If you get attacked in high sec, will drones that are already deployed retaliate? I’ve had inconsistent answers. Some say that the game will not allow you to get a weapons timer unless you manually activate a module or order a drone. This will imply that the drones will not retaliate. Others have said that aggressive behavior on drones will allow them to retaliate against any aggression within your drone control range. This implies you can attempt to use EC drones to break a lock on a suicide ganker before they get their second volley. Well, they can’t both be right. And yes I know warping away is better than trying to use drones against a gank.
This is correct afik. But it will work only against single ship. So useless in most cases
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Thank you for answering. I’ve seen some low sec gate camps here only one guy had scram (more commonly, this is not the case), so maybe some gankers are just as dumb?
You assume you live long enough to actually engage drones on something, which is not the case 99% of the time.
If you get caught, you are in trouble, stabs may help you out against a single T2 scram. Assuming you have time to align, activate, warp …
… in highsec you are mostly dead in a few seconds if you fly a ship which can have drones.
In a 1:1 situation I’ve seen people (mostly mission runners) trying their chances on EC drones. A few escaped I remember. If you see them deployed you need to primary the drones. Luckily they pop easily. 
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I don’t know how it works in high sec, as that’s an area I don’t operate in… but in low sec, your drones will not automatically do actions that would get you a limited engagement. If they did, the limited engagement would allow someone to pod you without a criminal timer and sec status hit (instead of the suspect timer they get from engaging your ship in low sec), making drone boats free to pod.
Firing back makes you a free target.
Well ■■■■. Actually this is consistant with what I seen when my venture gets attacked in low sec and I was too busy watching the rocks instead of the overview or local.
And if you had time to lock on a catalyst to order the drone you probably had enough time to warp off anyways.
Heck the time it takes for a barge to lock on a dessie… if the barge lived this long CONCORD already saved it. Normally people try to gank in a single volley, but for some reason they like hunting retrievers using numbers that need that second volley. If the drones on aggresive could help in this case, it would be nice.
If you supertank your barge, you can potentially bait them, and snag a few catalyst kills. Just assign one drone to each ship to get on the killmail, overheat everything, and pray.
Sadly I can’t turn a Retriever into a super tank ship. Yes there is a tankier barge out there. The Procerer can be used as bait. But I want to make people sad to hunt a Retriever either by letting CONCORD get them while the barge lives, or have them see the barge go to safety after they spent all that effort trying to find it.
It turns out it’s pretty near impossible to catch a Retriever that is boosted in mining range by an orca pre-compression. Just align to a station and you’ll stay in range of the rock or ice until you’re all full. Compression put a nerf to this since you’ll always drift out of range before you’re full.
When on grid compression was on the drawing board as an active module that only worked on the industrial command ship this would still work since compression couldn’t be done on the mining ship. I kind of like this idea. It would have meant that fleets would have several options. One is to have the barges slowboat to the orca. Another is to jetcan and let the orca use its tractor beam. A third option would would be jetcanning and letting the Orca pick this up, but it would mean pauses in the industrial core since the Orca would need to move. In all these options, the Retriever wouldn’t just be a worse barge in fleets only good for solo mining, but it would be a sidegrade in fleets. The exact numbers CCP proposed in the original From Extraction to Production would take 2669 minutes with perfect skills to compress the R64 from a 28 day pull, so I admit the original ideas for on gird compression with only the Orca (or Rorqual) was a flawed, but I think the numbers could have been tweaked to something reasonable rather than giving compression to the whole fleet.
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