Attack Drone

Never send a human to do a machine's job.

"This humble, yet eloquent, synthenoid has been manufactured with only one directive: protect its master! Note: Synthenoid has the tendency to trash talk those it feels are unworthy of fighting it, i.e. everyone."

—Description for Mr. Zurkon, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time

An Attack Drone is an automated weapon controlled by a larger system. The archetypal Attack Drone is basically a gun, a propulsion system to move it, and an AI with sensors to carry out commands. This can allow the controller to attack an enemy with a greatly reduced risk of getting themselves shot, or allow them to strike from multiple angles, or simply utilize more firepower by themselves.

The major difference between Attack Drones and Mecha-Mooks is a matter of size and shape. A Mecha-Mook is usually in the size and/or shape of a humanoid or animal, while a drone is aircraft-like or entirely mechanical in appearance (though there is some crossover in the form of Spider Tank drones). In short, a Mecha-Mook may look, if only on the most basic levels, like a person or animal, while an Attack Drone is unmistakably a thing. The other difference is, as noted above, that an Attack Drone is directly commanded or controlled, directly tied to said controller as an extension of it as opposed to the more independent Mecha-Mook. Also, an Attack Drone is more often than not smaller than its controller, and in many cases can be carried until it is ready to be unleashed.

These are a common accessory in shoot-em-ups and games in space settings, which aids the player in battle. It is detached from the player's avatar and will follow the main avatar around in battle. Often called "options" (as in Gradius), "bits" (as in R-Type), or "funnels" (as in Gundam), or by the generic term of endearment "gunbuddies".

Common features:

• Is immune to and may block enemy fire.
• Is able to destroy enemies on contact.
• Fires weapons of its own, either in tandem with the player or automatically.
• Covers arcs of fire outside those of the player's normal weapons.
• Can be customized and enhanced by gathering powerups.
• Can be directly controlled by the second player if the game supports Co-Op Multiplayer.

Not to be confused with Drone music or Drone Tactics. Compare Attack Animal (which might overlap if the drone is intelligent enough to act on instructions, rather than direct control). Contrast Orbiting Particle Shield. Might be deployed by the, well, Drone Deployer, or by an Enemy Summoner, if they summon the drones via Functional Magic. See also Surveillance Drone.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Akudama Drive: Hacker always has two drones that are shaped like bear heads by his side when it comes to moving from place to place or blowing enemies to smithereens.
• Aldnoah.Zero has these appear from time to time due to the diversity of the incredibly powerful Martian Kataphrakts.
  • Hellas, piloted by Countess Femieanne, is the first to feature such an ability, with the huge multiple arms — called "Servants" — being launched like massive missiles to plow through their targets.
  • Dioscuria, the personal Kataphrakt of Count Saazbaum, carries the Hellas' Servant fists as well, as well as the void barrier of the Nilokeras and the beam saber of the Argyre.
  • Herschel, which belongs to Count Marylcian, and later Harklight after Slaine kills Marylcian, carries scores of traditional attack drones that unleash a hellish Beam Spam.
• The first New Transfer Student Ritsu from Assassination Classroom is an attack drone. Her full name is Jiritsu Shikou Kotei Houdai, or "Autonomously Thinking Fixed Artillery" in English.
• GaoGaiGar has GunDober and GunGrue, their personal motorcycle and mini-chopper, which transform into robots. In addition to being simply driven, they also take wireless commands from Volfogg; he even has tactical maneuvers with them. And they combine with him into Big Volfogg.
• Gundam absolutely loves the Attack Drone concept; it's one of the few things to appear across almost every continuity. In order:
  • Universal Century kicked it off with bits, funnels, and incoms. Bits tend to be larger and carry their own reactors, while funnels are smaller and have to dock with their mobile suit to recharge (Nu Gundam's fin funnels are a misnomer, carrying their own reactor; one presumes they were given that name in-universe for the exact same reason as in real life) While the latter two require Psychic Powers to function, incoms don't, at the cost of requiring a guidance cable. In-universe, it's explained that the bit/funnel system was made possible by the development of Newtype-based technologies as Minovsky Physics made automated drones as we would know them effectively useless.
    • The Mobile Suit Gundam novel puts a twist on this with the Elmeth. While the anime version just has standard beam gun-equipped bits, the novel version has some which are essentially psychically guided nuclear missiles.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory kind of cheats this one with the Neue Ziel, whose forearms can detach on control cables; this was explained as the Ziel using an experimental "half-system" in which the control duties are split between the pilot and a dedicated computer. Since this happens a good five in-universe years before practical incoms were developed, it was retconned into being the precursor to said system.
    • The non-canon manga Mobile Suit vs. Giant God: Gigantis' Counterattack, the Mega Zeta^note An improved ZZ Gundam combines this with Rocket Punch in the form of the Psycommu Arm. Needless to say, when Judau sees it in action, he's left completely dumbstruck.
    • Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam features the first recorded instance of melee drones with the Divinidad's feather funnels. However, rather than being designed for the purpose, it's simply a case where the Divinidad is so massive (the eponymous Gundam is about the size of its face) and the funnels are tough enough that they can ram enemy machines and survive (and even if they don't, it has so many funnels that losing a few isn't a problem).
    • The Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway's Flash has the Ξ Gundam's Funnel Missiles that in addition to the abilities of the regular funnels, can explode upon impact with the enemy — hence the name.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn also delves with this trope, but with an added unique twist.
    • We have the NZ-666 Kshatriya which sports 24 of the traditional funnels stored in four massive pods;
    • Then there's the titular Gundam itself, which isn't outfitted with any sort of funnels or Newtype weaponry, but instead can hijack them through the suit's Psycoframe with the Newtype Destroyer (NT-D) mode active. This also counts towards the Unicorn's own weaponry, particularly the shields on its Full Armor configuration (which come each with its own Psycommu panels, I-Field generators, and twin Gatling guns.)
    • For the wired variants, there's the Rozen Zulu (basically the Hamma Hamma's direct descendant) with its two INCOM claws; and the massive NZ-999 Neo Zeong, which has 30 wired funnels which is capable of hijacking an enemy mobile suit on contact.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative continues Unicorn's usage.
    • The Unicorn Unit 3 "Phenix" uses the same stunt its sibling unit does, attacking foes with its Armed Armor DE shield boosters as either pummeling units or as long range weapons.
    • The Narrative Gundam's B-Packs are armed with two fin funnel-like INCOM units that also double as capture units.
  • G Gundam has the Rose Gundam's rose bits, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Master Gundam's Jyuni Ouhouhai Daishahei technique creates mini-Master Gundams which function like Attack Drones.
  • Gundam Wing has Defense Drones called planet defensors, which generate an electromagnetic barrier field. At least once, Heero tries to use them offensively, pairing them off and using the force "chain" like bolas to knock Wing Zero's beam saber out of its hand. The manga spin-off G-Unit (aka Last Outpost) introduces the Hydra Gundam, whose shoulder cannons are effectively incoms.
  • Wing also included the use of drone mobile suits ("Mobile Dolls") as a major plot point. The initial wave of Mobile Dolls were completely autonomous, run by a master control computer. The automization of warfare and its dangers went on to become a major plot point of the series, with its primary antagonist Treize objecting to the practice so voiceferously he revolted against his ostensible masters in the Romefeller Foundation over it. The Dolls were able to parse combat data quickly and had a very fast reaction time, but a really good pilot could fool their logic systems and catch them in a fatal mistake. A later experiment used pilot data collected from ace pilots (Heero and Trowa); these were even more dangerous. In the final iteration of the Mobile Dolls, the control computer was replaced by a human operator who operated the drones using the ZERO system to parse and respond to massive amounts of combat data.
    • In the SNES game Gundam Wing: Endless Duel they can be used offensively in a variety of ways, mostly as either chained together as a sort of lightning whip, or used to shoot out electricity. But there is an attack where they fly at the enemy on their own and electrocute them.
  • Gundam X has standard bits, but also has bit mobile suits, psychically-controlled Mecha-Mooks called G-Bits.
  • ∀ Gundam's rival, Turn X, can split its body into pieces and use them as bits.
  • Gundam SEED starts with wired weapons called gunbarrels, said to require Newtype powers great "spatial awareness" to operate; later in the series they introduce DRAGOONs which are more like standard bits.
    • The sequel, Gundam SEED Destiny, begins introducing wireless weapons that don't require spatial awareness. It also introduced DRAGOONs that can emit beam blades, functioning as melee weapons rather than just ranged ones.
  • Gundam 00 is probably the most diverse and extensive case so far:
    • The first season only had GN Fangs, which are combination melee/ranged Attack Drones.
    • The second season really lets loose: Cherudim has GN Shield Bits and GN Rifle Bits and the Gaddess has GN Beam Saber Fangs (each of which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin), the Reborns has Large GN Fin Fangs (basically rifle bits) and Small GN Fin Fangs (basically beam saber fangs), the Regnant has its own massive GN Fangs (which lack ranged weaponry and basically slice the enemy to pieces), and the Arche has an upgraded version of the GN Fangs from the first season. Seravee can also launch and remote-control Seraphim without transferring the cockpit. Fun is had by all. Additionally, there are human-sized ones called Automatons used by the A-Laws to mindlessly slaughter people without having to dirty their own hands.
    • Gundam 00 Awakening Of The Trailblazer features the Gadeleza, a truly massive mobile armor boasting 14 Large GN Fangs (which are each roughly the size of a standard mobile suit and pack their own Phlebotinum Reactor and Wave-Motion Gun), each of which carry 10 of their own regular-sized fangs that can emit both a beam saber and regular beam shots, making for a grand total of 154 remote weapons all together.
    • From that same movie, all four Gundams have their own unique types (yes, plural) of Attack Drone that can pull all kinds of crazy stunts:
    • Zabanya has 14 Rifle Bits (fly around shooting stuff) and 14 Holster Bits (block shots, ram things, and combine to form beam guns).
    • Harute has Scissor bits, which are dual-bladed bits that slice enemies into tiny pieces.
    • Raphael has two very large claw bits that each contain a Wave-Motion Gun and can grab things, which can be combined with the Raphael's backpack to form a second remote-controlled Gundam, the Seravee II.
    • 00-Qan[T] has Sword bits, which fly around stabbing and slicing things. They can also combine to form a shield, or combine with the main unit's sword to form a gigantic beam saber.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam AGE had the Farsia using standard bits that looked remarkably like G-Gundam's Rose Bits, which could combine their firepower for bigger beams. Later, the Ghirarga and the Gundam Legilis utilize the X-Transmitter weapon that creates energy-based particle bits, giving them controllable beams and a limitless supply of bit weaponry. Finally, the Gundam AGE-FX utilizes C-Funnels, which act a lot like the GN-Sword Bits of Gundam 00's 00 Qan[T]. While they can't shoot beams at enemies, it can block them.
  • Gundam Build Fighters has the Qubeley Papillion which uses the same funnels utilized by the original Qubeley, but also has a set of "clear funnels" made of transparent plastic, making it look like that anything getting close to it would suddenly explode as soon as the general vicinity around the machine started to glitter and sparkle.
  • Also some suits like the Build Strike, Zaku Amazing, and GM Sniper K-9 have backpack vehicles that can be used like this in battle. It seems however that using remote weapons in battle is not easy for Gunpla battlers, which is why many of them bring secondary pilots who can help control them.
  • Gundam Build Fighters Try has Gundam The End's DE (Dead End) Fangs which resemble nothing so much as remote-controlled bullets that ram enemies and can combine together to form a super-sturdy projectile. Unlike most funnel weapons however, Saga has to control each and every one of them by hand.
    • The Star Winning Gundam has Star Funnels, which can attack, defend or combine together to for shuriken bits.
    • Transient Gundam's GN Partisan can split into two two parts, one half for slashing and the other for shooting, though he only does this when he adds a second partisan to his arsenal, calling them "Lance Bits".
  • The Arcade Game SD Gundam: Psycho Salamander no Kyoui has detached Fin Funnels which float around your RX-78 and fire straight left or right.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans has some of the most fearsome attack drones in the franchise — Mobile Armours, here interpreted as huge, A.I.-controlled genocide weapons, can mass-produce 'Plumas' ('feathers'), drones slightly bigger than tanks that fight alongside their 'mother', hunt down anything it can't reach, and gather resources for it in order for it to keep going and keep making more Plumas until everything in the target area (which can be an entire planet) is dead. They wiped out a quarter of the human race during the Great Offscreen War that shaped the setting before they were finally put them down. In a more traditional example, the wire-tail bit that the Hashmal (and after a rebuild with Hashmal parts, Barbatos Lupus Rex) uses also counts by being a remotely controlled blade that requires spatial awareness (of an AI or a pilot with Alaya-Vijnana cyberjacks installed) to be operated.
  • Gundam Build Divers has the AGEII Magnum and its F Funnels, which are based off of the AGE-FX's C-Funnels. When its builder, Kyoya Kujo, updates the AGEII Magnum into the AGE-2 Magnum SV ver., he adds in two SigMaxiss Funnels, large drones armed with the AGE-3 Orbital's SigMaxiss Long Cannon and can double as extra thrusters.
  • In Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE, Hiroto's Jupitive Gundam has two arm-mounted Manifer Bits and two backpack-mounted thrusters that double as the Multi-Container Bits. When Kyoya returns in the second half of the series, his brand new Gundam TRY AGE Magnum is outfitted with TRY Birds, funnel-like weapons mounted on its shoulders. Its wings can detach to become TRY Funnels and, when they are attached to the TRY Birds, they grant them TRY Guns, giving it the power of the normal DODS Beam Rifle. Alus' Evil Knockoff copies of the Nu Gundam and Turn-X also have the same weapons as their normal counterparts.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury makes attack drones far more central to the plot than most shows. Similarly to how UC works made bits and funnels into technology only Newtypes could control, it treats the use of them as almost exclusive to the GUND Format, originally a form of prosthesis. "Gundam" in this continuity specifically refers to mobile suits using the format and thus using drones. Though the technology allows a pilot to control a large number of drones by interfacing their body to the suit itself, it risks a backlash that can harm or outright kill the user, and is consequently banned—leading to complications when the protagonist's suit, the Aerial, shows up having somehow seemingly solved the weakness.
    • The Gundam Lfrith, and its successor, the Gundam Aerial, utilize "bit staves", which can combine together to form a shield on top of functioning as normal attack drones, or act as enhancements for Aerial's weapons. Aerial's drones show an abnormal level of control, to the point of even protecting each other in combat, and are implied to have a degree of intelligence. The Lfrith is shown to be an advancement of earlier designs in the prologue that lacked the laser-shooting bit staves in favor of what were essentially remote-controlled mines.
    • The Gundam Aerial's control over the technology, indicated in-series by a "Permet Score" metric, is far beyond any other suit, to the point of disabling or hijacking other Gundam's drones. These abilities are all because the OS for Aerial and its' drones are actually the brainwaves of Ericht Samaya and clones of herself. The Aerial is also notable for being the first initial lead Gundam in a TV series that is equipped with bit/funnel-type weaponry. Before that, these weapons are usually reserved for Mid-Season Upgrade or endgame units. The Aerial also retained the GUND-Bits upon being upgraded into its Rebuild version, but they can combine with its beam rifle a la 00 Qan[T]'s GN Buster Rifle.
    • The Pharact is the first Gundam not made by Ochs Earth, but by Peil Technologies, and has a very different approach: rather than the typical Beam Spam that characterizes drone-using suits, its drones can generate electromagnetic "stun beams" that briefly short out the technology of whatever they strike, allowing the Pharact to finish off disabled targets with its rifle.
    • The Beguir-Beu from the prologue is not a Gundam (in fact, it is a Man of Kryptonite to Gundams, due to its drone-disabling weapons), leaving it with a pair of wire guided drones, similar to the incoms from the Universal Century shows. The Michaelis, its upgraded form, shares this feature, with the drone being incorporated into its entire right arm.
    • The Gundvolvas basically revisit G-Bits from Gundam X—full-sized Mecha-Mooks separate from and controlled by Gundams. The GunNodes are similar but for an additional purposes of extending the range of the GUND Format's Field Power Effect as well as packing Attack Drones of their own.
    • Guel's Darilbalde is the only suit with fully-detachable drones (two, then four) that doesn't use the GUND Format. Despite being a very advanced suit, its beam kunai are a step down from pretty much anything a Gundam would use. And Aerial can still take them over.
    • The Gundam Calibarn is a subversion, since it isn't equipped with any bit weapons by default, though it is revealed that it is compatible with Aerial's GUND-Bits for its own use.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency, Caesar's signature technique uses soapy water to create swarms of Hamon-infused bubbles which he can control remotely and attack his foes from afar.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS introduced the Blaster Bits, four attack drones Nanoha controls which can copy her spells, including Starlight Breaker. Nanoha is basically a human Gundam to some extent, so this was pretty much inevitable.
  • In Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force, Raising Heart has herself turned into an Attack Drone so she can continue to assist Nanoha after she gets assigned a BFG that requires both hands to use.
  • The movie version of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's gave Durandal Attack Drones that reflected overflowing mana from spells back towards the target in order to focus the spell's power.
• The Macross franchise mainly features manned ships and mecha, but has its fair share of combat drones as well:
  • Macross Plus introduced the X-9 Ghost drone fighter, with later Ghost variations making appearances in Macross Frontier as the QF-4000 (AIF-7S) used by SMS and AIF-9V (V-9) used by Macross Galaxy. Interestingly, unshackled X-9s and their successors are portrayed as superior in just about every way to a flesh-and-blood pilot, and are therefore considered far too dangerous to use unless their AIs are slaved to human-controlled systems, which renders them much less effective than they could be.
  • Drone fighters appeared in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross as the QF-3000E Ghost. They appear only in one episode, but despite being nowhere near as good as later Ghost models, they still served their role in providing support to and drawing fire from manned aircraft.
  • Prequel Macross Zero has the QF-2200D Ghost, a cheap but effective reconnaissance fighter used during the Unification Wars.
  • Macross Delta has both sides of the conflict using these. Delta Squadron's VF-31s can launch hundreds of tiny drones that act as shield generators and hologram projectors for use by Walkure. Meanwhile, the Aerial Knights' SV-262s each carry 2 larger UCAVs that are used in a more conventional, offensive manner.
• Chao Lingshen from Negima! Magister Negi Magi included four of these in her Powered Armor for the climax of the Festival Arc.
• In Outlaw Star, Hanmyo's ship, the Torarato, can split into three ships, with her piloting the main ship, while the side ships are controlled by her two pet cats.
• Panzer World Galient: The Eraser combines this with Kill Sat. It's a network of computer-controlled mechanical devices that uses a powerful gravity surge to destroy the surfaces of planets.
• In Rebuild of Evangelion 3.33, Unit-13 has a quartet of attack drones capable of generating their own AT Fields. The four of them together proved to be nearly an even match for an enemy Evangelion on their own.
• Until Death Do Us Part: These things are the weapon of choice for assassin Fang. Additionally, they have a noise dampener on them so they're utterly silent; the fact that Mamoru's "eyes" can't detect them is a bonus.
• In Valvrave the Liberator, the Valvrave IV/Hinowa's Spindle Knuckles are capable of doing this.

