Relay Drone

Relay Drones are manufactured by the millions at Orbital Foundries and planetary fabrication plants, making them the single most numerous unit class in the Terran military. They are deliberately designed to be cheap, simple, and expendable — a philosophy that makes some Terran ethicists uncomfortable but that military logistics officers consider essential.

Each Drone consists of a lightweight chassis roughly the size of a human fist, a single optical sensor, a short-range relay transceiver, and a data core capable of storing approximately one hundred gigabytes of sensor data. The entire unit costs less to manufacture than a standard infantry meal ration. This extreme economy allows Terran commanders to deploy Drones in numbers that would be logistically impossible with more expensive units.

The Drone's most tactically significant feature is its deathrattle protocol — a final data burst transmitted at the moment of destruction. When a Relay Drone is destroyed, its data core performs a last-gasp transmission, uploading its complete sensor log to the nearest relay node. This log contains everything the Drone observed during its operational life: movement patterns, energy signatures, terrain data, and — most valuably — the precise method and direction of the attack that destroyed it.

This death-burst intelligence has proven so valuable that Terran commanders sometimes deliberately deploy Relay Drones into suspected ambush zones, using their destruction as a form of hostile-force mapping. The practice, known as "drone fishing," is controversial among those who ascribe any form of consciousness to automated units, but its tactical effectiveness is undeniable. A commander who loses three Relay Drones to an ambush knows exactly where the ambush is, what weapons it's using, and how many hostiles are present — intelligence that would otherwise require risking actual combat units to acquire.