I know, you dev's probably have a story behind this, but I just have to ask. Why do these collectors have guns anyway, before the bots went crazy. What were these overseers and arklans and assaults doing before?

I can see maybe, after they went crazy, the hive queen equipped her little friends with guns, but it's kinda hard to get them in the first place without any.

collectors have guns to protect themselves against pirates. If there is an area with higher statistical occurrences of pirate attacks, then guardians and assaults are deployed to protect them.

I suspect that before the hive went crazy, the proportion of guardians and assaults to collectors was much lower, as they were only deployed on a case of need, but once the hive went crazy, they were deployed to nearly all sectors where collectors were mining, and all bots were instructed to defend themselves against everyone, not just people who attack them.

This leads to another question, why is the CTC transport occasionally guarded by collectors. I mean I know they're basic defense, but do you really need a ship with a mining beam+scanner?

Also, considering that they use Collectors for defense, why don't they use them for mining around stations? One would expect the roids around there to be very hot from collector activity.

They would also keep the price of those particular minerals at that station low.

newbies do a good job of keeping the station roids hot already, though with little influx as of late that has changed. I would imagine that any automated machinery has been banned or seriously restricted since the exidus of all the previous robot slaves (bots). The only reason I can think of why we can't use bots for players or as "good" npc's at the moment would be because if we put out new tech the hives could potentially steal/infect/infiltrate them and improve themselves with it.

I agree with Shape that collectors should not have "originally" had weapons, but I can see the hive equiping them after the rebelion.

It would be nice though to see npc people mining roids in sectors as we see npc players trading between systems. It would also be cool to see civilian ships, people transports, vacation liners, but probably only in capital systems like Itan, Dau and Sol2, less on the fringe territory.

LOL... I didn't Serco citizens TOOK vacations.... :o

they have to fly to there next scheduled arena combat somehow, why not a public cruiseliner. =)

So the idea needs tweaking for specific factions but the core idea is still good.