Comic Books

• Angel Catbird: In the second book, Dr. Muroid sends a giant drone he calls "The Drat" (Drone Rat) after Angel Catbird and his group. It's designed to look like the biggest, most irresistable cat toy around. It has twirling feathers and fluttering wings, multiple wiggling rat-tails, a catnip and rotting salmon aroma, and concealed missile-firing powers.
• The TIE/D automated starfighter from Dark Empire.
• In Death & the Family, Dr. Light sends bug-like drones armed with plastic explosive to blow up a chunk of Insect Queen's lair.
• Horizon: As Coza, Mariol, and Zhia try to get close to a building Finn's tracking device is in, a military drone is sweeping the wheat field they're moving through looking for them.
• Justice Society of America: The T-Spheres used by Mister Terrific.
• Madman: Dr. Gillespie Flem kept a hive of robotic drones to assist in his experiments, the most commonly seen ones being Marie and Warren, his "helping hands".
• In the final issue of the Ratchet & Clank miniseries, Artemis Zogg releases a swarm of Mr. Zurkon robots to try and kill Ratchet, Clank, Talwyn, and Vorn Garblack in a desparate attempt to retrieve the Surinox Comet shard.
• The Iron Patriot drones in Secret Avengers.
• Spider-Man:
  • Armada is a minor villain who uses little flying robots.
  • In King's Ransom, the "Pro-Spider Slayers" are drones piloted by Threats and Menaces subscribers which were meant to help the heroes in battle. While Jonah designed them to be non-lethal, they still cause a lot of collateral damage and end up turning on each other.
• In Wonder Woman (2011), Dr. Poison uses cloaked, remote-controlled drones to release airborne poisons. Her attempt to attack a G8 summit this way is thwarted by Wonder Woman.

Fan Works

• Invader Zim: A Bad Thing Never Ends: In Chapter 14, Aldrich gives Iggins access to one of these that's operated like a video game, having him use it to attack the Membrane house and Zim and Tak's bases. As part of the resulting High-Altitude Battle, Gaz counters with one of her own that's part of her father's home security system.
• Meloetta: Melody of Discord: The helicopters and ships that try to stop you from reaching the whaling vessels are referred to as drones, presumably so that the player characters can blow them up without worrying about killing people.
• The Price of Flight: The Ankh-Morpork City Air Watch experiment with un-womanned broomsticks carrying both magical spells and conventional explosives, designed to get high up and explode, for arguments' sake, in the middle of a formation of Klatchian magic carpets that might be invading or bombing the City. This was born out of a potentially calamitous test flight of a vertical take-off interceptor broom called the ME-163 Komet — the pilot parachuted out just before the broom, overloaded with magical energy, exploded. Elsewhere, remotely controlled magic carpets are used as target drones to practice air combat and air-to-air shooting.
• Rise of the Minisukas: The Sixth Angel's main body is orbited by clockwork-shaped laser-shooters.

Films — Animation

• The Independence Army's invasion fleet in Doraemon: Nobita's Drifts in the Universe consists entirely of unmanned drones, which Doraemon and gang — including their new friends, Lian and his Space Knights Troupe — blows up in entire droves, before Doraemon, Nobita and Lian (backed up by Gian, Suneo and Shizuka in their own ships) finds and destroy the antenna tower controlling the fleet. Given that Doraemon is a G-rated manga, this is probably intentional so the heroes can destroy plenty of enemies in an action-packed climax without any moral issues (with Gian boasting he's about to get his 100th kill before Suneo and Shizuka reminds him it's not a contest).
• Ratchet & Clank (2016): The Galactic Rangers face a legion of Mr. Zurkon robots as they attempt to investigate Drek's warbot factory on Quartu.

Films — Live-Action

• In The A-Team, the team have to fight two jet-powered Reapers while parachuting in a tank.
• The Avengers (1998): Sir August's flying armed robot insects, radio-controlled by Bailey.
• In Babylon A.D., fighter drones patrol the Bering Strait, literally killing everything that moves, whether wildlife or illegal infiltrators.
• The aliens in Battle: Los Angeles make extensive use of UAV drones as their air force. These drones are centrally controlled from large underground floating structures and are capable of exceeding Mach 7; ramming is as good a tactic for them as firing their guns, and there's thousands of them.
• In Cyberjack, the police force uses a remote-controlled drone to flush out the terrorists who have taken over a computer science lab. However, they almost immediately mistake the lone hero Nick for one of the bad guys and he spends considerable time trying to avoid the drone.
• In The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), the military uses two drones to attack GORT. GORT destroys the missiles with lasers and then takes control of the drones to destroy some nearby tanks.
• Deal of the Century involves a couple of arms dealers attempting to sell these to the dictator of a Banana Republic.
• The Big Bad in Eagle Eye controls a Predator drone to chase after the protagonist, who attempts to stop the assassination of most of the government. The drone is destroyed by a Heroic Sacrifice.
• In Ender's Game, the fighters launched from IF carriers are mentioned to be drones. Since the battles aren't actually simulations, the fighters are almost definitely piloted, as they are in the book. In a pinch, they can be used as an impromptu shield, constantly moving in a cocoon-like shape around the ship, filling in "holes" in the "shield". The commanders even have a "shield integrity" gauge on the screen.
• In the climax of Furious 7, Mose Jakande drops a drone he calls "the Predator" (even though it looks nothing like the Real Life MQ-1 Predator) that has VTOL capability, missiles, and a Vulcan cannon. Throughout the battle, it's remotely controlled by one of Jakande's Mooks. It's finally brought down by some Car Fu from Luke Hobbs with an ambulance. He then proceeds to grab the drone's BFG and let it loose against Jakande's gunship.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man 2, Justin Hammer and Ivan Vanko create Animated Armor "Hammer drones" to sell to the US military.
  • The Destroyer from Thor is essentially a horrifyingly powerful Attack Drone, used to guard Odin's Vault.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), small, machine-gun-outfitted drones are used as part of the security in the Kyln.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, all the Sovereigns' starfighters are remotely controlled from a room filled with what look like arcade video-game cabinets on their home planet — even when going to a place as distant as 700 hyperspace jumps. This is no surprise considering that Ayesha explained earlier that they consider each of their "genetically perfect" number too precious to waste in a war.
  • Falcon has a drone called Redwing in Captain America: Civil War that's based off his pet falcon in the source comics. He can deploy it from his back, use it as a scouting device, use it to target his missiles and it can even shoot people. Falcon calls "him" "cute".
  • In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Peter Parker receives a pair of high-tech glasses as a gift from Tony Stark, allowing him to control an entire arsenal of drones deployed from an orbiting satellite. Mysterio (Quentin Beck) and his crew were already operating a swarm of hologram-camouflaged, heavily armed drones, which they used to stage the Elemental attacks. Pretending to be a hero, Beck manipulates Peter into giving him the glasses, and thus access to even more drones.
• The Matrix: The Sentinels are squid-like machines that hover across the tunnels of the underworld to search and destroy vessels piloted by humans who defected from the Matrix.
• In Mosul (2020), the Nineveh Province SWAT Team encounters multiple Islamic State drones fitted with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). One suicide drone successfully destroys one of the team's Humvees, but the rest are shot down by nearby Popular Mobilization Unit soldiers.
• The spherical, heavily armed, tough as hell drones Jack repairs for a living in Oblivion (2013). It turns out that the reason this trope is being used is an Artificial Intelligence is using them to Kill All Humans, unknown to Jack.
• One is used in a scene of Outpost 37 to attack a "Heavy" alien and save an informant.
• In the Phantasm movies, the Sentinel Spheres are the Tall Man's signature weapons. The spheres are created by the Tall Man using sinister unknown technology and contain the brains of his victims. Each sphere has a nasty assortment of blades, drills, and lasers that make mincemeat out of people.
• The Falconer from Predators hunts with a little Attack Drone that perches on its shoulder between flights.
• At some points in Robot World, the astronaut encounters these, which come after him.
• A non-lethal variant in Short Circuit 2. As Johnny 5 is being brutally beaten by the thieves, he uses his antenna to hijack a kid's remote-control airplane and use it to chase away the thieves.
• Sleep Dealer: Unmanned drones (remotely piloted by operatives thousands of miles away) are deployed to use lethal force against suspected terrorists who threaten privatized interests. Footage of the drone attacks is even broadcast on live television in a show called "DRONES!" that glorifies the exploits of the pilots. Memo Cruz's home is destroyed and his father is killed when Rudy Ramirez's squad of drones is dispatched to track down and eliminate the "terrorist hacker" (i.e. Memo with his jerry-rigged receiver) that tapped into their communications.
• Attack drones are the weapon of choice for Dr. Robotnik in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020). He eventually gets the nickname "Eggman" from their oval shapes and white paint.
• In Star Trek Into Darkness, the Vengeance can launch drones that in turn are capable of launching several photon torpedoes before crashing into a target.
• In the Star Wars prequels, the Separatists use droid armies. This extends to various types of droid starfighters.
• The Hunter-Killers and their predecessors from the Terminator series.
• Toys features drones the size of ordinary remote-controlled toys with full power weapons controlled via videogames.

