Any way to automate the Freight Drone?

[MaximumBullfrog]

My TL acts as (amongst other things) the ammo barge for my chaingun based ship. I use Freight Drones to let the thing find and strip chaingun ammo forges for future use by myself. However, I generally need to deploy and command the drones themselves to go to the station, stock up and return home. Easy enough, but I'd optimally like to be able to just tell the TL to trade with whatever station I choose and have the Drone deploy and fly to said station automatically. Basically an extension of the ship's menu capabilities. Right now the ship is parked right between a chaingun forge and a chaingun ammo forge in Profit Center Alpha, and I'd love to just tell it to trade with one or the other periodically as they stock up.

[jkjklkl]

CLS2 on a fighter

[ConCorDian]

im with jkjklkl, get yourself some Falcon Haulers, and if you can cap a Blastclaw Prototype or two it wouldn't hurt...

Falcon Haulers can carry pretty much anything you can buy... they have XL cargo and by the time you fit sheilds and some weapons they have roughly 275-300 cargo units meaning if you wanted you could pick up 2Gj sheilds, PPC's, IC's etc etc

Blastclaw prototypes only have L cargo but will have roughly 575-600 Units (after sheilds and some weapons) which is not bad for trading some of the smaller wares like ECells or in your case Ammo... especially considering what your getting per freight drone is 800 units.

only question though is why a TL with Ammo? thats a hell of a lot of Ammo... a basic superfreighter such as Mistral SF (Drake if your playing AP) can carry tons of Ammo and missiles... plus they are dockable with every station!!

[pccenter]

I use TL's to. Because i only use capped ships and its harder to cap a TS, than to board a TL.

[Rapier]

I'd have suggested using a Trading Station or Equipment Dock. If you're going for captures only, that might be difficult, though not impossible.

[ConCorDian]

I use TL's to. Because i only use capped ships and its harder to cap a TS, than to board a TL.

im not saying anything against it, i have storage TL's also, i just normally have something like a Tern (im playing AP) as an EBC ammo ship, because i can dock it to an EQd or PHq in order to transfer the freight over to a cap ship (i know i can do the same with a TL but the cap ship slots are limited at these stations more than TS slots) and if i want to transfer so much ammo to a smaller ship like a fighter in combat area's i use a Hype or Springblossom to carry it since its more likly to survive the journey than a freighter of any sorts

[MaximumBullfrog]

Thanks guys, I'll try the M3 idea out. ALready I haveb a few M5s on board for use in the event that I need to deliver a software suite, shields and JJ to some newly purchased to-be Universal Traders.

only question though is why a TL with Ammo? thats a hell of a lot of Ammo... a basic superfreighter such as Mistral SF (Drake if your playing AP) can carry tons of Ammo and missiles... plus they are dockable with every station!!

Cause it has the space left over anyway. I'll probably put together a specialized ammo barge should I need the TL for much more station transporting, but I'm not at that point yet. My income comes pretty much solely from 10 UTs.

The chainguns (which by the way turned out to be ABSOLUTELY FUN in groups of 10) are on my capping designed ship. I'll use PBGs and such for dogfighting, so I'm not going to chew through thousands of boxes of ammo admittedly

[ConCorDian]

okay, sorry just the way i read that post it made me think you have this TL solely as an AMMO barge, and i was thinking it was a bit overkill

[layton99]

My elephant is a floating equipment dock. Usually have Falcons resupplying it. Never actually used the frieght drone.

I am thinking of buying an equipment dock but not sure how useful it would be.