Drone Carrier software

[Midnightknight]

Hello,

So i stole the drone carrier software to Atreus and was hoping to be able to use an Advanced Chokaro as a small drone carrier with this software. However, nothing happens when it's installed on it and i have no control on the 6 extended drones docked there.

in the encyclopedia the command to repair ships with drones says you need a M7D and nothing else ... So i'm wondering what is the use of this software? It's useless to M7D that can already use drones and it's useless to other carriers cause they are not M7D ...

[Hwitvlf]

The software seems useless to me for the reasons you mention. Maybe it wasn't implemented because of the issues that still remain in Drone controls. It would have been cool if any ship with docking bays could use a drone.

[Cycrow]

the Drone extended can only be used with Drone Carriers

the Software is for use with the deployable drones (fighter/freight/recon)
and add additional commands for coordinating multiple drones for a task.

also when installed, it will recall and recharge fighter drones when they run low on power

[RunGiantBoom]

it will recall and recharge fighter drones when they run low on power

This is working only if ship has docking bay?
I tried to drop lots of drones from M2, attack all enemies and recall, but there was no autorecall or "return to base" option

[Hwitvlf]

the Software is for use with the deployable drones

Cool, thanks for clarifying. This opens a new combat option and also explains why I couldn't find any freight drone commands on my TL which didn't have the Drone software installed.
There are a couple threads on other sites that claim the DC software is required by M7Ds. That confused things a bit.

[Midnightknight]

Yeah in the end those who would benefits the most from this software are traders. Too bad no option to make Station manager buy them.

[Hwitvlf]

I did some testing and with Drone Command, dropped fighter drones escort the 'home ship' as normal and return to inventory when low on energy. But, just like in AP, they require a docking port to return home. It doesn't seem to matter if the docking port is full, just so long as it exists.

If you give them a direct order (like attack all enemies) they won't return home when low on energy.

There's some weird behavior if you drop a swarm fighter drones when in-system: the drones register as docked ships and launch slowly as if they were undocking. If you have all your docking bays full, then they seem to drop normally.

[Cycrow]

They should be able to "dock" at any ship, not just those with docking ports. Did they have their homebase set correctly ? (it should be set automatically when launching them)

as for the weird behavior, this is intended. If a ship has launch bays, they will be used to launch drones instead of just appearing in space. Not only does this look better but it reduces collisions and prevents drones from spawning far away if you are too close to other objects like large stations

[Hwitvlf]

The dock-launching behavior is better to avoid collisions. I was testing in the Hyperion (2 ports) while launching swarms of 70 drones at once and some them were nearly out of energy by the time they launched. So just release them in sets of 10 if your ship doesn't have a lot of launching docks and it should work great.

About needing docks to return home, I tested again with the Carrack (no ports) and it is not showing up as 'owning' any of the drones. Both In/Out-Of-System you get a 'command rejected' message and they run out of energy in space.