Drone

Drones are aerial vehicles that operate on Batteries by flying between selected Drone Ports.

Usage
Each Drone can only be assigned to 1 home Drone Port, and that home Drone Port can only be linked to 1 other Drone Port (that Drone Port, in turn, doesn't necessarily need to be linked back to this Drone Port). There is no limitation on the numbers of assigned Drones unloading on a Drone Port, however one must be queued before the other fully unloads. Waiting Drones will circle above the Drone Port.

When flying from one port to another, a Drone will show a take-off animation, wiggling around, rise vertically, turning mid-air then fly roughly in a straight line to the destination, then descends, followed by some wiggling animation and finally docks. Drones will attempt to navigate around obstacles mid-flight. As the take-off and landing can take up a considerable amount of time, the efficiency of Drones increases with distance.

The Drone consumes a minimum of 4 Batteries per trip plus 1 Battery per km of flight distance.

They are potentially the 2nd fastest mean of transportation, second to Hyper Tube Cannon. Pioneers can stand on the drone for a ride, however a fall protection equipment such as Jetpack is highly recommended as the Drone will push away the pioneer mid-air when it starts accelerating forward.

Logistics
Drones can be used for long-range low-throughput transportation. For example they can be used for transportation of ores from across the world. Drones can only have a timetable of two drone ports. They need a battery input at at least one of the drone ports in the timetable.

Behavior
Drones will try to fly from drone ports to other drone ports as straight as possible. When an object is in the path the drone will try to avoid the object. A drone needs to be built at a drone port. A drone port can only have one drone, if a drone was already built before on a drone port you will not be able to build a drone there. If a drone is being supplied batteries from the non-home port the pioneer will be required to supply the drone with batteries manually for the first trip, after this the drone will take enough batteries for a round trip from the port with batteries.

Efficiency
Drone throughput will be shown in the drone's home port, this is shown along with the maximum throughput and batteries required per round trip. The efficiency of drones will be increased as distance increases since the drones have a landing and take-off animation that takes up a considerable amount of time.

Trivia

 * The development of Drones was vaguely alluded to on May 15th, 2020: "There's going to be a new vehicle in Tier 7 or 8".
 * The inclusion of Drones was jokingly "confirmed" on July 23rd, 2020, via Jace's high quality screenshots/mspaint art video.

History

 * Patch 0.4.0.11: Reduced default round-trip Battery cost for Drones to 4 (from 5) and reduced cost/distance from 1.66 to 1 Battery per kilometre.
 * Patch 0.4.0.10: Fixed bug where the distance between drone stations wouldn’t be calculated properly, causing incorrect round-trip time estimates and battery consumption, Battery consumption should now properly increase over larger distances.
 * Patch 0.4.0.6:
 * Drone Pathfinding and World Grid improvements. Drones will now fly to the closest cell if trying to pathfind outside of the grid instead of crashing. Building outside of the grid might have some weird behaviour but shouldn’t cause crashes anymore
 * Removed an ensure that caused many crashes when loading a big save
 * Fixed a bug where Drones would skip a station if saving when it’s docking, causing it to take off and bring the items back again when loading
 * Patch 0.4.0.4:
 * Potential fix for a scenario where the Drones would take a nonsensical path to their destination
 * Fixed a bug where Drones would teleport when dismantling a Drone Station they are about to dock on
 * Fixed a rare crash related to Drones
 * Fixed Drone Ports allowing duplicate names
 * Patch 0.4.0.0: Introduced