(AP) Recon Droness?

[delstars]

So I'm looking through a shipyard and find a factory producing recon drones. I checked my encyclopaedia and couldn't find anything on recon drones. I also did a quick search on the forum but saw nothing about them. So my question, what are they? Is it worth buying the factory? Does anybody have any experience with them, are they useful?

[Timsup2nothin]

No knowledge of AP, but in TC they are just a ware, and a very nasty one at that. There is exactly one dock in the universe that buys them. It stocks like ten and consumes them like a fat man eats health food...as in hardly at all. Add to that that there are a couple fabs right in the sector producing them and it becomes basically impossible to get rid of them.

They are the Nividium of manufactured goods. The only way to get rid of them is to load them in a ship and sell the ship at a shipyard.

[BurningMan]

In Ap they are functional and you can use them to scout a sector, but will get destroyed if they run out of energy before you collect them. M5s are imo better for this as they won't self destruct and aren't that much more expensive, but if you are flying around in a M6 or lower ship and want to scout a hostile sector they can be handy as they don't need a docking spot on your ship as they fit in the cargo bay.

[Threesixtyci]

They were likely a plot element in Reunion (can't remember, slightly remember having to use something for the asteroid tunnel sections.) or a previous X game and were just left in the game.

Much like the remote guided warhead, where you can't remote guide it outside story missions.

[ajax34i]

In X3AP they're actually pretty good for a ship with hangar space, but where you don't want to use up a hangar spot for a scout M5. Basically the drones can use the hangar capability to land themselves back in the cargohold of the M7 ship, and they're pretty good for scouting ahead so you don't jump blind into an enemy gate camp.