Drone targetting and movement

Maybe auto-targeting is on? I don't know though, I haven't had much experience with drones in SEV
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Drones are non-controllable by default and just go and ram the nearest target on launch. As of 1.17, they also die instantly upon hitting that target, even when the drone was much stronger than the target, which makes them rather useless. A drone with 8000 shields and 1000 armor should not die when it hits a ship with maybe 750 hp total! It should merely be slightly damaged and go ram into another ship.

Not sure about that Fishamn, drones are effectively torpedos.... they ram a ship and explode. It doesn't matter how much shielding or armour they have then they explode they kill themselves. Otherwise noone would ever use ships for combat.

The idea of protecting them is to make sure they get to the ship and don't get shot down first.

...how would they explode given that I did not install a warhead to explode with? Why would they NEED to explode, given that kinetic impact seems perfectly capable of demolishing opponents?

Explosions make them do more damage. If you wanted to ram things you could do that with any ship, the warhead makes sure they get the job done
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The ink of the scholar is worth a thousand times more than the blood of a martyr.

Actually, warheads DON'T cause you to do more damage. An L100 AS warhead gives you maybe 1000 points of damage in 50 kts of space. Installing an L100 shield generator takes up 30 kts and will give you about 2000 hitpoints, which translates into about 2000 damage. An L100 standard armor plate takes up 5 kts and gives you 500 hitpoints. Any of these will give you better damage than installing an actual warhead.

Both options are also cheaper!

Are shields counted towards ramming?
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There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

Yes, shields count towards ramming. Ramming simply inflicts damage, the damage being applied to both sides until someone dies. Trust me on this, ramming is pretty much my main battle tactic.

I haven't done any experiments yet -- they've changed that apparently. It used to be shields were dropped when ramming.
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

Even without exploding should drones really go on to seek other targets? They're not ships they're just projectiles. If they're not missiles because they lack warheads then they're more like spears, and spears don't bounce between targets, the thrower does. I agree with cordas that shielding on a drone was initially intended to help it reach its target, if it happens that those shields also add to drone damage, and thereby make warheads obsolete, I don't think this is intentional. Why even add warheads to the game if it wasn't mean to be the primary damage delivery source?

Edit: Sorry to get off topic above ^_^ but it turns out you're not supposed to be able to control drones in combat, it says in the manual that control of drones in combat is totally automatic, so maybe only launch enough drones to destroy one target at a time? Not a very good fix for now though.
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The ink of the scholar is worth a thousand times more than the blood of a martyr.