Literature

• After Doomsday: The protagonists return to Earth to find it destroyed and the solar system full of automated missiles attacking anyone who shows up. Their first priority is to capture and disarm one of these missiles so they can examine it for clues on who is responsible. It's later suggested the missiles were placed there mainly as a deterrent so the guilty party could claim the planet for themselves once the radiation had died down.
• After the Revolution: Drone warfare is incredibly common, both during the Second American Civil War and after. The Secular Defense Forces surrounding Dallas makes heavy use of autonomous drones with military AI driving them, giving them an edge against the otherwise superior Heavenly Kingdom who only use remote-controlled ones (who the SDF keep jamming) due to a religious ban on thinking machines. The opening chapters of the book sees heavy use of new, unjammable drones and vehicles by the Heavenly Kingdom that spearhead their new offensive. We later learn exactly how they managed to work around that particular issue.
• In Armada, the titular MMO game, as well as its companion Terra Firma involve players remote-controlling drones (space fighters in Armada and ground robots in Terra Firma) against Sobrukai drones in a battle for Earth. The games turn out to be realistic simulations, preparing future drone pilots for an actual war against aliens, who are also using drones. Real-time control is achieved via a reverse-engineered alien quantum communication link.
• Dale Brown books have the FlightHawk and StealthHawk drones, as well as in later books whole EB-1C Vampire remote-controllable bombers.
• The Culture: Culture "Drones" are not this, since they're all at least Human-equivalent intelligences. However, the knife missiles occasionally seen when Special Circumstances dispenses with subtlety are. It helps to distinguish non-sentient drones from sentient Drones. Knife missiles are of course drones controlled by Drones — simple.
• A bunch of nonhumanoid gardencare droids are converted into these during Galaxy of Fear. They're surprisingly effective.
• Genocidal Organ: The drop pods deploying the special forces unit also deploy small gatling-equipped helicopter drones as close air cover.
• Joe Pickett: In Breaking Point, EPA director Juan Julio Batista attempts to take out Butch Roberson by calling in a military drone strike on him. The Hellfire missiles deployed wind up igniting a massive wildfire.
• Laszlo Hadron and the Wargod's Tomb: The security of Secret Government Warehouse Sel'Akis consists largely of these and the Wargod deploys a massive fleet of automated warships.
• Subverted in The Machineries of Empire. Drones aren't used in combat because the setting's calendar-based Functional Magic doesn't allow them to channel formation effects the way humans can. However, when Cheris realizes that this isn't true for the heretics' calendar, she does end up sending her fleet's drones into battle.
• The Murderbot Diaries. A favorite tactic of the title character is to hack the enemy's drones (or just use its own surveillance drones) and send them to swarm the enemy as a distraction just before Murderbot launches its attack. This usually involves ramming unless they're armed combat drones.
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy got the Combat Wasps as weapon platforms and supplementary (things like electronic warfare) small craft. See also on fan site.
• The Perry Rhodan series has droid ships.
• Quantum Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner: The Karma Temple's inner defenses have several drones, with the Warrior Priests among them.
• Rebuild World:
  • After Akira upgrades to a Cool Bike model with remote weapon mounts, his Virtual Sidekick Alpha can both drive and fire from it, making it into one of these useful for a Combination Attack.
  • A black Flying Saucer fleet that Akira encounters launches these from its Drone Deployer mothership while it provides fire support with its Wave-Motion Gun. When they accomplish their objective of slaying a different group of monsters, the smaller drones self-destruct instead of being recalled.
  • Most Mini-Mecha in the setting are equipped with autopilot functions which is shown when the Playful Hacker Shirou busts some out of storage to help defend his convoy, obviously being less effective than if they were piloted.
• Spectral Shadows has Blair Montgomery inventing some sort of half cybernetic half organic bee creatures that can essentially become this.
• Spellsinger: A vintage example using model planes as aerial attackers appears in Moment of the Magician. Although not projectile-armed, the planes' rotor-blades prove very dangerous to a raven messenger they pursue.
• The Succession Duology has attack drones in spades, of both A.I.-controlled and remotely piloted varieties, from FTL-comm equipped forward command drones used to cut down on lightspeed lag in interplanetary-distance battles to "flockers", finger-sized kinetic kill missiles with onboard A.I. control, which network with each other to become a sort of computerized Hive Mind before ramming their targets at velocities normally reserved for railgun projectiles.
• In The Sun Eater, the alien Cielcin used "Nahutes" as their main weapon against the Dune-style shielded humans. A Nahute is a drone shaped like a mechanical snake and capable of limited flight. The superstrong Cielcin can throw them at great distance and while the initial throw usually sets off the shield, attacking Nahutes have a good chance of not setting off the shield. On a successful attack, they latch on to the victim and can easily chew through the ceramic-titanium armour on a human to burrow inside for an agonizing death. A huge drawback is that the rare human with a cybernetic link can hack and disable Nahutes.
• The Tenets of Futilism ends with a predator drone killing the protagonists months after they take over Alcatraz Island.
• In Tour of the Merrimack, the Romans use lots of unmanned drones. Though less intelligent than piloted fighters, they are far cheaper to mass-produce. They have shields, weapons, FTL drives, and Self Destruct Mechanisms to prevent them from being captured. This last feature ends up being a bit of a mistake.
• Robert Sheckley's 1950's short story "Watchbird" is an early examination of this trope, with autonomous drones used to prevent murder. Unfortunately A.I. Is a Crapshoot.

Live-Action TV

• The titular starship in Andromeda has both combat and recon drones.
• As of the 2016 season, BattleBots now allows drones. As a result, drones have proliferated in usage, although because they need to be light, they serve strictly as assistance or nuisance to their primary units. Because of the arena's cramped space, however, drones fall squarely into Awesome, but Impractical, with nearly all of their weaponry limited to flamethrowers to maintain balance and none of them so far having any meaningful effect on the battle except getting struck down and destroyed (with one possible exception, but it's ambiguous).
• Burn Notice: Michael has to deal with one at the beginning of season 3. He explains in the voice-over that it works by being given a target area, and it then kills anything in that area — so he leaves the area (which was difficult, since it was already shooting at him).
• Chuck: Chuck has his father who uses his elite hacking skills to call on drone attacks from predators as his favorite tactic.
• Class of '09: The AI deploys drones which tase people if they resist arrest.
• A victim of the week in iZombie is revealed to have been killed by a shipping drone (like the ones Amazon claims to be working on) with an attached 3D-printed gun. The killer is, at the time, sitting in a board meeting, giving him the perfect alibi, while using his tablet to operate the drone. Unfortunately for him, he forgot to wipe all traces of it from his computer.
• Stargate-verse:
  • The Ancient drone weapon is a remotely controlled swarm of small, self-propelling projectiles that can avoid obstacles and friendly targets to attack and destroy enemies. Used to destroy Anubis's fleet and many Wraith ships. Seems to have been the primary weapon of the Ancients.
  • An episode of Stargate SG-1 also has the team travel to a planet where one side in a conflict uses remote-controlled drones for defense. The other side also has unmanned reconnaissance craft, but their bombers are manned.
  • On occasion, the SGC launches a small remote-controlled recon plane through the gate. They then use that little plane to spot targets for the next thing to go through the gate: a guided missile. In a later episode, they arm a UAV with missiles of its own. Unfortunately, it's shot down before it can use them.
  • Stargate Universe introduces automated drones that attack all other sources of advanced technology, including the Destiny and the civilization built by the crew's alternate timeline descendants. In the series finale, the crew make an early FTL jump to another galaxy at low power to escape them.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • In "The Changeling", a space probe is sterilizing planets, and Captain Kirk must find a way to stop it.
    • In "The Doomsday Machine", Commodore Decker loses his entire crew to a planet-eating machine and pulls rank on Kirk to take command of the Enterprise to try and stop it.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: The episode "The Arsenal of Freedom" features an advanced series of adaptive attack drones. So advanced, in fact, that they destroyed the civilization that created them and nearly destroyed the Enterprise as well.
  • Star Trek: Discovery: The season 2 finale features Control fighting the Discovery and the Enterprise with a fleet of 38 remote-controlled ships, all of which then launched hundreds of fighter drones. As soon as Control-possessed Leland is disabled, all of its ships and drones go inert, allowing the Enterprise and the Klingons to destroy them.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech:
  • The Star League had the M-series of drone WarShips, known as "Caspar", as well as the Pavise automated defense station and the BlackWasp and Voidseeker automated interceptors. Lacking any pesky crew to house/feed/breathe/protect, they typically had raw performance characteristics far above other ships of comparable size and mass,^note An unmanned craft has no worry of G-LOC or the other nasty effects of sustained G-Forces and because they lacked squishy crew who died when the atmosphere vented, often continued to fight with damage that would have rendered a manned WarShip inert. Combined with the fact that it was not uncommon for a major system to have hundreds of Caspars and thousands of interceptor drones, when they were turned against their Star League makers during the Amaris Coup they were by far the most formidable obstacle the Star League Defense Force faced. On the other hand, they could not be set use their jump drives while the AI system was running. Something would happen that caused the ship to reject all outside signals and view everything else on its sensors as a threat.
  • While automated BattleMechs are sometimes rumored by people centuries after the fact, the Star League doesn't seem to have deployed ground-based or aerial-based attack drones at all, only spacecraft. However, the Word of Blake did figure out how to rig a remote piloting system into BattleMechs, but their performance was markedly inferior to traditionally manned mechs. And if the control signal got jammed, they went berserk and started shooting randomly.
• Fairly common in Eclipse Phase. Extropian judicial hypercorps usually have them stationed around their coverage areas.
• GURPS:
  • A few of the more serious Game Breakers that people have devised use the Ally rules to build brutally efficient attack drones.
  • GURPS Ultra-Tech has fully sapient missiles which guide themselves but have no initiative and must be given orders by radio. There are also shurikens with basic reasoning skills.
  • Transhuman Space depicts a future society with excellent robotics, and so a wide range of combat drones, from "brilliant" missiles up to robotic military spacecraft.
• In Hc Svnt Dracones, drones are used instead of fighters. They try to get in the same hex as enemy ships and then deal automatic damage every turn, unless the enemy's flak barriers hit them.
• Common in Infinity, as drones (called 'Remotes') take a variety of shapes from small humanoid robots to larger flying devices.
• Jovian Chronicles:
  • Utilized primarily by the Venusian forces. Not particularly durable, but they tend to be very fast and always in numbers.
  • The Lucifer class terror drone is a frightening example — basically X-9 Ghost about the size of a space shuttle designed for independent commerce raiding. Faster than all but the fastest of exos and packing immensely powerful particle cannons it easily qualifies as a Lightning Bruiser.
• This is why they let you build Remotes in Mekton. These can be used to represent everything from MIRVs to floating turrets with gatling lasers.
• Shadowrun:
  • Riggers pilot drones through a wireless VR interface, and Pilot programs for autonomous drones. Due to stealth concerns, PCs usually don't use them nearly as much as corporate security, of course.
  • On the other hand, Riggers are hard to identify because they're usually two blocks away from the action, which means that a smart Rigger lives a for a very long time.
  • For example, Twitch from Weregeek. And her drones (that's in character for Twitch).
  • Examples include the Steel Lynx ground-combat drone.
• Present in Star Fleet Battles as the main weapon of the Kzinti, who can produce Macross Missile Massacres with them.
• Warhammer 40,000 has multiple versions of attack drones.
  • The most prolific users are the Tau, who field entire squadrons of drones or attach them to infantry or battlesuit units. Variants include combat drones armed with pulse carbines and grenade launchers designed to suppress infantry, drones with missile pods to assist the BFG-wielding Broadside Battlesuit Teams, shield drones to absorb incoming fire, sniper models and the new shielded missile drones specifically designed to protect and assist the equally new XV104 Riptide Battlesuit. They all kinda resemble large, heavily armed frisbees (some fans even refer to them as "Frisbees of Death" or occasionally "Bin-Lids").
  • The Imperium of Man is leery of A.I.s but will make use of drones slaved to a psyker's will or imbued with a limited "machine spirit". These come in the form of servo-skulls, the remains of devoted servants outfitted with logic engines, anti-gravity drives, and sensors or weapons packages. To reiterate, these are flying human skulls that act as assassins, scouts, or simple familiars.
  • The Adeptus Mechanicus, on the other hand, make further use of Human Resources for their drones. Servitors are condemned criminals^note or vat-grown clones, or political dissidents, or "retired" soldiers... who are given lobotomies and extensive cybernetic implants. Among their roles as technicians or unskilled labor, some servitors are rigged with heavy weapons and accompany Tech-priests on the battlefield or support their security forces.
  • Nurglite forces have Blight Drones, an unholy fusion of helicopter, rusting pile of junk, and assault cannon.

