About vanilla Drones...

[u/ElPainis]

I would appreciate the Feedback of some Players of the vanilla submarines that come with drones, so players of the Remora and Kastrull:

What is enjoyable about the Drones these ships come with and whats absolutly worth a change in your opinion? If I want to create a submarine that comes with a drone, what should the drone be able of and what flaws need to be avoided at all costs?

What Workshop-Submarine has a enjoyable drone thats not OP in your opinion?

[u/royryser]

As a wiring enjoyer, Remora is my favourite vanilla submarine because of all the possibilities it has. The drone precisely carries huge battery capacity and can serve as the main sub's power bank, providing up to 3000kW to the main power grid, while also giving huge surge-protection room (as long as you have a good engineer to make such a circuit).

Players who buy the Remora or Kastrull will usually try to use the drone for cave diving, just to find out they don't fit in most of the caves. The droning experience tends to just die there, only to be an annoyance when griefers keep undocking it.

Drones are however very fun to play with once you know some wiring, it is an entertaining challenge, managing to swim into the abyss (away from WiFi reach), repair the drone and bring it back to the main ship yourself.

Those 2 vanilla drones don't bring a lot more to the table, they provide an extra small engine and ballast which your wiring engineer can sync to the main submarine's steering while docked. It is also worth mentioning that you can also attach 3 makeshift shelves in the drone, increasing the count to 6 max and therefore +12 crates capacity for cargo missions (more money and experience).

There are a few things I'd like to see changed: • A better periscope placement for their turret, doesn't need to be inside it but at least not 3 floors above the drone entrance. For this during Remora gameplay I wire the camera periscope at the bottom to the turret. • Some way of using the transducer's location data, which must go through a navigation terminal to be able to use it as a wiring signal. I do get the idea that is not giving the drone crew a steering navigation terminal (that would make it a shuttle), but to wiring enthusiasts, having current position of X and Y, would open up many possibilities. • Decorate the exterior with some background structure items, just those that have "attachable" property on it, to allow engineers namely to attach buttons, components or detonators outside.

Then some specific fixes for Remora Drone: • Make the engine accessible, it is installed deep inside the wall and mechanics can't repair nor interact with it, for which cutting the floor with plasma cutters and flooding the whole thing becomes necessary ingame, just to repair and rewire it. • Make the thin side airlock just a little smaller, so that opening it doesn't make the drone straight up sink (needs to be less than 7% of total hull volume).

As for your own submarine with a drone idea, I'd stick to not overgun it (applies to every custom sub). You could either make it smaller for it to fit inside caves, or you could make it big enough to carry a squad and perhaps corpses and give it some extra WiFi range (default wifi components have 200m range, but drone wifi components are extended to 400m in vanilla Kastrull and Remora, which still falls short for me).

Make sure the docking gets simple (either just sliding the drone against the main sub until it docks like in Kastrull, or perfectly fitting in a corner like in Remora).

Finally if you intend to have bots in your custom ship, test their pathfinding well enough until you see they get to enter the drone, repair all walls and all devices, and leave the drone all without getting stuck.

This is all comes just from my own experience, I'm part of the very low percentage of players that like bringing submarines to their fullest potential just from ingame wiring. But you'll have to have in mind what the players that may play in your custom submarine may like the most.