1) Mining Beam -- Hefty polarized IRKA-4 mining laser. Used for boring into asteroids.
This outfit fits in a small (S) port. Used to extract ore from asteroids. This outfit classifies your ship to (Unaligned) drones in your sector as a fellow Collector. If you fire a weapon other than the mining beam within 200 meters of another bot, you are reclassified to "Player" and you will be fired upon.

2) Bot Charmer -- IFF encoder configured to match the frequencies of the rogue drones. (Drain: 10/s)
This device fits in a large (L) port. Mollifies all drones (Defbots not included) within one kilometer of your location unless you fire a weapon in this small radius.

3) Bot Irker -- IFF encoder configured to classify your ship as a threat to a hive queen on the rogue drones' sensors. (Drain: 10/s)
This device causes all bots within one kilometer of your ship to cease what they are doing when you approach and attack you.

Bot Irker sounds great, we could lead bot parades like the old days.

Seriously though, that's an interesting idea to add to mining defenders. Obviously useful for botting as well. Even better if you could lead the parade through a wh and dump all the bots in the Itani capitol (or wherever).

Hey, where did I hear those ideas before... I think I like them though. :)

I like the idea of a bot charmer/irker(I like the idea of less aggressive bots and just the irker - maybe a charmer needed for REALLY aggressive sectors - a lot better, though), but the energy drain you suggest might be impractical, depending on how it worked out with other items that drain charge... what might be good is to put such a thing ingame in 'testing' mode(possibly explain that AxiaCorp and a few others have just invented this new bot aggression inhibitor/provoker and that they are still tweaking it) and see what sorts of charge drains work out the best... who knows, I'm just tossing out ideas here.

Bot Charmer was yours, Andy... I just expanded on it. The Mining Beam stuff was expanded from Demonen's idea.

The reason for the particular drain rates I chose was so that while they were on, boosting would be hindered, even with the fast charge battery.

I'd rather not that the mining tool auto-branded you as "bots best friend" and instead have the act of actual -mining- being "ok".

So while you fly, equpped with your mining tool, you are fair game, and hostile bots can well attack you, but when you start to mine, you are "clear" and should be left alone.

so, while firing the mining-tool:
a) you never get new enemies. you keep your old.
b) old enemies that are more than 500m away start to ignore you.
c) old enemies that are closer than 500m will still attack you.

(Just to avoid some of the roid-jumping techniques. at least make them a bit harder on the players)

To expand on the bots not bothering you when mining, a few bots could stay a distance away and seemingly just be doing their business, but are really keeping tabs on you. Once you are done with mining they will attack you and try to take your ore from you and head out to their queen. This would give assaults more of a purpose other than guarding, and allow a new type of bot like, Recoverer, or some other word.

Well, it would seem to be in the best interest of a group of miners to have a few guards around to chase off the bots.

Artificial means of keeping bots away seem to me to be kinda...artificial.

Celebrim, that sort of doesn't work because of the current so-called "aggro model" of the bots: more guards simply attract more bots to the point where it's a constant assault which is more difficult than it should be. The main problem is that as soon as a guard peels the bot off a miner's back, another bot will come to take its place, no matter how long it takes for your guard to kill the first one.

The "bot charmer" was one solution (although I wasn't 100% serious when I suggested it, at least). This is only really a problem in sectors with Assault and Guardian bots.

Hmmm....

I'll give it some thought.