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Drones

	EVE University offers classes on:
Drones 101 Drones 102

This article explains what drones are and how they work. For a more detailed discussion of PvP and PvE tactics with drones, see the Using Drones page.

Drones are semi-autonomous vehicles launched from larger spacecraft, designed to augment the launching ship's capabilities. All four races use drones (to a greater or lesser degree), so every combat pilot is likely to use them sooner or later.

While for most ships drones are used to support their main weapons, there are some ships which use drones as their primary way of dealing damage. In addition to dealing damage, there are drones for more specialized uses, such as mining, electronic warfare, and logistics.

Drone basics

Drone bay

A ship must have a drone bay to use drones. You can find out if a ship has a drone bay, and how big it is, by looking at the Attributes tab in its Show Info window - if it has a drone bay, it will tell you the drone bay's capacity in cubic meters (m³). The size of a ship's drone bay determines how many drones you can carry with you, ready to be launched into space; larger and more powerful drones take up more space in your drone bay.

The Tristan has a 40 m³ drone bay, which means it can carry up to eight light drones (which take up 5 m³ each), or four medium drones (10 m³ each), or a combination of the two (e.g. two medium and four light drones).

Only drones can be carried in a ship's drone bay; it cannot be used to carry other cargo. While you can, of course, carry drones in your cargo bay (just like any other kind of cargo), you cannot use them if they are not in the drone bay. You can only move drones in or out of your drone bay while docked at a station, or by using the fitting service provided by a mobile depot. The size of your ship's drone bay is usually fixed (with a few exceptions, such as the Ishkur, whose drone bay size depends on your skills), and cannot be enlarged using modules.

Launching and controlling drones

Main article: Using Drones

If you undock with drones in your drone bay, you will see a new window for controlling drones appear on your screen. Through this window you can launch drones from your drone bay, give commands to them once they are in space (for instance, to attack a target, orbit your ship, or mine an asteroid), and recover them (bring them back into your drone bay). This window also shows you if any of the drones you currently have in space are damaged.

You cannot control how a drone fights and fly directly; you can only issue commands like "attack that target", in which case the drone will fly to the target you have selected, and start firing on it once it's within weapons range, all without further input from you. You can give commands to each of your drones individually, or to all of your drones at once. The Using Drones page goes into more details on the different commands you can give to your drones.

Bandwidth

The other important ship attribute is its "bandwidth" (which you can also check in the Attributes tab of your ship's Show Info window), which represents your ship's ability to control your drones, and is measured in Mbit/sec. Bigger and more powerful drones require more bandwidth, and you can only deploy (ie use in space) as many drones as you have available bandwidth on your ship. Many ships (particularly dedicated drone ships) can carry many more drones in their drone bay than they can deploy at once; this allows you to selectively deploy different types of drones to best match your enemies, or to replace drones which are destroyed in combat.

However, irrespective of your ship's bandwidth, you can only only have as many drones in space at once as you have levels in the Drones skill (up to 5 drones at level V). The only exceptions to this limit are carriers and supercarriers (both capital ships) and the very rare Guardian-Vexor cruiser, but in every other case you can only ever have at most five drones in space at once.

The Tristan has a 40 m³ drone bay, allowing it to carry up to eight light drones. Its bandwidth is 25 Mbit/s, so that it can deploy, at most, five of those light drones in space at once (they need 5 Mbit/s each), but only if the pilot has trained the Drones skill to level V. If it's carrying a mixture of light and medium drones, it could deploy up to two medium (10 Mbit/s each) and one light drone at once, assuming the pilot has trained Drones III.

With the exception of fighters and fighter bombers (which are only used by capital ships), a drone's bandwidth requirements (in Mbit/sec) is always the same number as its size (in m³). Your ship's bandwith is fixed, and is not affected by skills or modules.

Drone control range

You can only command a drone to attack/repair/mine a target if that target is within a certain range of your ship; this range is known as the "drone control range". By default, your control range is 20km, which means that you can only order a drone to attack an enemy ship if it's within 20km of your ship. This range can be extended by training skills or installing modules on your ship.

Drone navigation

All drones (except the stationary sentry drones) have a built-in microwarp drive (MWD), allowing them to travel quickly to engage a target. Once they arrive near their targets, they shut down their MWD, orbit the target, and fire their weapons. This means that, unlike for the other weapons systems in EVE (lasers, projectiles, hybrids, and missiles), drones first have to travel to the target, and then stay within range of it in order to apply their damage. In practice, this means that drones will have difficulty against faster, more agile targets, as even though they may be able to catch them thanks to their MWD, they may not be able to stay within weapons range for long (at their non-MWD speed). Larger drones (medium and heavy drones) in particular are almost useless against fast frigates for this reason.

