fuel while in use, or X amount of fuel blocks per delivery request? In that case it would not be considered an “Online” module as the fuel blocks would be used for the delivery call.
Possibly having it to where you jettison a can an “request pickup” from station in range (125km?) to have a drone come out and pick it up?
This could be really useful for mining, however I have strong doubts that the min maxers will replace a mining drone with a cargo drone, reducing their output.
I give it a +1, but very low priority.
It also has to have a very limited range, and fly very slow so it cannot be used to evacuate valuable cargo in a fight.
The concept I was referring to wouldn’t be AFK, you would have to “request pickup” from the station. Just keeps me from having to swap a Covetor for a hauler to keep the Orca’s boost running. Using say 1 fuel block per pickup would be a fair trade off for that I think.
Running an Orca + two Coveter’s keeps me plenty busy and does not allow me to AFK mine. That and I don’t like loosing assets to possible gankers
Why would I use a Retriever when I have an Orca? I’m talking about not having to stow a Covetor in the Orca, swap for a Maismos, ferry ore back and forth until the Orca is empty, and then getting back in the Covetor. Keeping the Covetor running and the Orca boosting while a Cargo Drone from the station comes out and picks up the ore, even at a fuel cost would be great. My concept would only be for moon belts with the stations there.
Lol, that’s literally what a rettie is for! So you never have to change. Just have the orca in space and fly the rettie back and forth. It’s what the rettie was designed for.
Alternatively, since boosts work the way they do now you can move the orca back to station and then to the belt again before boosts run out.
