A few months ago @CommanderGumball made a thread about adding a pet chicken as a sort of upgradeable wingman.
In the thread, @isp mentioned Hen Solo as the wingman in CI4, which gave me the idea for implementing drones.
Recently this thread has popped up which talked about adding Hen Solo to the game, so I decided it’s about time I finalized the idea.
And now this drone thread just popped up, so I’m just going to get on with it already.
The idea is to add drones, which would function just like the wingman in CI4.
This is a mockup design I came up with, using pieces of the M40X base sprite.
The drone has a single small thruster and two weapon pods. It’s equipped with a compact version of the Moron Railgun (different weapons could perhaps be added, but I haven’t really thought much about that) and fires two weak bolts per volley. Its default rate of fire is 6.66/s and can be increased up to 10.2/s with upgrades.
The drones can be mounted in satellite docks. Additionally, they require a control unit (or something like that) to be installed on the spaceship (the control unit can be mounted on a hardpoint). If the control unit is absent, the drones will not appear in the mission.
The drones’ base, shine and engine colors as well as engine type should match the paintjob of the player’s ship.
Drones are less controllable than satellites and deal damage more slowly, but they don’t have an ammo limit. This means they can deal a lot more damage over time, so they should be pretty expensive (or it could be countered by implementing a cooldown period after a certain amount of shots have been fired, in which case they should also have an ammo/cooldown indicator).