Video Games

• The 1942 games have powerups that call smaller planes to fight by your side, which performs the role of Attack Drones — however, these games are arguably set during World War II, and as such, the planes are likely piloted.
• Ace Combat:
  • The Z.O.E. in Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy, a remake of Ace Combat 2, is revealed to be an attack drone that is controlled by a primitive Artificial Intelligence that was created by Belka.
  • The Omega Ending to Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, reveals that the Player Character, Nemo, is an attack drone. More specifically, it's an Artificial Intelligence that was created by Simon Orestes Cohen to kill a Brain Upload version of Abyssal Dision, because he blamed him for the death of Yoko Martha Inoue.
  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War has UAVs play a role in several missions. Most notably, the Arkbird and Hrimfaxi launch UAVs as a defensive measure when attacked by the player. The Arcade mode, "Operation Katina", likewise has a flight of X-02 Wyverns apparently operating as UAVs.
  • Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation's Mission 13 has Ilya Pasternak launch machine gun-equipped UAVs to back up his CFA-44 Nosferatu fighter.
  • Ace Combat Infinity features an unmanned variant of the above Nosferatu, the QFA-44, which also gets its own UAVs to support it. In this case, they're equipped with lasers that can shoot down any missile that approaches the primary fighter and lock onto the helmets of dismounted pilots.
  • Erusea in Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown deploys an army of automatous drones against Osea that cause tremendous amounts of damage against Osea’s navy. Said drone army is controlled by an Artificial Intelligence that is descended from the Z.O.E. that was used in the Usean Uprising. The Arsenal Birds themselves are massive attack drones that deploy smaller attack drones as well.
• The S.C.A.R.A.B. drone in the PSP/Wii remake of Alien Syndrome attacks enemies, blocks enemy shots, and also acts as a portable shop, where you can convert unwanted items into Resource Points or use Resource Points to buy new items.
• Allegiance (2000) has an interesting aversion: There are drone AI ships under the direct control of the team's commander, but they cannot attack the enemy. All the ships that can actually fight are flown by human beings; the drone ships perform "boring" (but essential) duties like mining and must be defended by human players.
• In ANNO: Mutationem, automatic drones appear as enemies in various areas. The drones take measure to avoid any attack before firing their weapons, and other variants will activate a Self-Destruct Mechanism and flies towards Ann to deal damage.
• Armored Core:
  • From Armored Core 3 to Armored Core: Last Raven, the player can purchase a torso unit equipped with a "Exceed Orbit" function, where one or two weapon pods located on the back can detach and fire automatically at any enemies it sees (for some reason, it can see through walls, whereas the rounds fired cannot penetrate said walls, sometimes leading to waste of ammo if one isn't careful). They come in shell-based and energy-based projectile versions, with differing damage and rate-of-fire stats; while the shell-based ones have more shots, the energy-based ones can recharge themselves when deactivated.
  • The "Orbit Cannons" are a back part that launches up to three laser cannon drones that follow their selected target. The only drawback is that one only has a finite supply of these drones on any given mission, and they're weak as heck, so if your target is protected by terrain, the bits will hit the walls and explode. They do have their own power supply and energy spent only involves launching them. Plus, since the lock-on acts like a missile lock-on, missile extensions work with them too. It is fairly effective in PvP as well, since as long as you engage them in wide open space, the bits follow your opponent wherever it goes and is fairly hard to shake unless you can outrun it or endure the withering attacks. A similar Arm Cannon variant of it in Silent Line gives an option to launch six at once for More Dakka.
  • Previously, in Armored Core 2: Another Age, the Orbit weapons were actually introduced as an unlockable inside part. Unlike its future incarnations, it does not expend energy upon usage, though it is otherwise stationary.
• Grey from Atlas Reactor fights using her custom-made attack drone, which she calls "Rio". Once deployed Rio hovers above a 16-square region of the map and automatically deals damage to anything caught underneath, with Grey able to either move Rio or supplement his damage with her own weapons. Rio is treated as a terrain feature and cannot be attacked, only flying off the map if Grey is killed.
• Battleborn:
  • Kid Utra's support drones are turned into ones capable of attacking as well via his "Search and Destroy" augment. The augment makes it that when a Support Drone stops healing, it will fly toward a nearby enemy and detonate.
  • The mechanical owls deployed by Marquis' "Predatory Strike" basically function as owl shaped attack drones.
  • M3.Shields Drones when they are not providing shields to fellow enemies are capable of attacking by themselves.
  • MX.Raptors and M3.Shepherds are attack capable drones that resemble small spaceships.
  • Assault and Temporal drones are purchasable Minions that aid in attacking. Assault drones attack enemies directly while Temporal ones slow down enemies.
• The squad sentry and recon drones in Battlefield 2142. The former is much more useful than the latter, as it needs a complicated lock-on to attack enemies.
• Battlestar Galactica Online has these as a type of mook belonging to unaligned Precursors.
• BattleTech (2018): One story mission sees you attempting to infiltrate an old Star League base, only to accidentally trip an alarm and cause it to start deploying an infinite number of combat vehicle drones. The only way to stop them is to press forward fast enough to get into the base before you're overwhelmed.
• Bio-Hazard Battle has these, which move around you ship differently depending on your selected character. They fire out your characters' special weapons.
• Bio Menace has the RoboPal, a rare example of an Attack Drone in a sidescroller.
• Area 6 in Bionic Commando has a Unique Enemy that sends remote-controlled mini-helicopters after you.
• The Security Bots in BioShock fulfill this purpose if hacked — instead of attacking Jack, they will follow him and open fire on any hostiles. He can have up to two of these at any one time. This trend continues in BioShock 2; with level two of the Security Command plasmid, you can even summon friendly security bots on command, and level 3 lets you call in "Elite" versions with more health and higher attack power.
• BlazBlue:
  • In BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, Nox Nyctores Nirvana, wielded by Carl Clover looks like a Mecha Mook, but functions like an Attack Drone in an actual fight. In Continuum Shift, his father Relius reveals that he's made a similar one named Ignis.
  • In BlazBlue: Chronophantasma, Izayoi can summon the Slaver Trans-Am, two small drones that charge into enemies when she attacks.
• In Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Miriam has familiars floating around her and attacking her enemies.
• Call of Duty:
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops II's plot revolves around the increasing usage of drones by both the United States and Chinese forces being hijacked by a third party. Multiplayer allows use of them for various purposes, from simply detecting enemies on the map to dropping a missile.
  • In Modern Warfare, players can call guided missile strikes from Predator drones. Modern Warfare 3 adds the similar Reaper drone, which fires multiple laser-guided missiles.
• In Cannon Dancer, obtaining power-ups allows Kirin to project up to three phantom images of himself, which remain in place and attack simultaneously with him. They appear whenever he hits an enemy with an attack, and when he stops attacking, they return to him. Although they can be placed floating in mid-air, they can't be re-positioned until they return to Kirin.
• In Children of a Dead Earth, drones are the closest thing to space fighters your ships can use. They are normally armed with a single, forward-facing weapon, usually the smallest size of weapon a spacecraft can mount, though larger drones can mount weapons similar in size to what mid-tier warships can mount (some can even deploy smaller drones) and are deployed from a small port on the side of a carrier ship. These drones are useful for harassing and occasionally even destroying enemy warships without risk to your larger ships, though their weakness to gunfire and low fuel reserves means that they normally only have one attack run to deal damage with before they are "Dead in the Water", so to speak.
• Claws of Furry: One of the types of Mecha-Mooks you encounter in the mansion levels is a robot plane that drops bombs on you when you're close.
• Command & Conquer:
  • In Command & Conquer: Generals, most U.S. vehicles can deploy one of three types of drones for a minimal fee: sentry drones to increase sight range and detect hidden enemies, battle drones with anti-infantry weapons and the ability to repair their "parent" vehicle, and (with the expansion) Hellfire drones to shoot missiles at enemy vehicles. Unlike other examples, these drones can be destroyed by enemy fire, and even targeted directly — in fact, enemy base defenses will by default target these drones first, giving the parent vehicles time to tear through the turrets and gun emplacements relatively unmolested.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and onwards are pretty generous with the trope. The practice differs according to alignment: heroic drones (Allies: Hornets, Sky Knights and Robot Tanks) are slaved to an expensive master control (such as a seaborne Aircraft Carrier) and villainous drones (Soviet: Terror Drones, Yuri: Chaos Drones, Imperial: Sunburst Drone) are autonomous, brittle, cheap and, most importantly, disruptive to an opposing force. But one thing's for sure: since they're robots, mind control resistance and Insanity Immunity are always guaranteed.
• Crying Suns has Drones as one of its four squadron types. They're generally the fastest squadrons in the game in terms of movement and attack speed, though their individual attacks aren't very strong. They beat Frigates but lose to Fighters in the game's Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors system.
• In DarkOrbit, your drones are essentially just extra equipment slots, but look like this.
• Studio Nanafushi's Dead or School has drones as rare abilities. They are typed as Bullet (low damage but good attack rate with a decent ammo supply), Rocket (high damage with area of effect but low ammo supply and poor attack rate) and the extremely rare but most useful Laser (mediocre damage but very good attack rate and extremely large ammo supply). Hisako can hold two weapon attachments plus one weapon ability — meaning she can simultaneously have 3 drones out and attacking.
• Dead Rising has Overtime Mode where Gas Mask wearing special forces soldiers descend upon the mall, wipe out the vast majority of the zombies, and are now on the patrol to ensure the infection, and witnesses, don't make it out of Willamette. One of their weapons of choice is a small drone that will not only open fire on Frank with a mounted M16, but will also alert members of the special forces team to your location. The little buggers are also tough as hell, and thus, are best just avoided.
• Dead Target from VNG Game Studios has three types of powerful drones to accompany the hero: the baseline Cyclops which flies around with a machine gun, the Hunter which instead uses an automatic shotgun for crowd control and finally the mighty Caterpillar. Far and away the most high-tech, the undulating and futuristically sleek Caterpillar flies on an ornithopter principle and releases flowing streams of Macross Missile Massacre from the micro-missile bays in its sides. But outside of actual cash purchases the only way to get components to build and upgrade a drone is doing boss raids. These drones have only a limited activity period and then they go into Cooldown.
• Death from Above centers on the player piloting a drone to drop grenades on Russian troops.
• One of the Cranial nanoaugmentations you can equip in Deus Ex is the Spy Drone, a hovering camera-bot with the ability to kamikaze into enemies and explode, dealing EMP damage.
• Duke Nukem: Both Dr. Proton and Mech Morphix make extensive use of attack drones; various types, in Proton's case, and flying camera drones and bipedal assault mechs in Morphix's case. The Cycloid Empire also employs the Sentry Drone, though their "attack" consists of flying into Duke's face and exploding.
• End of Nations has the Shadow Revolution use drones for both defense and assaults.
• In EndWar, the Joint Strike Force and EF Enforcer Corps both have access to armed ground drones, which are used to defend control points and mobile command vehicles, bonus points in that the Russian 'drones' are actually just infantry soldiers, who still get to be called drones. In addition, all three playable factions can deploy air drones, which are used to scout out areas from above, as well as harass enemies with light weaponry.
• In EVERSPACE, drones are common and used by all factions including you. Attack drones are the most common, followed by specialized drones such as: annoying webber drones which slow you down, shield-recharge drone that gives save you from total destruction, anti-missile drones, drone override.
• In Evolve, if the Hunters win on the Armory map these will be deployed next match to hunt the monster.
• Fallout:
  • One of Fallout 3's companions is a Mister Gutsy robot named Sgt. RL-3. The Mothership Zeta add-on has Guardian Drones, which the player can make use of with the Drone Controller. Operation Anchorage features Chinese Spider Drones. In the final mission of Broken Steel, the Sentry Bots can be reprogrammed via terminal to fight on your side, although if you hit any of them with friendly fire, they will all turn hostile once again.
  • The Robot Buddy ED-E in Fallout: New Vegas has this function, along with mobile storage and crafting tools with more added in Lonesome Road provided the Couirer has found them. Ulysses, the final boss of Lonesome Road, is supported by a pair of respawning Eyebots, which also provide repair and healing services to him. This is bad because he is the single toughest boss in game,^note He has 100 skill in Guns, Melee Weapons, and Explosives, and 880 minimum to 1030 maximum hit points and you have a horde of Marked Men trying to kill you at the same time.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Antagonist Cid in Final Fantasy XII is protected by four autonomous Rooks during his first boss fight. Several more varieties act as a defense mechanism for the Bahamut.
