Script for controlling a drone swarm?

[EmberStar]

I was recently watching the saved Video On Demand of a stream by W4stedspace and Splitsie, and one of them mentioned in passing that they'd built a drone swarm at some point. I think the idea is interesting, and wondered if anyone knows of scripts in the workshop for doing such a thing? I tried searching, but as before I get a ton of results that are nothing to do with what I'm actually looking for. (Mostly many, many versions of drone ships. But almost nothing in terms of scripts.)

[Fedora01]

This might be what your looking for: Rdav's Fleet Command MKII
But it's player controlled and limited to space.

[EmberStar]

I found the episode Splitsie was talking about, which included links to the scripts. They're compatible with atmospheric thruster drones. They follow in precise formation around the lead ship and mimic its movement. As long as you set things up properly (and don't do a roll when the drones can't fly upside down) and have enough fuel electricity, it looks like they'll work just fine.

Formation Flight: Leader https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1542975902
Formation Flight: Follower https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1542976322

[ouch67]

You can do something similar in vanilla with sensors and timer blocks.

[EmberStar]

I can think of a way to make an *avoider* drone swarm, where they bounce off each other then try to fly back. Making them actually stay in any kind of formation would take many sensors and timer blocks for each drone. And each one would have to be specifically configured for it's space - lose one, and the drones anchored to it start to drift. And the drones would have to fly pretty close together since sensor range is so short (without mods.)

It's probably possible, but it would be a massive pain. And several times more difficult than just parking a decoy welder over the target and raining armored decoy blocks on it while you try to snipe the turrets with an assault rifle. (Or just raining warheads on it until it's a chunky crater.)

If you have a link to ships that can do something like this with no scripts or mods, I'd be curious to see it though.

[Karmaterrorᵁᴷ]

Sensors and timers works but its gonna be insanely fiddley to set that up for formation flying. Its good for little drones inside your base as security though.

Id give rdavs a try like in first post. If i remember you can have formations and it can do other cool stuff like using a turret to select and order units around rts game style :)

[EmberStar]

I'll take a look at both sets of scripts when my world is a bit more advanced. Right now, I'm still trying to set up some automated mining systems so that I can collect resources. Mining platforms to collect ore without just strip mining it. Then that would be picked up by a simple timer and derp-bot waypoint drone to take it back to the main base where the refineries all have yield modules and there's power to spare. (Sort of, at least for now.)

My plan for the drone swarm scripts is to help capture NPC bases - I want to build some kind of ground tank, and the drones would basically just be decoy blocks with heavy armor and engines. The goal is for them to fly overhead and get blown to scrap while I pick off the turrets. The formation flight script would work okay for that, aside from the part where small grid armor has about the protective qualities of wet toilet paper tube.