How do I Drone?

[SievertChaser]

Campaign mission 3, I can launch, I can efficiently intercept, but then they burn out all of their fuel and die. How do I turn missiles back into drones?

[Dog]

Deactivate them when they miss the target, otherwise they will continue to home in

[dracogeno]

After a few tries I only needed one pass to disable the power plant with two waves of drones. I didn't need to recover them (given how difficult and costly in Dv or time rendezvous are, I thought of them as one use only)
But in the next mission I have seen some enemy missiles do two passes trying to catch my space station after being lured by a decoy, so maybe its doable.

[Toushi]

If your Delta V budget is not high enough to allow them to burn back at the enemy ships then sadly they are just doomed to drift after the initial attack.

[SievertChaser]

Originally posted by Toushi:

If your Delta V budget is not high enough to allow them to burn back at the enemy ships then sadly they are just doomed to drift after the initial attack.

Total dV of about 5 km/s (those are Stingers), spent about 400 m/s to get an intercept, relative velocity at contact 224 m/s. Should last for a few passes, wouldn't you think?

[SievertChaser]

Mkay, after I realized what different commands do, I think I can more or less get what I want done.

[kahlzun]

I'm having problems getting the Stingers to shoot at the enemy. I can intercept no problem, but they seem to drift past the enemy blithely doing nothing to hit him until they run out of dV and 'die'. Which command is best for "shoot that guy"?

[Dog]

Drones suffer from the problem where they will not effectively engage the enemy unless you set them to ignore effective engagement range.
Also make sure they are set to broadside

[not madattak]

Originally posted by .|Ϟ|. Catface (Modding):

Drones suffer from the problem where they will not effectively engage the enemy unless you set them to ignore effective engagement range.
Also make sure they are set to broadside

This might have been the mistake I was making - I set them to nose first since the cannons were in the nose, but this for some reason prevented them from firing.

[AtomHeartDragon]

Orientations are named rather unfortunately in CDE, for historical reasons it seems (originally you only had non-extruded ball-turrets so ships *had* to broadside to be able to shoot):

Broadside is whatever happens to aim fixed (if any) or longest range weapon directly at target. Note that it isn't necessarily the bast option because with extruded turrets you usually can aim MORE guns in nose forward mode. Also note that "fixed" usually means spinal or nose mounted so it also aims those even though that's definitiely not broadsiding.

Nose forward just aims the ship's nose directly at target. Counterintuitively, aiming nose directly at target is usually not the same as aiming spinal guns, becuase target tends to be moving fast in space so it won't be there once the bullets arrive, and the slower the bullets the worse it gets. Nose forward doesn't account for this, but broadside does.