  • In Final Fantasy XIII, the Berserker, Tyrant, and Immortal all take a few seconds at the start of battle to summon a Centaurion Blade, a free-flying sword that fights alongside its creator, slashing at the party for multiple hits at a time. It can't be provoked and gets respawned periodically if destroyed before its creator. Each variant of the Centaurion Blade has different stats and a color scheme corresponding to whichever of the three robot-centaurs created it.
  • The Endwalker expansion for Final Fantasy XIV introduces the Sage job for player characters, a healer that uses as its weapon a quartet of 'nouliths,' small drones that hover around the character. They can attack the enemy with lasers, or fire healing rays at allies and construct force fields around them.
• Hovering laser drones are seen in the later levels of First Encounter Assault Recon.
• The Satellites in Forgotten Worlds provide a variety of unique backup fire weapons to the Nameless Ones.
• Forsaken lets you collect up to four Orbital Pulsars, small floating balls containing a laser. They spin around your hoverbike and shoot at anything you're shooting at.
• Wireless gun pods from Front Mission: Gun Hazard, which fly around independently firing machineguns for anywhere from ten to fifteen seconds before needing to be re-deployed. Normally they flutter from place to place around the player's head, but if the shield is activated, they form up in a line behind you. Unlike some of the other examples, though, these gun pods are immaterial, causing shots to go right through them.
• In FTL: Faster Than Light, these come in several flavours (anti-ship, anti-personnel, dedicated drone Boarding Party), but need the appropriate subsystem to even start using. To elaborate, attack drones come in 3 flavors: Boarding Drones (Boarding, which actively attack enemy personnel once on board, and Intrusion, which stun enemy crew and deal ion damage to systems), Hacking Drones (Lock down systems and temporarily disrupt them or reverse their effects outright), and Combat Drones (MK I, which move about slowly and fire one laser before moving to fire again, and MK II, which move much more quickly). There are two inversions, however, in the Defense Drone series (MK I, which shoots down missiles and incoming boarding/hacking drones, and MK II, which fire faster and shoot down lasers/ion weapons in addition to having the capabilities of the MK I) and Ship-Board drones (System Repair, which automatically repair systems at about the same rate as an Engi, and Anti-Personnel, which do the same as standard Boarding Drones but hit the guys and drones that come on board your ship). Proper use of drones can mean the difference between victory over the Rebels or defeat at the hands of any of the innumerable dangers you'll inevitably encounter.
• Funk Unplugged: One of the enemy types Ampy can face is a flying robot with a gun on its underside.
• Gaiares has the TOZ System. Not only does it help you get new weapons, but it also fires out the weapon you have, and it blocks shots.
• Galaxy Angel: Trick Master, Mint Blancmanche's personal Emblem Frame, is equipped with drones known as Fliers, which allow her to conduct remote attacks on multiple enemies at once. Having all of them concentrate their fire on a single enemy is her Limit Break.
  • In the sequel trilogy, Galaxy Angel, Kahlua/Tequila's Spell Caster fills the same role, having three orbs that follow the ship around, and through which magic energy is channeled for the attacks.
• Gate Of Thunder has two flanking drones that can be turned to fire backward instead of forward.
• The familiars from Gauntlet Legends. A Phoenix Familiar item gives you a temporary one, and when you reach a certain level milestone you get a permanent familiar.
• Genocide 2 has this in the form of a floating capsule named Betty.
• Ghost 1.0 has multiple types of drones available to the player. The Drone power-up deploys a drone which follows Ghost around and shoots her enemies with lasers, and she gains an extra drone for every copy of the power-up that she collects. The Killer Drone item deploys a temporary drone which is far more powerful and aggressive than regular drones. Some of Ghost’s secondary weapons are also used to deploy drones, like the Linux Gun^note which fires capsules that hatch into tiny robotic penguins which run around shooting enemies with Eye Beams and the Beam Drone Cannon^note which deploys a drone that sweeps the room with four powerful lasers for several seconds.
• One enemy variant in Ghostrunner is a flying circular laser-drone, which Jack can jump onto and pilot into enemies on the ground.
• The throwing dagger of Ghouls 'n Ghosts allows Arthur to cast a spell which summons a phantom doppelganger if he's wearing golden armor, letting him spam twice as many daggers on screen until the spell wears off.
• Gizmo has purple attack drones that fire lasers at the Player Character.
• In GoldenEye (1997), drone guns are Demonic Spiders that will kill you in a matter of seconds on higher difficulty levels. They show up again in GoldenEye (2010); although they are annoying as they were before, you can use your Smartphone to hack them, which will cause them to attack any guards in their line of sight and then shut down.
• Several borgs in Gotcha Force have drones that can aim and fire independently from the user. The most powerful of these is Cyber Atlas, who can still use these when he merges into his super form with either Cyber Mars or Machine Red.
• The Option (a.k.a. Multiple) in Gradius is probably the Ur-Example for video games. Unlike most kinds of drones, these fire the exact same shots that the Vic Viper does at any given time, literally multiplying your firepower. Yu-Gi-Oh! even has "Gradius" and "Gradius' Option" as playable cards, since both are handled by Konami.
• In Ground Control, the Order has the O11/BEHCCA "Orion" Drone Carrier, which is a, technically, unarmed Hover Tank that drops GHE Spider Drones, which hone in on enemy vehicles and explode when in the 5-meter radius of the target.
• Gundam Breaker allows you to equip funnel weapons by attaching the backpacks of certain mobile suits onto your unit. They end up being the most useful of weapons since their recharge time kicks in the moment they're launched and by the time they're finished, they're ready for use again in about a couple of seconds, and because they're EX attacks, they don't run on any ammunition.
  • In the sequel, every funnel part except for Strike Freedom's DRAGOONs is reworked into subweapon equipment, though this time all subweapons except for health repair kits work on a cooldown gauge.
  • The third game lets players go the distance for "funnel" builds with the addition of the Builder Parts mechanic which allows you to add additional parts and weapons to any part of the body. This of course includes funnels and the base game allowing you to add regular funnels or Cherudim's shield bits and with DLC later adding AGE-FX's C Funnels and Arche Gundam's GN Fangs as well as Woundwort's Composite Shield Booster as a wire-tethered shield part. There's even a skill where you can launch large energy spheres that fire rapid fire beam volleys. In an update, the skill used to release Strike Freedom's DRAGOONs will instead launch energy bits if the part isn't equipped.
• Gunner Z from BitMonster had a wide variety of A.I. aerial drones that can be upgraded by breaking down other drones and then using the components to upgrade, though this isn't always a success. Built to assist your Gun Truck, these range from the single non-combat model being able to detect supply chests to attack drones that carry everything from a basic machine gun to advanced weapons that do a Macross Missile Massacre or fry zombies with Chain Lightning.
• The penultimate stage of Gunstar Heroes takes the form of a space shooter. The first player gets to control a ship, but the second player just gets to control an attack drone that can only orbit the ship.
• Half-Life 2 has Manhacks, deployed by Combine soldiers, vicious little flying robots that consist of a camera eye and a miniature Helicopter Blender. Manhacks are mainly used for riot control, and often fly about in swarms, shredding any hostile they encounter. Gordon can use the Gravity Gun to catch them and send them flying into walls or into Combine soldiers themselves. They can also be used as floating buzz saws to limited effect.
• The Halo franchise has a few examples of attack drones:
  • In Halo 2, you encounter an enemy that throws out these two little balls that somehow turn into holographic clones of him that can kill you with their holographic guns and can take a lot more damage than he can, though the technology is never seen again (probably Forerunner tech the Covenant couldn't reverse-engineer).
  • In the Halo 3 backstory told in the terminals, this is taken to the extreme, with two ridiculously advanced Forerunner A.I.s duking it out with fleets of thousands of drone capital ships which are commandeered by the A.I.s after their crews die.
  • Supplementary materials reveal that some of the UNSC fighter-craft you see in Halo 3: ODST are actually unmanned drones.
  • In one point in Halo 4: Spartan Ops, Mission Control calls in a "suppressive fire" drone to launch an airstrike on the enemy leader's position.
  • In Halo: Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike, one armor ability allows you to summon an explosive homing drone.
  • Besides from the ones seen in the games, there are other types of attack drones mentioned in the Expanded Universe, like the MAKO. Indeed, the 2022 Encylopedia states that the vast majority of the UNSC Air Force's combat assets are actually unmanned drones.
  • The Sentinels can sometimes count when they are being remotely controlled by a Monitor. The rest of the time however they have their own tasks and a rudimentary AI.
  • In Halo Wars 2, the final upgrade for the Jackrabbit is a support drone with a machine gun. Sunray 1-1 also has an identical drone, which instead fires Spartan Laser beams.
• Misteltoes serve this purpose in Hellsinker for the player characters and bosses, though some enemies also use them as ammo. This would be normal were Misteltoes not topless fairies with half of a crystal ball instead of a lower body.
• The Scan-Balls if Hidden Deep are normally used by Scout class personnel to recon possibly dangerous or hard-to-access areas, but they can also send out an electric arc to fry any hostile mutants that get close. This dramatically shortens the Scan-Ball's already-limited lifespan, though.
• You'll see at least one kind of this in every Homeworld game, which by like the trope definition by default, is nothing more than a remote-controlled space gun with a bit of armor and engines slapped onto it.
  • The Kushan Drone (Homeworld) is a mass-produced Weak Turret Gun that stays put with its parent ship, the Somtaaw Swarmer (Homeworld: Cataclysm) is a quality-over-quantity autonomous craft which can do strafing runs (relative to the Kushan Drone) and the Progenitor Drone (Homeworld 2) is an unobtainable piece of deadly heavily armed and armored unmanned fighter technology which could only be built by a Progenitor Keeper that's just as deadly. The Progenitor Movers are unmanned yet manually controllable A.I. ships in Homeworld 2 canon, much like their Keeper and its Drone offspring. The Drone Deployer article has more on this.
  • Breaking away from the trend, Homeworld: Cataclysm also introduced the unconventional Somtaaw Leech microship. It's incredibly fast, undetectable to low-end enemy sensors and can be instructed to quietly attach themselves to the hull of enemy craft, screwing up systems and chewing holes in the hull.
  • Additionally, the manual for Cataclysm states that the Sentinel defense pods (which can project a Deflector Shield around a particular ship when working with other Sentinels and also have a gun) were originally designed to be AI-operated. Unfortunately, the sheer complexity of the systems has resulted in the accidental destruction of a Somtaaw frigate, when an AI-controlled Sentinel projected a shield through the ship, slicing it. Naturally, you can't do this in the game. However, since then, the pods have been refitted with a minimal life support system to allow it to be piloted.
• In Hellgate: London, one of the classes is the Engineer, which uses several kinds of "bots", both for attacks and for buffing/debuffing purposes. He can also summon a larger "drone" which acts more like a pet, but can be upgraded with a gun, sword and armor.
• Iron Helix: The main, and only, enemy in the entire game is the ship's automated security drone, the Defender, which is constantly patrolling the ship and will kill you on sight.
• In Injustice: Gods Among Us, Batman can summon robotic bats that either fire themselves forward or circle him in a shield, and Sinestro has the ability to create a fear construct that fires energy blasts directly at the opponent.
• Jak and Daxter:
  • One of Jak's upgrades in Jak 3 is a drone that hovers for a few seconds while spraying the area with gunfire.
  • In a rare driving game example, Jak X: Combat Racing provides a defensive Red Eco drone that disgorges an infinite stream of ammunition into anyone who gets too close (for an all-too-brief time), as well as towers that stay in place and fire machine gun or missiles at passing enemy vehicles.
• In Jazz Jackrabbit, some levels contain caged green birds called Hip Hops that you can rescue. Hip Hops will relentlessly attack any enemies within range but will disappear as soon as Jazz takes damage.
• Floyd the robot from Jet Force Gemini, though you need a second player for him to do any attacking outside of minigame areas.
• In JYDGE, unlockable abilities allow the player to deploy floating armed drones in missions.
• Tacticians in Killzone 2 can use air support drones to attack their enemy.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Marluxia's thorn shaped drones in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. These also make a comeback in Re:Chain of Memories for the second and third battles against Marluxia. He sends out three drones at a time, and they each shoot three times every time he plays a card but can easily be destroyed as enemies or taken out one by one by Cardbreaking Marluxia.
  • "Teeny Ships" in Kingdom Hearts II. In addition, Terra/Lingering Sentiment in Final Mix has an attack where he sends out several drones to surround you from different angles and shoot lasers. They chase you down, and move very quickly, even zig-zagging over your head before firing, but can be dealt with using Reflega or even jumping into them before they fire. They also disappear after a while if you didn't destroy them.
