Will there be a physicality to these various processes and activities? [i.e. will you have to move stuff from the hold and attach it to the drone before sending it out, or will the drone just pull stuff from the hold?]
TL;DRInitially the loop is not very hands-on: the player flies each drone manually from a support station, one function at a time, while how rearming and component replacement physically transfer from hold to ship is still undecided.
Initially, it's probably not going to be very tactile, hands-on. It will go towards that as time goes on, but the initial loop will be controlling that drone. You go to the support station to control the drone. You pick what you're going to do with it, whether you will rearm or repair. The drones can only do one function at a time without re-docking. So you set it in repair mode. You manually fly it over to the thing you're going to repair. It's not a case of, oh, there's a ship next to me, drone, go repair that, and off it toddles. You've got to fly it yourself, do the repair yourself from that station. The same for refueling and rearming. Refueling, obviously, there is going to be a point on the ship that it has to lock onto to transfer, and the fuel is on the ship itself, so there's a physical connection. The rearming and the replacing components is a bit TBD at the moment. Obviously, there's physical ammo boxes and physical components. It's working out how we want to transition the stores you have to that drone to the ship.
A lot of ship items that are broken potentially are inside. And so we don't necessarily want drones to then be flying through corridors kind of thing. So the logistics of how do we get it from my cargo hold over to there is still under...
You don't want to be walking down your Retaliator hallway and this drone just comes flying down it with a power plant in tow.