Player Features and Ideas Discussion

New skills and drones.

Skill - Transport drone Operation(x3), Transport drone specialization(x5)

Transport drone Operation requires Drones lvl 5
Transport drone specialization requires tranport drone operation lvl 5

Drones - transport drone I and transport drone II

These drones will have no damage output, and not tank

They're paper thin

t1 drone can transport up to 1000 m3 from anywhere to anywhere, has a warp speed of 6 au, and flight speed of 300m/s
20% bonus to flight speed and cargo capacity per transport drone operation lvl
Requires transport drone Operation
At max skill, goes 600m/s and can transport up to 2000m3

t2 drone can transport up to 1500 m3 from anywhere to anywhere, has a warp speed of 8 au, and flight speed of 500m/s

10% bonus to flight speed and cargo capacity per transport drone operation lvl
10% bonus to flight speed and cargo capacitry per transport drone specialization lvl
requires transport drone specialization lvl 1
At max skills, goes 1000m/s and can transport up to 3000m3

Both the t1 and t2 versions fly in the same manner as auto pilot. They also warp in 15km from a station as well.

You can use them to transport anything that will fit into the cargoholds of these ships.


edit...From here down is based on discussion throught the forum

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The drones are limited to your marketting range, so will never be able to transport anything outside of your region.
and that's with marketting lvl 5

t1 drones will have the same production demands as t1 cruisers, putting them in roughly the same price range.

T2 drones will have the same production demands and t2 cruisers, putting them in roughly the same price range as t2 cruisers.

These drones are limited to only being able to have 5 on routes at any given time. They're based off your drones skill, so having 5 of these out on routes will mean that you cannot field 5 combat drones, or however many of these you have out...If 3 are out, you will only be able to launch 2 combat drones. However, if in a carrier you will be able to launch the remaining amount of allotted drones based on your ship and fit, so if your carrier can field 15 drones, and you have 5 of these out, then you'll only be able to field 10 combat drones until these have finished their routes.

They do not take up band width on any ship, since they are not directly controlled by the ships themselves.

These ships are subject to aggression timers, kill rights, war decs, and typical null/low sec combat. Meaning they can be shot at but in high sec are under the normal protections of concord that a player ship would be under.

Cannot pick items up from space base containers, or station containers, the items must be placed the the items bin in a station of the corporate hangers of a capital.

These drones will fit into the space as ships in both stations and capitals.

They warp the same as auto pilot. Meaning they warp 15km from gates and must approach them, and they also warp 15km from stations and must approach them.

Targetting one of these ships will be the same as targetting a cruiser. The t2 drones would have a higher sig radius and easier to target.

They are NOT immune to electronic warfare, so they can be webbed and scrammed, but doing so is considered an illegal act, unless, again, you have kill rights or aggression with it's controller, have a war dec with the controller, or it's in low/null sec.

1) Being podded doesn't change anything. As long as you're logged in the drones will keep moving

2) It limits pvp the same way it limits pve. You can't use up to 5 combat drones if these drones are active.

3) They aren't tied to your band width, they're tied to the amount of drones you can field. if you have drones to lvl 5, then you can field 5 drones normally, it's just never been implemented while docked, with this it would be. If you're in a carrier and can control 15 drones, but you have 5 of these out, then you're limited to 10 drones from your carrier. There's gotta be some kind of penalty for using these. The penalty is not being able to control combat drones based on the amount of transport drones out

4) It's actually not that complicated, and it's not OP by any means.

This is an interesting idea. However:

1) Transport drones already exist. It's called "Creating a courier contract", or "Minions in your corp". I've never done it before, but I'm sure there's folks out there who make a living hauling stuff around the cluster. By not moving the stuff yourself, and creating an automated method everyone can use to move stuff, you're removing game play and a source of income from those people. EVE is meant to be played with people.

2) The ability to move stuff around on your own without leaving the station basically creates a method of easy, free money. You've just invented a way to complete courier contracts, courier agent mission runs, and move your stuff to Jita, all without ever leaving the station or interacting with other players. There should always be some risk involved in making cash.

So, in short: no. By starting your own corporation, and/or using courier contracts, you basically turn people into the very drones you're wanting to use. And the upside is: you aren't limited by bandwidth, or the number of drones you have currently in space. You could, in theory, have a hundred drones doing your business for you throughout the EVE galaxy. Those 'drones' are simply 'other people'.

Actually, these drones dont' really carry enough cargo to replace couriers.
You can only buy items off the market in your region. Only contracts can be bought out of region.
Couriers would still be needed to transport items larger than the holds of the transport drones, and it having 3k m3 max, that's not very much.
Couriers will still be able to do regional trading, again, because your market purchases are limited to a region.


Again, these drones are limited by capacity. So while there were certain courier missions and contracts you could do, it boils down to if you could do that courier mission or contract with a drone, anyone could. The person wouldn't have put the contract up in the first place. Also, most people don't put up courier contracts for small amounts of cargo.. Otherwise, they would have just done it themselves.
Also, again, you're limited to your regional market, so you couldn't buy items in jita and bring them to dodixie without actually going to the region jita is in yourself. So basically, these drones would be limited to your regional market and contracts you have purchased that are small enough to fit into the drone.


Again, these drones would only be usable for small capacities of items, and only items purchased of a regional market. Larger items will still require couriers and corpies. All this does is saves the player the headache of regional small m3 pickups, but at a cost of not being able to use combat drones while these are in flight.

Actually, my thought behind this was there are cruiser sized drones they they require the same building materials as cruisers
and would not be insurable.

So there's a huge risk you take in losing a drones, and the t2's can be expensive, and also at a risk of losing the cargo in the drone.

If you have that drone bringing a complex shield booster back to you, and the drone is hit by a war target, you're pretty screwed.

Also, the drones are gankable, you just won't be popping a player.

They have fast flight times and fast jump drives, but they still have to approach gates from 15km and stations from 15km km.

They also have the averge alignment time of a standard cruiser.

So these drones are completely gankable and you could be hurting someone pretty bad if you do gank one of these drones.

Sure, the player themselves might not be taking a risk with their character, but they're still risking their isk in the cost of the drones and their cargo.

The t2 version of the transport drone will be roughly the same isk difference as a t1 cruiser compaired to a t2 cruiser.

The caracal for example is roughly 2.5 mil. That would be the round about cost of a t1 transport drone.

however, the Cerberus is around 100 mil. That would be the round about cost of a t2 transport drone.

you would actually be taking a pretty hefty risk every time you sent one of these out.

Sending them out in unsecured areas in low or null would be almost suicidal. And sending them out in high when you're war decked, or someone has agression or kill rights on you would be the same.

So there is a risk reward to this.

from the sound of it, the drones would be unable to use jumpgates and, thus, only be able to move stuff around in system.

Wanted to drop more on this.

Basically restating that limiting them to your marketing skill range would be perfect and for the most part leave the contested aspects of the game alone.

Also, limiting your drone control to be based off your drones skill as well as the amount of drones your ship is capable of controlling would keep from putting anymore load on the server than currently exists.

Actually, due to the fact that these drones are a lot easier computing on the server than combat drones, if anything, it would reduce server load cause less combat drones would be fielded based on the amount of transport drones on routes.

If every player in the game was able to field 5 drones, not including carriers and so on, and every player has 5 of these out, then there would be no fielded combat drones and server load would probably be better.

So again, the only real negative to this is that these don't have players in them. But there are still more cons to a player using these than there are pros for that player, so its a good balance..

no, **** this. When I clicked on this thread, I expected a semi-plausible idea involving using such drones for sending ore from the belt to the station while mining, not "Automated courier runners for the lulz".