• Your main power-up in the Neo Geo game Last Resort is a drone that follows your ship, blocks enemy shots and damages enemies like the R-Type Force Pod, and shoots when you do. Instead of having a separate gun that charges up, you charge energy into the drone and launch it as a projectile, then it boomerangs back to you. Since you can toggle the drone's relative position to your ship, it can be launched in whatever direction you want.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails: The Alpha and Beta Drones Reverie used by Ouroboros along with the Forecep L and R units can separate and act like big drones (in fact, they're first seen operating independently). The Tactical Pod line of enemies also function like this on a personal level, starting with the prototypes from Trails in the Sky.
• Windblight Ganon in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In the second phase of the fight, it detaches the spikes projecting from its back and uses them to redirect its shots to confuse Link as well as to fire condensed blasts of wind from its arm cannon. The drones can be temporarily taken out.
• In Konami's Lightning Fighters, drones have a unique behavior in Co-Op Multiplayer mode, where they always keep halfway between the two player fighters and fire in a perpendicular direction.
• In the last few levels of Machine Hunter (notably the asteroid base), players can collect a spherical robot drone that hovers around them while firing shots the same direction as the players. The drone itself is invincible, and can damage enemies by touching, but it disappears if the player loses a life.
• One of Sarara's special moves in Magical Battle Arena, where she launches Fin Funnel-like drones to attack with.
• Magical Chase: Topsy and Turvy, they can shoot enemies and protect Ripple from some enemy fire at any angle.
• In Marathon, the hovering MADDs — Marathon Automated Defense Drones — are among your few allies. Well, except for the ones that have been reprogrammed to attack you and equipped with grenade launchers... There's also the Pfhor attack drones in the second game, and the Cyborg Drones in the Game Mod EVIL, some of which are on your side, others which attack you.
• Mass Effect has these as commonly encountered enemies used by the various opponents in the games.
  • In Mass Effect 2, Tali, Legion, and Engineer Shepard all have the ability to summon combat drones. (Tali named hers Chiktikka.)
  • In the endgame of 2, the Collectors defend their base using starship-scaled attack drones called Oculus, just in case somebody, like, say, the Reaper IFF-equipped Normandy comes through the mass relay and isn't immediately shredded by the various environmental hazards in the vicinity. Joker and EDI destroy a couple with the Normandy's GARDIAN lasers, another breaks into the cargo bay twice and is engaged on foot by Shepard, and Joker does a Wronski Feint through the debris field to get rid of the rest.
  • In Mass Effect 3, Tali and Engineer Shepard gain some new options. Tali gets the Defense Drone, which hovers over her head and zaps any enemies that get close, while Engineer Shepard gets the Assault Turret, a stationary hovering gun that will shoot any enemies that get in range. Several multiplayer characters also get the Combat Drone or Assault Turret powers, while the Geth Engineer and Geth Juggernaut get the Geth Turret, which will heal the shields of nearby allies in addition to providing fire support.
  • In Mass Effect: Andromeda, Peebee reprograms a Remnant Observer (that she nicknames Zap) and gives it to Ryder to use, taking the place of the Combat Drone from ME 2 and 3.
• Mega Man:
  • Harpuia from Mega Man Zero series can summon them one by one, which then slowly home in on Zero.
  • Albert from Mega Man ZX uses multiple Model W fragments to defend himself against Grey/Ashe in one cutscene. Later, in the Final Boss fight against him, he's surrounded by ten Model W-esque "bits" which he can use to generate energy shield and generate some of the other Mega Men's attack, as well as giving him six wings, a tail and a halo.
  • Commander Yammark in Mega Man X6 has a signature weapon called the Yammar Option, which creates a few dragonflies that circle around and fire independently of the user.
  • In a homage to Gradius by Rockman 7 EP, Shade Man uses Options to attack Mega Man with Ripple Noise blasts.
• Mercs of Boom has drones in use both by the aliens (a weak flying pyramid and a powerful tentacle-y thing reminiscent of The Matrix Sentinels; both are capable of teleporting) and by the various human factions (a machinegun-armed tank and a missile-armed flyer). While players can't bring drones on missions the way mercs can be, they're in the inventory as single-use items and can be deployed as needed. Your Wrench Wench back at the base can build more, but you can also purchase them at the market (even during missions).
• The Fire Buddy Power-Up from Metal Arms: Glitch in the System follows Glitch around, shooting anything he shoots. Curiously, the Buddy even switches to the same weapon Glitch is using.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty features Cypher drones, which are based on the real-life Sikorsky CYPHER-T prototype unmanned aerial vehicle. There are two varieties; the surveillance type, which alerts the enemy, and the direct attack type, which does not exist in the real world.
• Metroid Prime has Sentry Drones, which often fly around and spam you. They are destroyable, but pretty aggressive. Bonus points for the first appearance of them being when the Phendrana base is blacked out, so unless you have the thermal visor, you won't see them, and a mini-boss much later on, which is an INVISIBLE version, which can't be scanned or locked onto (unless with the Wavebuster, which is very good at killing the drone). There's even an underwater version in the crashed Frigate, but there are only two in the entire game, and they aren't much different from the standard ones.
• Since space combat takes place too fast for humans to make a difference, all warships in Mission Critical deploy drones for attack and defense. The ships themselves are armed with point-defense lasers, but they prove useless against fast-moving drones and are only good at taking out anti-ship missiles. One of the plot arcs in the game is the use of an experimental serum that allows you to take control over your ship's drones and destroy the enemy.
• In Morningstar, the Moai-like stone heads on the planet Deadrock turn out to be alien drones. They appear to be the ones responsible for the deaths of the crew from the Armstrong.
• In Mortal Kombat X, Sonya Blade's "Special forces" variation grants her an attack drone that floats next to her until a command is given. If not used, its lights will flash after some time and then it will disappear. Her "Demolition" variation causes a drone to appear to give her more grenades. Her daughter, Cassie, introduced in the same game, makes use of an attack drone in Mortal Kombat 11. And of course, both characters use their drones in some of their fatalities.
• MS Saga: A New Dawn (being a Gundam-based JRPG) has the various bits, funnels, and fin funnels available to different characters as spells. This gets somewhat jarring when those characters can use that equipment when they're piloting MS that doesn't have it, while other characters can't use it when they're piloting MS that does have it.
• In M.U.S.H.A., options, once acquired, can be placed in six different formations. Only two options can be used at a time, though more can be kept as spares in case you lose a life.
• Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos allows Ryu Hayabusa to summon up to two "Shadow Clones", phantom duplicates of himself that cannot be destroyed and follow in his footsteps and perform attacks or ninjutsu exactly; if he jumps and then remains still, they will hover in midair. If Ryu himself perishes, the clones go away and must be recollected.
• In Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, Ohatsu's Super Mode releases demonic Attack Drones that can shoot at enemies around her. Apparently, she somehow got this from previous series Big Bad Nobunaga, her uncle despite the fact that he was originally a human.
• In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, the Sentry ability summons a fairy-like drone that attacks with homing lasers.
• The beloved Snowball in Overwatch, although he wasn't originally built for attacking. He follows the character Mei around, and fires small bolts of ice at random enemies. He also features in some of Mei's special moves and attacks. He can also attach to Mei's jury-rigged ice gun.
• Vivian from Paladins summons two magic sentinel drones as her ultimate ability. They fire explosive energy blasts when she shoots, greatly amplifying her damage capability. Unlike other ultimates, they last indefinitely until they are destroyed or Vivian is killed.
• Sexy Parodius makes the Option a playable character. Like most other characters in the Parodius series, it uses attack drones, which in its case are miniature Vic Vipers.
• Attack drones show up in a few levels in Perfect Dark. The first one to appear is indestructible, but in later levels they can be destroyed with remote mines.
• The special attack of the "r" power up in Phalanx. It doesn't shoot, but it kills most things on screen.
• Mags in Phantasy Star Online are small robot pets that evolve when you give them items; they can heal you when your health is low, provide a shield to block an attack, and when charged up, can perform powerful attacks.
• In Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, the Plants have the Garlic Drone (Cactus' abiltity) and the Zombies have the Zombot Drone (Engineer ability) which function identically to each other^*though they can be swapped out for alternate drones that attack differently from each other. Both have a main attack that either fires spike needles or laser beams and can call in an airstrike as their most powerful (but longest recharging) attack. Both also run on limited flight power, meaning you can't call in too many airstrikes before the drone is automatically destroyed. In GW2, the Zombot Drone is replaced with a cybernetic Pirate Parrot that otherwise functions similarly.
• Quake IV has the spherical tripodal Convoy drones that roll onto the battlefield (similar to the Droidekas in the Star Wars prequels, but weaker).
• The Raiden Fighters games have Slaves, miniature unmanned versions of your chosen fighter. Unusually for a scrolling shooter, the Slaves will die if they take enough hits. It's possible to play as a Slave by using a certain cheat code, and Slaves have the advantage of a smaller hitbox than the normal fighters, as well as a very powerful vulcan gun that makes up for their lack of charged weapons.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • The first example of the trope was the Glove of Doom in the first game (later renamed to the Agents of Doom), which allows Ratchet to deploy small robots that chomp down on enemies. It ended up being so popular that it returned in the third installment Up Your Arsenal where it could now be upgraded to give the robots missile launchers and then even the ability to fly around Ratchet.
    • In addition to that, the first game also had the Drone Device (which puts a ring of explosive drones around Ratchet for protection) and the Sonic Summoner (which allows Ratchet to summon a small creature piloting a spaceship to attacks enemies with a tiny, yet surprisingly powerful, machinegun in select locations).
  • Going Commando has Synthenoids, a set of four robots which float above Ratchet and fire at anything within range.
  • The multiplayer mode of Up Your Arsenal gives each team a set of attack drones to protect their base: Walking robots that resemble the Galactic Rangers from the main story, and small hovering robots that shock any enemy players that get near them.
  • Ratchet: Deadlocked gave Ratchet two companion bots named Merc and Green that can be customized and upgraded. In addition to attacking enemies, he could command them to do certain tasks for him such as turning bolt cranks and lobbing EMP grenades at enemy vehicles.
  • Going Commando, Up Your Arsenal and Deadlocked also have the Miniturret Glove/Launcher, which drops small towers holding miniguns/rocket launchers/lasers (depending on the version) that attack everything nearby. In UYA, the maxed-out version is even able to teleport to nearby enemies and shoot those if they were out of range.
  • Size Matters and Secret Agent Clank have the Bee Mine Glove, which throws out a small beehive that sends swarms of robotic bees to attack enemies. Tools of Destruction would introduce a similar weapon called the Toxic Swarmers.
  • By far the most prevalent attack drone in the series is Mr. Zurkon. Being first introduced as a device in Tools of Destruction, Mr. Zurkon is a small robot with a gun for an arm who hands out both death and hammy insults to the enemy. Later installments would up the ante by giving him a charge shot, rapidfire, allowing multiple Zurkons to work in tandem, and a wife and kid that are just as bloodthirsty as he is.
    "Ha ha! Mr. Zurkon requires no Nanotech to survive. Mr. Zurkon lives on fear!"
  • Rift Apart introduced the Topiary Sprinkler which behaves similarly to the Miniturret Glove, though instead of simply shooting enemies the sprinkler turrets instead spray enemies with water that covers them in plants, temporarily immobilizing them.
  • Clank also has the "Attack" command during his gameplay sections which makes Gadgebots start attacking the nearest enemy.
  • In addition to facing Drek's Zurkons as they did in the movie, the 2016 reimagining of the first game pits Ratchet up against a giant Mrs. Zurkon boss in the warbot factory on Quartu. It also comes equip with a bunch of regular Zurkons to deploy during the fight, making it a rare example of an attack drone having attack drones of its own.
• ReCore has the FL1-R corebots which will exclusively attack Joule from a distance. Eventually she can take advantage of this herself by putting one of her three corebots into the FL1-R frame, which also grants her a different special attack depening on which corebot is occupying the body.
• Red Faction has Mecha Turrets, Spike Robots, and the Ultor Combat Drone miniboss. The second game has spider drones which explode.
• The Ancipital (bipedal goat) from Revenge Of The Mutant Camels. You can also pick it up on your back as a smart turret. (You're a camel.)
• Risk of Rain has robot drones that the player can use gold to repair, they will fly around the player and shoot at any enemy in range or heal them. After taking enough damage they will break down and have to be repaired, which costs more money each time.
• In Robo Aleste, the player's Humongous Mecha comes pre-equipped with two satellite pods that hover in front. They destroy enemies on contact and can be launched outward, and also provide 100% of secondary fire.
• The Force Pod and Bits from R-Type. Also, a Battleship Raid in R-Type FINAL has among its defenders, ships referred to as mobile turrets, essentially making them Captital-grade Attack Drones.
• In Satellite Reign, the corporation has flying drones that come out at higher wanted levels. Your Hacker and Support can also become Drone Deployers.
