Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: An improvement to the Survey Droid idea
Thoughts?
Javac wrote:
The idea to have a droid help you survey has been kicked around quite a bit since very early on. Increasing range, surveying multiple materials at once (or class of materials) have all been good ideas. If this is done, I think the best deal for DE's would be to have the droids be single-use items much like BH droids. The sucess (or failure) would be based off the user's Survey skill (also giving a reason to use the chef +survey food at Survey IV). I'm not sure if increased range over 320m is doable, but multiple resources at once certainly is. Harvesters pull the concentration for all reources they can harvest at that particular spot.
Thoughts?
The concept of a Survey Droid generally involves having the droid find set concentration of a specific resource on planet or reporting back on all possible resources available on another planet. A simple one-shot /survey droid would be largely useless, because the people most likely to use them are also the people most likely to already possess the Survey skill.
My personal favorite is the former. Let me "program" a droid to search for a specific resource at a specific concentration or higher. I don't really care how it reports back - emailing a waypoint would suffice - and this type of droid could easily have charges as you suggest. The advantage is that it does the searching for you, which is something that a lot of people just don't like to take the time to do.
I would love to be able to send a droid off to find the 'perfect' spot and not have to run around the planet for a 40 minutes looking for a half-decent concentration. Unfortunately I don't see this happening for technical and gameplay reasons.
However, if you could survey at a much larger range that would still be something people would want. It would cut down on surveying time but not eliminate it. Perhaps with double your existing survey range or 1024m it would be enough of an improvement to be a desired item. Getting the concentratrions for all resources in the immediate area would be quite useful too.
What about programming a droid with a unique resource and a predefined concentration? The droid will survey for that resource and send you a wp for a spot with that exact concentration. It could work like the seekers, with a limited number of uses
Ellesa
Javac wrote:
Good points, the trick is to make something that is desired but does not replace an existing skillset. I'm not saying that it would be a one-shot clone of /survey.
I would love to be able to send a droid off to find the 'perfect' spot and not have to run around the planet for a 40 minutes looking for a half-decent concentration. Unfortunately I don't see this happening for technical and gameplay reasons.
These droids shouldn't be useable by anyone without the survey skill anyway. They should just try and pinpoint the highest concentration based on the level of survey skill you already possess. It would fly up and try and pinpoint the highest concentration based on your skill. Say 25% to find the highest resource spot at box 1, 50% box 2, 75% box 3 and 95% at box 4.
Oh, and they should be either difficult and expensive to make OR creativelyprogram it so you can only use one per day. That way it would limit a person from using one after another to locate the highest concentration using tons of droids.
If a arakyd can pinpoint a single person from orbit, you would think it would be able to find resource concentrations as well. Look at the Mars missions. They predicted specific types ofelements to be found before the landers even touched groundand sure enough thats what they found.
Message Edited by Gribnitz on 02-17-2004 09:18 PM