Drone Customization/Drone Upgrades

[Wyxian]

I think an interesting way to add depth to the use of drones would be to add the ability to find/make random parts specifically for the drone, similar to finding random weapons and mining lasers and such for regular ships. One could press the edit ship button but instead of editing it like a normal ship, a simple UI opens up that allows you to swap out parts for ones in your inventory, these parts could be in any of the same materials that you find in the world anyway, all the way up to avorion, but in order to use materials better than iron, you would have to upgrade the drone to allow it, which would be costly but permanent, each better material costing more than the last, naturally. Parts could range from wings to engines to new lasers, with weapons being limited to unarmed turrets like mining lasers or salvaging lasers, not allowing for armed turrets to avoid people relying purely on drones for everything. You wouldn't be able to add systems or anything like that, you would only be able to improve the drone as it is, not able to change how they work and not able to change how they are used aside from changing between mining and salvaging, and simpler things like that. Also being unable to make the drone as powerful as a regular ship with the same kinds of parts by any means, but still making noticable improvements. If this is done right, it could be rather fun and interesting, and add a nice extra layer of depth to the game while also making drones more worth using alongside your other ships for various purposes. Another interesting thing could be that these parts could have various different appearances and designs allowing for interesting looking drones at the same time. I might've forgotten something relevant to the idea like how certain mechanics would be handled or how certain things would be balanced, if anybody notices something like that feel free to mention it and I'll add it onto the suggestion with an appropriate response.

[Wyxian]

Also sorry for the wall of text, not very good at summarizing things and keeping things short and concise, but I'm fairly good at paying attention to detail, at least.