• The main power-ups in Shatterhand are Greek letters. Collecting three assembles a hovering droid equipped with a weapon determined by the letters combined. Some mount laser cannons or flamethrowers, others swing swords or throw grenades. All of them will block bullets and can be grabbed by the player, either to lift the hero into the air or for him to fling at enemies, although they can only withstand so much damage before disintegrating.
• Sigma Star Saga have weapon data which allows you to carry up to three attacker nodes, with an expense of the main plane's rapid fire rate.
• In Silver Surfer (1990), you can collect orbs that attach to your surfboard and can be adjusted to fire in any of three directions, though only one can be deployed on horizontal levels.
• The Advent fighters and bombers in Sins of a Solar Empire are actually drones (or anima) controlled by powerful psychics, according to the manual. Each squadron is controlled by a single person, so this allows the Advent to spam fighters and bombers (they don't need to train dozens of pilots, just several controllers).
• The Attack Drone in Smash TV is a destroyable one — very annoying when you grab it while in the middle of a horde of enemies. Another separate Power-Up sets up a blade barrier around you that hacks up most (but not all) enemies, but not fire itself, evaporating at the end of the room.
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory has the North Korean Army deploy a large number of flying drones armed with machine guns in the streets of Seoul once war breaks out. They can only be destroyed with a non-stealth loadout (only the F2000's shotgun or sniper attachments can take them out).
• SSTR: The enemies you face in the game are little spherical drones deployed by SSTR to kill the humans on board The Horizon. They do so by floating towards them and administering electric shocks until they die.
• Star Control has non-lethal "De-energizing Offensive Guided Interceptor" launched (up to 4 at once) by Chenjesu Broodhome ships. Three laser "ZapSats" follow the Chmmr Avatar ship in Star Control 2.
• StarCraft has the Protoss Carrier, with Interceptor drones that can be targeted, but never are (either you have large amounts of light attackers that are hard to control that just shoot them done as the Interceptors exit the carrier, or you focus fire on carriers themselves, which then kills the connected Interceptors).
• In Steredenn, there are both passive ones that behave like most shmup attack drones, mirroring your movement and shots, as well as stationary ones actively deployed by the player using a "bot" weapon that fire at enemies on their own.
• Geist, one of the commanders of the Sai faction in Stormrise, is usually depicted with six of these and can control them with his Psychic Powers
• The three Options in Strider (Arcade): the Dipodal Saucers are two mushroom-looking drones which fly around Hiryu and attack with lasers; the Terapodal Robopanther is a mecha panther that pounces on closing enemies and the Robot Hawk is mecha hawk that dives in airborne enemies.
• SUGURI:
  • Nanako has a half-dozen of these drones that she calls "Bits" orbiting her, which can swarm the opponent and bombard them with laser fire. Suguri (and Sora in her game) can also equip similar drones to attack their enemies with.
  • In Acceleration of Suguri X-Edition, one of Suguri's alternate forms is Suguri-P, who also gets this capability. NoName in the same game also makes use of drones that consist of the Mecha-Mooks from the main game.
  • Sham in sora also has her own set of drones, overlapping with Mecha-Mooks and Drone Deployer, with two of her supers in Acceleration of Suguri 2 consisting of them zerg-rushing her opponent.
• Super Paper Mario has the Pal Pill powerup that surrounded the character with 6 copies... in 8bit. They die easily however.
• The Super Robot Wars series, in addition to the Gundam examples listed above, also features a number of original mecha with drones, such as the Soldifar, Ashcleef, Ashsaber, Dis Astragant, Shuroga, R-Gun Rivale, and more. Many of these Attack Drones' names follow the pattern of "Slave".
  • Shin Super Robot Wars: Aya's Strike Shields are notable in that they are entirely unarmed, with no guns or blades to speak of. They're just giant blunt bits of metal that she psychically smashes into people.
  • Super Robot Wars: Original Generation: Meanwhile, Ing's T Link Sliders can switch between blades, beam guns, and surrounding and forming a field to trap his enemies in. The large slider on his back however is just a sheath for his BFS.
• Sword of the Stars: Attack drones appear as a ship option in the second expansion, A Murder of Crows. They are the specialty of the Morrigi, who start with this technology.
• In Terra Cresta, your ship upgrade parts can temporarily detach and act as attack drones. Ditto for its Spiritual Successor, Dangar UFO Robo. The official sequel, Terra Force, has Gradius-style drones.
• Three Wonders: The Helpers from Midnight Wanderers assist Lou/Siva by their different abilities, like Firestorm's flame breath, and they can even be upgraded the longer one keeps them around.
• Thunder Force has the CLAW drones for the Fire Leo starfighters. Early CLAWs look somewhat like miniature fighters themselves but in Thunder Force IV once the Rynex is upgraded it gains new spherical CLAWs that also function as capacitors to store up power for the Thunder Sword.
• Tiger Heli lets you use these to decide if you want more forward or instead lateral shots.
• In Touch The Dead, these are encountered in the last quarter of the game.
• Touhou Project plays with these often.
  • In earlier games, a pair of Drones are acquired upon gaining enough Power items, and they shoot differently depending on which shot type you choose at the beginning. They look the same regardless.
  • Perfect Cherry Blossom starts each character out with two Drones. Again, they look the same regardless of shot type.
  • Imperishable Night only lets certain characters even have Drones, which are explicitly named "Familiars"; all youkai characters have one or two, but only one human, although the other humans have abilities to compensate. Enemy fairies and bosses may also use Familiars, which youkai can see through and shoot through — humans are out of luck in that regard, but they can still destroy them for Time Orbs. There is actually a counter when you fight a named opponent showing how many slaves they've used in IN. It gets absurd when you fight Mokou, who apparently uses upwards of a thousand slaves.
  • The newer games award a Drone for each number of Power (normally out of 5.00 or 4.00) you attain. Unlike earlier games, Drones look and even act differently depending on shot type.
  • Also, Alice's dolls are her Attack Drones.
  • As of Unidentified Fantastic Object, Nue has her UFOs to assist her as part of some of her spellcards.
  • And Yukari and Ran's shikigami. And Orin's army of spirits. So many characters actually use them, that Marisa designates it as a quality for many spellcards (slave type) in her grimoire, as opposed to a mere gimmick such as Kaguya's item based attacks (all five of her original attacks also happened to use slaves).
• In Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark, there's Laserbeak, whom Soundwave unleashes to fly around the immediate area to bombard the enemy with a salvo of lasers.
• Tyrian, being a top-scrolling shoot-'em-up and a self-aware one at that, naturally features gunbuddies. These may be, depending on game mode and level, flanking firepower modules or gun arrays that connect to your ship's nose and can be fired directly into enemies ... then retrieved to be reused!
• UFO: After Blank: In Aftershock, the player is allowed to research and wield those.
• The web game Unmanned is a visual novel from Molleindustria following a Day in the Life of a drone pilot in the US Army.
• Vanquish has the transformable View Hound UAV's, which have a helicopter-like aerial mode, and a bipedal robot mode wielding the chopper blades as swords, which can deflect bullets.
• Vector Thrust boasts the PDU-17, which carries a small machinegun onboard that it uses to spray its target with before ramming into it and exploding after it runs out of ammunition.
• In Vega Strike, all three major races have drones on some stations and large ships: Human use Seaxbane (crippling weapons), Rlaan use Hellspawn (pair of powerful beams, piloted by pet brain), Aera use Porcupine "mines" (very sluggish, not much ammo, but have a shield-piercing weapon, explode when approached and fit in normal missile launchers).
• Warcraft III has a large selection of temporary summonable units, generally summoned by heroes and in a few cases by normal caster units. They range from powerful monstrosities like the Dread Lord's Infernal or the Warden's Avatar of Vengeance, to swarming disposable minions like the Necromancer's Skeletons and the Tinker's Clockwerk Goblins, and everything in between. The Crypt Lord can even deploy a group of five permanent beetle minions as scouts or extra combat units and can generate a swarm of untargetable locusts with its ultimate ability.
• In Wing Commander Arena, there is a Power-Up that gives you a clone of your ship that will fly in formation with you, and otherwise mirror your movements and actions until it's destroyed.
• Wizball has the Catelite, a power-up cat which can shoot at enemies and, more importantly, can collect the paint drops some of them leave behind when they are defeated.
• X:
  • X3: Terran Conflict has several types of Attack Drones (called Fighter Drones), which are dropped out from ship cargo bays and attack the nearest enemy ship (or you) or whatever the player designates. The small size of the fighter drones means players can shove thousands of them into cargo bays and use them to take down battleships and massive carriers, mainly because it maxes out your computer's CPU, forcing the game to do triage with the AI behavioral scripts (some will stop, allowing the others to continue).
  • X: Rebirth's player ship has these in lieu of space fighters, which were the staple of previous games of the series. The whole thing caused a rather intense Broken Base.
• One of the earliest power-ups from X2 (a 1996 Playstation game from Team 17, not to be confused with the Egosoft computer game), a tiny floating sphere that follows your ship and fires weak energy bolts at the aliens. You can collect as many spheres as possible, having up to 6 drone spheres backing you up when battling the aliens.
• XCOM:
  • In X-COM: UFO Defense, you get Tanks (armed with light autocannon, missile launchers or laser cannon), and later Hovertanks (armed with plasma cannon or Blaster Launchers), which appear so be drone vehicles controlled from HQ as they require no crew and continue to operate after all human soldiers are out of action.
  • X-COM: Terror from the Deep has Coelacanths, basically underwater tanks (armed with a gas-propelled cannon, torpedo launcher or gauss cannon), and Displacers, drone submarines (armed with sonic cannon or Pulse Wave Torpedo launcher). While they can operate with all the humans on the mission down, it's not recommended, as tanks can't pilot the troop transport (obviously). Aborting the mission with all soldiers dead or unconscious will result in the transport and the tanks being lost as well.
  • Alien freighters in X-COM: Interceptor are protected by automated drones. Strangely enough, the drones are actually more effective at killing you than most of the aliens, being agile, fast, and infuriatingly difficult to hit. The only advantage you have over them is that their weapons are relatively pathetic: it's easy to ignore them, destroy the freighter, and jump to hyperspace without losing much of your shields. If, however, you decide to attack the drones... well, you're going to need another fighter.
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown gives you the Super Heavy Infantry Vehicle, or S.H.I.V.: robotic mini-tanks that can be armed with a gatling gun, laser cannon, or plasma cannon. Regular models are just a mobile gun; upgraded models can act as low cover for adjacent soldiers, or fly, on top of having additional defense. You can also develop the ability for S.H.I.V.s to suppress enemies.
  • XCOM 2 has SPARKs, which are 8-foot-tall humanoid robots that act as fully mechanical MEC Troopers from the first game's Enemy Within Expansion Pack. Unlike SHIVs, a SPARK can earn Experience Points from missions completed and kills, and advance in rank, but unlike organic soldiers, you can't purchase alternative abilities. You can customize their appearance and even give them Johnny 5's head.
• Xenoblade Chronicles:
  • "Seven" from the first Xenoblade Chronicles 1 (named like that because of the Walking Spoiler nature of the character) has these equipped as 'foot' equipment, even though she has them on her back. These are used as her Talent Art. This one has the distition of being the only one in the game that is customizable. Depending on the Drone she has equipped, her Talent Art changes from a Blade Spam to even a Wave-Motion Gun attack!
  • Xenoblade Chronicles X has Psycho Launchers, which are essentially a pair of personal attack drones that serve as the ranged weapon for the Blast Fencer and Galactic Knight classes. A more traditional drone is also available for Skells to equip, and will bombard the target with lasers for a while when summoned. Combining this with effects that reduce/reset cooldowns can lead to unholy levels of Beam Spam, as several groups of drones can be active simultaneously. After clearing the main story campaign, you can unlock super weapons, two of which are drone-based; one being a massive kill sat that fires an incinerating thermal beam and another which launches series of disk-shaped blades that slice and dice everything within a large circular radius On the flipside, the Ganglion also have drone weapons equipped to their giant Xern machines, launching Drone Eggs that don't fire nearly as much your Skell, but hit like a tank and will most certainly kill you unless you're in cockpit mode or have insane evasion stats.
• Elly's Aerods in Xenogears work like Gundam's funnels story-wise, but is only treated as another spell in game.
• In Xenonauts, the aliens employ these in several variants.
• X Multiply has a pair of pods that attached to either side of the ship by tentacles.
• In Zero Wing, the ZIG has a pair of invincible drones on either side that multiply its firepower and are particularly useful for absorbing homing missiles.
• Jehuty Ver. 2 in Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner has three WISPs floating around it that mimic its base ranged attack, can grab enemies from afar like a grappling hook, and aid in immobilizing enemies in-close. For more Attack Drone-y goodness, the Vic Viper LEV in the same game comes complete with Options, which stick around so long as the LEV remains in its vehicular mode. The Quantity Award, however, goes to the Ardjet, the "cape" of which could break apart into scores of homing WISPs that slam into enemies for damage.

