Cargo Drones on Destroyers for Looting?

[🅶ila]

Is there any point to outfitting them to my attack ships?

Other than to trade with stations/ships, it seems like the cargo drones on my destroyer will deploy and fly around when there is a battle; but it doesn't seem like they ever actually loot any of the drops from destroyed ships.

Is this not their intended usage? It would be cool if this worked, because gate camps near Xenon incursion sites drop tons and tons of goodies that I could make use of.

[trooperrob]

have you set them to collect drops, if set to trading, they won't... You can order them to collect drops specifically. I find a high loss rate in cargo drones for this though.

[Xenomorph]

You can use your tractor bean to gobble the loot, don't need cargo drones.

[Responsible Fatherjk]

I would recommend having a scout ship for that purpose. Drones aren't that great as they're super slow

[Ruges]

I have a scout ship in each of my fleets. Well that are not inside the fleet. rather there default orders are to dock at one of the ships on each fleet. And I call them 1-Collector, 2-Collector, 3-Collector.... Since they are not in the fleet the will appear at the top of my unassigned list of ships. a quick double click on them will bring me to there area in space and select them, with a quick right click in space and collect loot. they will then go around and collect everything and then redock.

[iFrame]

Forget about cargo drones on combat ships or disarm them. They are too slow for looting moreover if say you want your destroyer/frigate to disengage from a battle or go somewhere asap, it'll wait for the friggin cargo drone to come to it and dock first which gonna take ages. Buy a fast scout ship and use auto loot command, set its default behaviour to dock on your destroyer or nearby station, it'll loot then proceed to dock for safety once its done, you wont want to lose all the loot if it idles in space and gets destroyed.

[🅶ila]

Thanks for your feedback guys.

They are deploying, and set to "Collect all". Essentially, I was hoping for something more automated that I could just forget about and teleport in on the Captains when I was running low on crafting drops. I have a Discoverer that I've been using periodically in lieu of the cargo drones, but it gets targeted right off the bat so I've kinda gotta keep an eye on it.

I have a gatecamp in Operation Flashpoint where the Xenon have really started pouring in. I had to add an additional destroyer last night, so now have two Behemoths camped out nuking anything red that comes in. Really, this is just to keep them from pouring into my inhabited space. Their incursion got to a point where they were overtaking the normal security patrols because of Argon/Paranid infighting. Once I got involved to balance things out, they started sending in capships lol - I guess they didn't like my intervention. :)

Either way, it sounds like the cargo drones are broken for collecting loot. I guess I'll continue using the Discoverer.

Thanks guys!

[Wraith]

The problem with collect all is it send them out as soon as it smells loot which is bad.

I personally only activate the cargo drones when the fight is over and the most important thing is to have the ship stay still so your drones don't get left behind.

It helps when there a massive amount of loot everywhere and you just can't collect them all before they start to disappear.