Freight/Fighter drones

[evilosmosis]

1. How does one use freight drones, is it for transferring between ships?

2. When you eject drones into space from say a Nova, how do you get them back easily?

[Cycrow]

you can transfer b etween ships, or between ships and stations if you like.

there are 2 ways, first is to use the Transfer freight via drones command. This will use as many drones as needed to transfer the selected freight.

otherwise, just eject the drone, and give it the fetch/drop off commands


you can just pick up the drones again by running over them or ordering them home

[Moizo]

The first way cycrow mentions needs trade mk2, Transfer Freight via Drones order can then be found under the Trade orders.

[Endoryl]

I was looking for some advice on freight drones when I found this topic with search, so I thought I'd ask it in this thread.

I recently bought an argon mammoth and it seems to work fine with freight drones. The Fetch freight command works like it is supposed to that is.
Now, I also bought a Split Tiger, and when I try to use freight drones with this ship, they seem less cooperative.
Fetch freight command sends the drones to the factory, but they don't come back.
Drop off freight also doesn't work.
Return home also doesn't. I think it didn't work with my mammoth either tbh. It actually went away from my ship when I gave that command :/

So the only way I can resupply energy cells for jumps with my tiger, is to set the drone to buy them. Then wait until it has docked, then order it to follow me, and then manually pick up the drone in space.
This gets realy tiresome after some time.

I don't know if this is a bug or whatever reason is behind this.
Anyone who has some more info on this?

Thanks

[pocoyo]

if the tiger has no docking bay they wont return automatically and have to be ran over to be picked up

[Vim Razz]

Tiger has no hangar bays, so the drones don't know where to go.

Your ship needs to have at least one free hanger bay for the drones to return to if you want to use them to their full potential, otherwise you need to wrestle with the sorts of limitations you described.

[Endoryl]

That pretty much explains it. Thanks alot for the info.

[BlitzIn4]

I found this thread via the search and I never used freight drones before hopefully someone with experience could help me out. BTW, there's no mention of freight drones in the x3 handbook v5

If you use 40 drones with an Elephant can they all dock at a station at once? If they can't will the price of the ware the drones are purchasing keep rising just as if you bought it in 800unit increments?

Freight drones sounds like a great idea, is there some reason that players don't make more use of them?

[Lapo]

Drones dock like ships, one at a time, so they are useless for large purchases... you can only buy 800 cargo units at a time.
The biggest problem with them is that the trade command to automate them only works with player owned stations. You have to direct them manually to interact with the other stations.
Also they have the same problem every other drone has, namely the autopilot issues in sector. It is very annoying when, from 20 drones, 10 fail to dock with their mother ship and have to be picked up manually.

[Vim Razz]

Really, the best use for freight drones is to have them collect loot.

They come with Special Command Software pre-installed, it's faster than calling in a TS, and they're cheap enough that if a few get killed it's not a big deal.