Drones

A drone is anything that acts as a body to a mind but has no mind of its own. The mind must be easily detachable or the object will be considered a body and not a drone. Being just an object, the drone can be shut down or destroyed without harm to the mind. Drones may have an AI to act as a nervous system to the body but as AI's are not alive, the drone remains an object.

The first drones were aerial as they technology of autopilot existed first.

Robilliverse

The most common drone is human analogue. Most things are designed by humans for humans so the most practical shape for a drone is that of the biological human. In effectively replacing the human body, a generic drone can be controlled by an engineer, don a regular suit and walk into the heart of a nuclear fission power plant to fix it. Dosed in radiation, the whole drone and suit can be safely disposed of, keeping the original engineer perfectly safe. Being a generic drone in a generic suit, this is the most cost effective way of dealing with such a situation.

The Principle of Versatility

Everything that can be designed to fit around a biological human and run by a biological human should be designed to do so.

The best example of the principle is where a carrier gets destroyed but the pilots get to escape by flying themselves out on their own fighters, as opposed to dying on the carrier if the drones didn't have a cockpit. That is why all Astry ships are designed to be flown by humans if needed.

Fighter ships can be flown
1. on automatic,
2. via a human treating the ship as a drone,
3. via a human controlling a human analog drone flying the ship like they were actually there (the double hub), or
4. via a human actually there flying the ship.

Quite often fighter pilots control a drone that flys the ship, as an ejected drone from a destroyed fighter can still maintain a view of the battle. This 'double hub' has been proven to be the most efficient setup in a 'messy' situation as it feels more natural to the pilots, although it is over engineered and more expensive. The double hub isn't the most efficient in some scenarios, but a proof showed that if some battles get what is now officially called 'messy', double hub can better deploy help from 'dead' pilots.

EI's

Most people consider EI's to be ethereal, that is to say they don't have a physical form and only exist in a virtual reality. Of course this is nonsense as all the data in computers is stored in vast data centres. For example the EI Doc resides in the data centres of every hospital everywhere. These data centres are considered part of Doc's body and so any attack on them is an attack on ous body and may inflict what is recognised as brain damage. Note that repairing of these data centres is referred to as brain surgery. Despite this, Doc is actually best known in his male and her female drones, that walk through villages in the poorer parts of the world. These are in fact drones, used by Doc to deliver front line medicine to those who need it. There is a body variant that has a brain capability that can allow Doc to fully decant a smaller version of ouself into the body. In doing so the body becomes an independent EI. Although the bodies are almost identical to a drone, they are considered to be a full life until The Return Imperative instructs the mind to leave the body (empty) and merge back with the main mind of the EI.