There are skills and modules to improve your drone's MWD speed, but you cannot improve your drone's non-MWD speed.

Drone type overview

Drones are capable of serving many different roles and exist in many different sizes. There are seventeen different groups of drones, which can be divided into five categories:

Combat drones

These are the most common drones, and are (as the name suggests) used to damage and destroy enemy ships. There are six different types of combat drone:

• Light, medium, and heavy drones, intended for use on frigate, cruiser, and battleship-sized ships, respectively
• Sentry drones, which act as stationary, long-range turrets
• Fighter and fighter-bomber drones, which are very large drones used by capital ships (carriers and supercarriers)

Electronic warfare and combat utility drones

These drones impair an enemy ship using electronic warfare or similar methods. There are drones for each of the four methods of electronic warfare: tracking disruption (TD), electronic countermeasures (ECM), sensor dampening (SD), and target painting (TP). Additionally, there are drones which drain an enemy's capacitor (energy neutralisers), or reduce a ship's speed (stasis webifiers).

Logistics drones

These drones assist friendly ships by repairing their shields, armor, or hull.

Salvage drones

These drones are used to salvage nearby wrecks.

Mining drone

These drones mine asteroids to produce ore.

Subcapital combat drones

Light drones:

• Use 5m³ space and 5Mbit/sec bandwidth
• Move and track targets very fast
• Are the best drones to use against frigates and destroyers

Medium drones:

• Use 10m³ space and 10Mbit/sec bandwidth
• Move and track moderately fast
• Are the best drones to use against cruisers, and are also good against battlecruisers

Heavy drones:

• Use 25m³ space and 25Mbit/sec bandwidth
• Move and track slowly, but do lots of damage
• Are good against battleships, and can handle battlecruisers

Sentry drones:

• Use 25m³ space and 25Mbit/sec bandwidth
• Cannot move in space
• Can hit targets at long ranges, but have poor tracking, and so will have difficulty against close or fast targets
• Most effective against battleships and battlecruisers, but can also hit smaller targets if they are far enough away

Each race has their its own light, medium, heavy, and sentry drones, and they each do primarily one damage type (for instance, all Amarr drones do EM damage).

Race	Light	Medium	Heavy	Sentry	Damage
					Primary	Secondary
Amarr	Acolyte	Infiltrator	Praetor	Curator
Caldari	Hornet	Vespa	Wasp	Warden
Gallente	Hobgoblin	Hammerhead	Ogre	Garde
Minmatar	Warrior	Valkyrie	Berserker	Bouncer
All combat drones do the primary damage type. 'Integrated', 'Augmented', fighters, and fighter-bombers also do the secondary damage type.

Faction comparison

Within a drone class (e.g. medium drones), each faction's drones have strengths and weaknesses compared to the other factions'.

Light, medium and heavy drones

• Minmatar drones are the fastest drones (50% faster than Gallente drones), and so excel at chasing fast ships. However, they do the lowest damage.
• Gallente drones do the most damage (23% more than Minmatar drones), but are the slowest.
• Amarr and Caldari drones fall between Gallente and Minmatar drones in terms of damage and speed (Caldari drones do a little less damage than Gallente drones, but are a bit faster; Amarr drones do a little more damage than Minmatar drones, but are a bit slower). Additionally, these drones orbit a little further away from their targets, making them apply their damage more consistently, and are a little tougher (+25% more hit points, compared with Minmatar and Gallente drones).

Therefore, the four race's drones represent a sliding scale between damage and speed:

Race	Damage		Speed
Minmatar				+50%
Amarr		+8%		+37%
Caldari		+15%		+13%
Gallente		+23%

• Table: Damage (incl type), MWD speed, orbiting speed. With all three drone types.

Sentry drones

• Caldari drones have the longest range (150% more than Gallente drones), but with the lowest tracking and damage.
• Gallente drones do the most damage (21% more than Caldari drones) and have the best tracking (200% better than Caldari drones), but have the shortest range.
• Amarr and Minmatar drones fall between Caldari and Gallente drones in terms of damage and range (Minmatar drones do a little more damage with better tracking than Caldari drones, but have less range; Amarr drones have slightly more range than Gallente drones, but worse tracking and damage).

Therefore, the four race's drones represent a sliding scale between damage and range (with short-ranged drones having better tracking). Note that, in the table below, range is given as "first falloff" (i.e. the optimal range plus 1 falloff); Amarr and Minmatar drones both have the same optimal range, but the Minmatar drones have a much longer falloff range.

