The Hedgehog Drones could only be used with ships specifically designed to mine.
Each Hedgehog Drone would come in small. medium and large sizes.
Based on the size of the Hedgehog Drone would determine the amount of collision bounce is produced by the shield of Hedgehog Drone. For example a small Hedgehog Drone would bounce a destroyer off of it’s alignment or orbit by 1,000 m. A medium, 1,200 m and a large drone, 1,700 m. The larger the ship means the less bounce back. The drones would orbit the ship like drones normally do. The Hedgehogs have armor comparable to drones of the same size. The Hedgehog Drone can also be abandoned to create a collidable object with the same parameters while orbiting the mining barge. When abandoned, the Hedgehog Drone has a lifespan of one hour.
In conjunction with warp bubbles, a Hedgehog Drone barricade around a gate can reduce players fit with Covert Ops Cloak and a Nullifier from warping to a safe and then warping back to the gate from an unknown vector.
How about a “panic” button. Only for mining ships, mind you. It’s attached to your payment method (no PLEX, because that would be to convenient) and when a panicking miner hits it, it causes them to be completely invincible for 60 seconds, breaks all the target locks on them, automatically warps them (and all their drones) off to a random spot in the system. But to keep it from being abused, it also prevents the mining ship from targeting.
The cost for using the “panic” button? $3.99 per activation.
CCP win,
The miner wins,
And provides more challenging targets for the ganker, so they lose.
I like the creativity, but bounce mechanics are janky enough as it is, and probably shouldn’t be integrated into modules/drones intended for the purpose of bouncing. Not to mention deployable containers already kind of do this.
Alternatively, let’s just let all mining lasers, strip miners, and ice miners be able to target locked enemy ships and deal continuous EM/Thermal damage per second to them equal to their ore yield per second. Or even 50% of yield per second. It’s still nothing compared to actual weapon turrets, but it would make sense to be able to do SOME damage with them. You could even make modulated crystals meant for dealing damage on par with energy turrets but are very poor at mining actual ore. In this way, mining yield modifiers would become damage modifiers under specific circumstances and wouldn’t stack with gunnery skills.
You could also do something similar for salvagers I guess. That too would make sense.
For the described effects your naming is totally wrong.
Are you maybe thinking of flubber drones, or maybe elastic drones?
To me a hedgehog drone should have some kind of gravity well that activates and sucks the target in once it reaches the event horizon. I’m not suggesting damage, but velocity to 0 on contact, with the affected ship returning to its original vector via standard mechanics. THAT’s a hedgehog.
Not different enough from heavy webifier drones IMO.
I’m also not a fan of drones that only certain classes of ships can use. I can sort of see the purpose but I feel like the mechanic itself is better left to deployables instead of drones.
The Hedghog Drone is meant to give the mining barge or Venture class of ships a little more defense against ganker ships, without having to use defense fleet for protection.
While in Null, I mined a lot of Mercoxit before the changes. Not once was there a fleet of corporation ships in the belts to protect the fleet.
We were on our own. Basically we had to watch Local Chat for NBSI and then were to dock up. Not much of a defense.
The Hedghog Drone is meant to give the mining barge or Venture class of ships a little more defense against ganker ships, without having to use defense fleet for protection.
While in Null, I mined a lot of Mercoxit before the changes. Not once was there a fleet of corporation ships in the belts to protect the fleet.
We were on our own. Basically we had to watch Local Chat for NBSI and then were to dock up. Not much of a defense
Your own fault, isn’t it? Might want to talk to the corp about it. Bring ships that can fight or leave the grid if others come around who can, simple as that. There is absolutely no need to add more “defensive mechanics” than that.
