Re: Drones
Point taken.
I'll stop hypothesising all over the place and have done some faffing and this is the best i can think of:
New ship type: One way tripper. A very cheap hull size 100Kt requires Bridge, life support, crew quarters and has max 1 engine.
Probe engine: 70Kt generates 1 move, or can act as emergency pod to produce however many moves you want. I made it 9.
So with these 2 items you can produce a VERY slow ship with no weapons which can do a burst of 9 moves in one turn and become a floating derelict / outpost. It could store 100 supply points + use 10 per move if you like (although it will still move 1 every turn after it's out of supplies...)
I have tested it and it works.
The size of the engine reduces the chances of it being fitted to regular hulls (even for the emergency move allowance) and if you build a battlecruiser with just probe engines and a repair bay, well fine....it's an expensive thing to maintain. You could build a one shot minesweeper with 1 drone engine and a bunch of minesweeping comps...
It would be possible to restrict all but one ship type from having a component, but it would involve editing every shiptype record and adding :
Requirement Drone engine - Cannot have. (haven't tested this bit yet)
I tried mounting engines and emergency supply pods on a satellite, but there is no movement allowed for satellites in the interface. If you look at specific sats it says '4/4 moves' but the move button is disabled. :-(
The other posibility would be to fit a normal size engine to a fighter, I'll try that later just to see if it will allow the fighter to warp. (probably not).
[This message has been edited by jimbob55 (edited 03 February 2001).]
[This message has been edited by jimbob55 (edited 03 February 2001).]
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