Race	Damage		Range		Tracking
Caldari				+143%
Minmatar		+7%		+115%		+60%
Amarr		+14%		+29%		+130%
Gallente		+21%				+200%

• Table: Damage (incl type), range, tracking

Drone variants

In addition to the basic Tech 1 drones, there are four other variants of drone within each race's light/medium/heavy drone lineup:

• A Tech 2 drone, which is more powerful (better speed, damage, and hit points) than its Tech 1 counterpart, but requires additional skills to use.
• A Faction drone, available from LP stores. They don't require additional skills to use (beyond those required for the Tech 1 drones). They have a very large number of hit points, but slightly lower damage than their Tech 2 counterparts.
• 'Integrated' and 'Augmented' drones, which can be thought of as enhanced Tech 1 drone and Tech 2 drones, respectively. These drones are produced from the components found in NPC rogue drone wrecks. They need the same skills to use as Tech 1 and Tech 2 drones, respectively, but have slightly improved stats. The damage they do is split between the race's primary and secondary damage types (unlike all other types of subcapital combat drones, which deal only the race's primary damage type). However, they are fairly rare therefore very expensive.

Sentry drones also have Tech 2 and Faction variants (but no 'Integrated' or 'Augmented' drones):

• Tech 2 sentry drones have better range, tracking, and hit points (compared with their Tech 1 counterparts), but need additional skills to use.
• Faction sentry drones have (compared to their Tech 2 counterparts) the same range, slightly lower damage, but many more hit points. They don't require additional skills to use (beyond those required for the Tech 1 drones), and are available from LP stores.

Note that, for sentry drones, the Tech 2 and Faction variants do not have higher damage than their Tech 1 counterparts (although the damage of Tech 2 drones can be further increased by training the racial drone specialization skills).

• Big table of +%

L/M/H

• Integrated need <size> Drone Operation I. +10% speed, +15% dps, +10% EHP
• Faction need <size> Drone Operation I. +20% speed, dps, +100% EHP.
• T2 are improved by Racial Drone Specialization skills (+2% dmg per skill level). +20% speed, dps, EHP. More dps (+10%) than faction, but lower EHP.
• Augmented need <size> Drone Operation V and <race> Drone Specialization. +32% speed, +32% dps, +80% EHP. Fastest and more dps, second-highest EHP.

Sentry

• T2: +20% optimal, falloff, tracking, EHP. DPS as T1, but increased by Drone Specialization skills.
• Faction: +20% optimal, falloff, +26% tracking, +140% EHP. DPS as T1.

Capital drones

• Fighters and fighter-bombers

Skills

You don't need skills to load drones into your drone bay, you only need them to launch drones.

Notable drone ships

Main article: Drone Capable Ships

A nice table with the ship pictures and a brief description of why they are good drone ships.

Notable PvP Droneboats

Gallente

• Ishkur: AF with potential 50m³ dronebay; one of the best AFs, good DPS ship or sticky tackler; good solo
• Vexor: tough, flexible secondary tackle/DPS ship; shield-tank and fit blasters for more DPS than a Thorax!; good solo
• Ishtar: lots of DPS and drone space in a small package; like other HACs can lose its role in a large mixed fleet; unlike some turret-based HACs, doesn't really work as a sniper
• Myrmidon: tolerable DPS; sometimes fitted with autocannon or lasers; active armor tanked Myrmidon can be good small gang bait
• Dominix: cheap and powerful Swiss Army Knife of a ship; high DPS w/ blasters and large drones; or RR or capacitor warfare platform
• Sin: despite its drone bonuses, its primary function is to create covert cyno bridges, not to use drones; not noticeably better as a droneboat than the Dominix, but massively more expensive

Amarr

• Sentinel: ewar, capacitor warfare and drones in one frigate hull; superb 1v1 ship, decent small gang support
• Arbitrator: flexible combination of ewar and DPS; shield or armor tank; good solo or gang support ship
• Curse: lethal mix of ewar and capacitor warfare, with drones for DPS; great gang ship; would be good solo if everyone didn't dock up when it appeared on scan
• Pilgrim: cloaky Curse, with a shorter range; good surprise solo/small gang ship; can be a heavy scout/initial tackler

Gurista

• Worm: similar to the Ishkur; held back by rockets' weakness but can mount a superb shield tank (for a frigate)
• Gila: similar to the Ishtar, with missiles instead of hybdrid turrets, and a bigger dronebay

(Unless you're quite rich, the Rattlesnake doesn't offer a great deal more than the Dominix for PvP, given its expense.)