Web Animation

• FTL: Kestrel Adventures: Inverted, initially, since the Crew bought the Drone Control System to use a point-defense drone. However, many enemies use combat drones. One of them who proclaims himself as the greatest mercenary uses nothing but beam weapons, including a beam drone.
• Natraps X features the Gradius Options a couple times. First is in the original video when Rockman enters the Konami Code and fully powers-up a group of popcorn enemies to annihilate him. In "Final", Thomas destroys another set of enemies and gains an Option that mimics his punches and kicks, then immediately loses it to a poorly timed roulette.

Webcomics

• Hated with a passion by the pilots in Air Force Blues, as well as their operators.
• Batman: Wayne Family Adventures: Batman calls in Spoiler and Signal to get a drone that's shooting at him off his tail using the Batmobile.
• In Commander Kitty, the Triple-I usually has robots piloting its attack ships, but they can be commandeered by any intelligent lifeform (as well as Fluffy).
• In Leaving the Cradle, spaceborne automated drones superseded Space Fighters and are a popular strategy of dealing with enemy spaceships, by throwing hundreds of them at enemy in hopes of overwhelming their point defenses.
• Schlock Mercenary: Doyt Gyo's kit has A.I.-controlled multi-purpose drones. Later, the armor worn by Tagon and Pi has Shoulder Cannons that can be set to engage targets independently and fly on their own, instead of remaining attached to the Powered Armor.
• Sleepless Domain: Bud, as the magical girl Laser Thrash, can summon and control a pair of drones resembling large white flower buds. Her powers allow her to operate these drones directly, and, true to her name, the flower buds shoot laser beams when opened. She also has a degree of control over the size and intensity of the buds she summons — while training, she uses a pair of miniature buds whose lasers simply sting a bit.

Web Original

• Ilivais X: Ilivais Q has six teardrop-shaped REACT Drones mounted on the "hair".
• In The Last Angel, Nemesis has built a small army of robotic hunter killers that allow her to put troops on the ground when she needs to and that function to defend her against boarding parties. And every one of them has been optimized over 2000 years by a hyper-intelligent A.I. to be the very best at what it does, up to and including psychological warfare.

Western Animation

• Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers: The "tweakers" generated by "Doc" Hartford's Series 5 implant, each with their own function and personality.
• An episode of Beavis and Butt-Head (obviously called "Drones") features these... and the titular duo thinks that controlling them is a video game.
• Double subverted in Futurama. Zapp introduces his new remote-controlled drones which don't need pilots. Leela is quick to point out that the machines do in fact have clearly visible pilots, to which Zapp responds that they're merely being used as ballast and can't actually control the drones.
• In Mega Man: Fully Charged, Suna can control her Sunacopter drones with a tablet, which can crash into things or swipe weapons.
• Steven Universe: Homeworld utilizes hover drones to search for unwanted Gems and annihilate them with its laser blast.
• Transformers:
  • In Transformers: Generation 1, Optimus Prime's trailer (in truck form) can transform into a mini-base with turrets and launch a small car drone for spying.
  • In other incarnations (notably Transformers: Energon), Optimus can sometimes combine with his attack drones to form a Super Mode.
    • The Combining Mecha in Energon are like this when separated.
  • One of Soundwaves cassettes is a variation on this — rather than a self-aware Transformer, the Autoscout was a remote sensor drone.
  • In Transformers: Prime, Soundwave transforms into a Reaper UAV. Appropriately, he is The Voiceless, The Blank, and The Spy Master, making him one of the most sinister decepticons in the series.
    • His deployer, Laserbeak, is a drone as well, and pops out of his chest. Yo dawg, we heard you like UAV drones...
  • The Vehicons from Beast Machines.

Real Life

• While drones are currently in service, they are, at military insistence, remote-controlled and only semi-autonomous (no Terminator scenario yet!). Most are built for reconnaissance missions, bomb defusals and troop recovery, but the Predator and Reaper (both Names to Run Away from Really Fast) are armed and definitely have confirmed kills to their name. The reason for their existence is explained above: so that nobody (that the drone operators care about) gets killed in a bloody conflict. And also, because they're so useful in conserving service personnel, all kinds of military services would want to use them in any combat theater, be it land, air or sea. Truly autonomous drones are currently only used for reconnaissance and surveillance missions where their long endurance truly makes them more effective that piloted aircraft. This is besides the fact that unarmed recon aircraft are always quite vulnerable to enemy attacks and unmanned systems are somewhat expendable. (Oh, and BTW, only unarmed drones are called UAVs; the armed ones are properly know as UCAVs, something that many games featuring such drones forget.)
  • The large scale Russian invasion of Ukraine since February 2022 has seen a considerable increase in the use of attack drones:
    • The Baykar "Bayraktar" TB2, a Turkish-manufactured UCAV, already been used in large numbers by Turkey during the Syrian Civil War and Azerbaijan during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. But it made international waves in Ukraine around the start of the invasion of the country by by Russia; the Ukrainian army had just received their orders from Baykar at the time the war broke out, and immediately the drones have proven their worth, serving in reconnaissance roles, ground attack and even naval attack roles (to the point of gaining instant Memetic Badass status and a dedicated song). It's believed the drones played a crucial role in bringing down Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet; while the drones went out to distract the flagship by circling it, forcing the ship's crew to focus on attempting to aim their Anti-Air guns at them, a concealed shore emplacement near Odessa took aim at Moskva with their Neptune missiles, allowing for a direct hit that struck the ship's exposed missile tubes, completely hobbling it and leaving it doomed to sink while under tow several hours later. However, with the war evolving and Russians consolidating their air defenses, more and more Bayraktars have been shot down, and the drone is now used solely for reconnaissance.
    • Since about August-September 2022, Russians make massive use of drones from Iran, most notably the unexpensive loitering munition ("kamikaze") drone Shahed-136, for both attacks on Ukrainian infrastructures and terror attacks on the Ukrainian population in big cities (Odesa has seen a large number of such attacks for instance). They also make ample use of their own ZALA Lancet (another type of loitering munition) to target Ukrainian war material on the battlefields.
    • Ukrainians have mastered the art of using unexpensive civilian drones to drop grenades on unsuspecting Russian soldiers or open tank hatches to devastating effects.
    • In late 2023 and continuing into 2024, Ukrainians have also used long range kamikaze drones to blow up Russian oil refineries in order to disturb the country's war economy, thanks to many areas in The Glorious Federal Subjects lacking air defense. And they can reach quite deep into Russia at that. They even turned a Cessna plane into a kamikaze drone to hit a Russian Shahed factory in April 2024.
  • Police in North Dakota may now officially deploy drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, sound cannons). What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• Older Than They Think. The earliest version of what you could call a drone or cruise missile was the Kettering Bug, developed by the Americans during World War I. They didn't get the bugs worked out before war's end, and kept the whole project a secret until it was revived in World War II, with drones ranging from purpose-built prop-driven proto-cruise missiles, to four-engined bombers loaded up to the gills with explosives for one-way raids.
  • The first true assault drone, i.e. multi-purpose (theoretically, at least) pilotless attack plane was developed by the USN during World War 2 under the "Project Opinion". Build by "Interstate" factory, the Interstate TDR-1 was a very cheap, wooden, twin-engine unmanned (or optionally piloted — it still had a cockpit and rudimentary controls) plane. It was guided towards a target by control plane (which used radar transponders to control up to four drones) and a drone-borne TV-camera for the bombing run. The drone was capable of carrying either a ton of bombs, or a torpedo. The initial plans of producing tens of thousands of such drones weren't fulfilled, but several dozen completed nachines were used — sometimes with remarkable sucsess — against Japanese-held islands in 1944.
  • The first one was the Kettering Bug, while the first successful one was the Fiesler Fi-103, aka the V-1. The explosive-crammed bombers were worn-out B-17 Flying Fortresses (Project Aphrodite), or US Navy PB4Y Liberators (Project Anvil) which were stripped down, fitted with two TV cameras and a radio control system for operating from a mothership controller. They were then piloted to the target area, where the pilot would then bail out and allow the controller to fly the plane into its target.
    • Unfortunately, Anvil and Aphrodite were not as effective as planned. The remote control and detonation systems were faulty at best, and most of the planes either lost control during flight, or simply exploded in midair, sometimes with the pilot still inside. However, in the few instances that they DID work, the results were pretty spectacular; one such raid managed to literally vaporize an entire enemy fortress.
• This trope's Older Than Steam: Fireships (and the highly-explosive hellburners) were old or cheap sailing ships which were deliberately filled with flammable material, set on fire and sent among the enemy's fleet to disrupt formations and cause panic among enemy crewmen. Used effectively by the British against the Spanish Armada during the Battle of Gravelines.
• Although not actually designed for combat, police bomb-disposal robots are sometimes equipped with shotguns they can use to destroy locks that obstruct their access to an explosive device.
• The earliest attack drone is the Nazi German Goliath, a metal box on treads packed with explosives. It was moved by a man with a wired remote, when they spot a target they rigged it to explode once it reached its target.
  • It should be noted, that it is NOT the German invention: it was designed in France by automobile engineer Adolph Kegresse (famous for inventing one of the first practical half-tracks), and captured by Germans in 1940.
• According to an informant, the Cosa Nostra Mafia experimented with remote-controlled aircraft loaded with explosives for use in assassinations during the early 1990s. Such plans never came to pass, if they even existed in the first place.
• The Soviet teletanks, which first saw combat in the Winter War, at the start of World War II. They were basically radio controlled light tanks which came in many variants. Standard tactics were for the control tank (with radio transmitter and operator) to stay back as far as practicable while the teletank approached the enemy. The control tank would provide fire support as well as protection for the radio control operator. If the enemy was successful at seizing the teletank, the control tank crew was instructed to destroy it with its main gun. Some variants were fitted with bombs for suicide attacks. When not in combat the teletank was driven manually.
• This BBC video suggest that drones could be used as a weapon of mass destruction/death.
• Missiles and torpedoes are arguably an example, being small aerial or naval craft launched from a (usually) safe distance to approach a target and explode, with the only thing stopping them from qualifying being the fact that they aren't reusable. Torpedoes in particular were originally stationary mines, which evolved to be dragged by a small boat, then later rigged to a spar on the front, before incorporating the engine into the weapon itself and allowing the sailors to launch it and let it sail off unattended. Missiles, meanwhile, were basically bombs rigged to rockets, allowing planes to attack targets without getting right on top of them. In aviation parlance, the distinction between a "missile" and a "drone" is not always clear, since some drones are little more than missiles or rockets that can be recovered. This is especially true of target drones, some of which are converted directly from the missiles they are meant to simulate.
• Non-government groups like ISIS have bought and armed commercial quadcopter drones with bomb-dropping devices and suicide mechanisms and used them to bomb enemy positions and ammo dumps. Commercial drones had become so cheap that it is easy for any faction to buy a few drones, arm them with grenades, teach a few pilots and use them to bomb enemy targets, while the operators stay a safe distance away. The tactic saw a great resurgence during Russia's 2022 attack on Ukraine, during which the Ukrainian army employed drone operators for both recon purposes and simply to drop grenades on otherwise occupied Russian squads. Reportedly, the effect on morale was devastating, as due to the drones' small size and silent operation they never knew when a grenade would simply go off right next to them.

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