Suggestion: Repair drones

[Teufelaffe]

Repair drones would be a player-crafted consumable that require a few parts plus a few hundred of any scrap of the same tier as your drone in order to craft.  Once you're in repair mode, hit the drone hotkey, which gives a targeting circle like with mining, click and BAM, the drone attaches to the construct and starts repairing every element within its range until it runs out of scrap or all elements within range are repaired, at which point the drone is consumed.

 

Benefits:

• Repair more than one element at once.

• Repair elements without requiring a player standing there holding the mouse button (or while the player repairs other elements elsewhere on the construct).

• Provides an additional product for players/orgs to manufacture and sell on the market, and since it's a consumable, there's theoretically always potential for demand.

 

Limitations so that repairs and associated talents are still meaningful:

• Drones cannot take advantage of players' talents, making it slower and less efficient than a player who's put the points and time into improving their repair abilities.

• Higher tier drones requires higher tier, and thus more expensive, scrap and parts.  I.e., an iron scrap drone might require some basic hydraulics and a robot arm plus the scrap, while a nickel scrap drone might require uncommon hydraulics, uncommon electronics, & robotic arm plus the scrap.  This results in drone repairs not only being slower than a player with the appropriate talents, but also potentially quite a bit more expensive.

• Amount of scrap per drone is fixed, so you can't make a single "super drone" with thousands of scrap.

• Drone is consumed if all elements within range are fully repaired, even if there's still some scrap left.

• Repair AOE will be relatively small and fixed, so you can't repair half of a ship with one drone and damaged elements that are far enough apart on the construct require multiple drones or "manual" repair.

• You can't "pause" an already placed drone.  Once you've placed it, it's there until it's done or you remove it, and in either case it is consumed.

• Cannot be made using the nanocrafter, so if you didn't bring any with you and need some emergency repairs in the field, you're doing it by hand.