FPV Drones

Six drone airframes you fly yourself, from the drone's own camera — or send to a point and let them get on with it. They run on battery packs you recharge off your grid, and on fuel. Run dry in the air and they come down.

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The aircraft

| | Role | | |---|---|---| | Strizh | Recon quad | Fast, fragile, unarmed. Uncovers the map as it flies and drops chart markers on nests. | | Ovod | FPV kamikaze | Shaped charge on the nose, contact fuse. The workhorse against nests. | | Baba Yaga | Heavy bomber | Six bombs dropped one at a time from altitude. Survives the run and comes home for more. | | Drakon | Thermite burner | Lays a trail of fire that keeps burning on its own. Clears forest and nests alike — and does not care whose side you are on. | | Orlan | Fixed-wing scout | Catapult launched, cannot hover. A single fuel can keeps it up for minutes and it uncovers the map in a broad swathe. | | Lantset | Loitering munition | Fixed-wing strike at long reach. Single use. |

Two ways to fly

Manual FPV. Your body stays where it is. A stand-in pilot takes the driver's seat, the camera goes with the drone, the interface disappears and you fly it on WASD. Shift+D connects and disconnects — press it again and you pick up the same aircraft wherever it drifted to, at any distance. Ctrl+D lists everything you own with range, charge and status, and hands you the sticks on any of them.

Remote orders. The target designator works on the ground and in the map view, like an artillery marker. Mark a spot and the nearest idle aircraft flies there by itself: strike drones detonate on the point, scouts circle it and uncover the map, the Baba Yaga works through its rack and heads home, the Drakon burns a ring. Alt-select an area to recall everything in it.

The autopilot is not a teleport — it is an AI driver sitting in the seat, flying on the same physics and burning the same fuel you would.

Nothing flies for free

Multirotors burn battery packs. A pack is 6 MJ, about a minute at full throttle, and it stays aboard as a spent pack when it is done. The charging station turns spent packs back into charged ones for 12 MJ off your grid — cheaper than building fresh packs, and it means how far you can reach comes down to how much power you can spare.

Fixed wings burn fuel cans made in a chemical plant. There is nothing to recover.

On top of thrust, every aircraft draws a hover load, so hanging in the air is never free.

Building them

Everything is assembled from two intermediates, so scaling drone production means building two real assembly lines rather than hand-crafting one-offs:

• Drone airframe — steel, plastic, gears, copper cable. Frame, motors, speed controllers.
• Drone avionics — advanced and electronic circuits, copper cable, plastic. Flight controller, camera, video link.

Airframes then differ by how many of each they take and by one signature ingredient: explosives, an engine, tankage, or a wing.

Research

Five steps, each unlocking one capability, spread across the vanilla ladder:

1. Reconnaissance drones (red + green) — airframes, avionics, battery packs, charging station, Strizh. Deliberately costs no military science: it is a map tool, not a weapon, and it arrives with oil.
2. Strike drones (+ chemical, military) — the Ovod. Lands about where explosive rockets do.
3. Autonomous guidance (after robotics) — the target designator. Autonomous flight is the same problem construction robots already solved.
4. Heavy drones (after flamethrowers and engines) — Baba Yaga, Drakon, bombs, thermite.
5. Fixed-wing UAVs (+ production science, after low density structures) — catapult, fuel, Orlan, Lantset.

Plus Shaped charges, repeatable forever: +25% warhead damage per level.

Controls

| Key | Action | |---|---| | Shift+D | Connect / disconnect (toggle) | | Ctrl+D | Aircraft list | | W A S D | Throttle, yaw, brake — stock vehicle controls | | Space | Airframe action: detonate, drop a bomb, burner on/off, or drop a chart marker | | Shift+Space | Secondary: warhead safety, or salvo on the bomber | | Enter | Also disconnects |

Aircraft carry a Take control button in their own window; the catapult has a Launch button in its. /fpv-reset returns you to your body if a flight ever gets stuck.

Honest notes

• Factorio renders one fixed top-down angle. There is no tilting camera, so "FPV" here means the camera is locked to the drone, zoomed in, with the interface hidden — not a 3D first-person view. It reads as piloting; it does not look like a racing sim.
• While you are flying, your real character is invulnerable by default. That removes a whole class of broken states, and you can switch it off in the settings if you want your body at risk.
• The Drakon's fire burns your buildings too. That is the point of it.
• Base game only. Not tested with Space Age.

Settings

Warhead damage multiplier, friendly fire, body protection, contact fuse and its radius, link range, designator dispatch range, hover power draw, FPV camera zoom, and whether the interface hides in flight.

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Русский

Шесть беспилотников, которыми управляешь сам, с камеры самого борта — или указываешь точку, и он идёт туда без тебя.

«Стриж» — разведчик, вскрывает карту и ставит метки. «Овод» — FPV-камикадзе с кумулятивным зарядом. «Баба-Яга» — тяжёлый бомбардировщик, шесть бомб, возвращается. «Дракон» — термитная горелка, оставляет полосу огня. «Орлан» — самолётный разведчик с катапульты, не умеет висеть. «Ланцет» — барражирующий боеприпас дальнего радиуса.

Мультикоптеры жгут аккумуляторные блоки, разряженный блок остаётся в борту и заряжается на станции от общей сети. Самолётным нужно горючее. Кончилось в воздухе — борт падает.