Drone ship

Drone ships are slow, floating vessels that the Scrin apparently use to establish ground control at a particular location, in the same way as the Mobile Construction Vehicles of human forces.

Overview
When the GDI ion cannon, by order of Redmond Boyle, attacked Scrin ships on their approach to Earth, they split into thirty-nine of these smaller craft. While lacking in speed, drone ships seem to be heavily armoured and, being airborne, may move over any terrain to deploy. It should be noted, however, that they are only capable of low-level flight and their progress may be impeded by tall structures or landforms.

Once a desirable location has been found, drone ships will land and 'implant' themselves into the ground, at which point the Scrin foreman may begin base construction. The resulting building is known as a Drone Platform. When a deployed drone platform is critically damaged, it will sometimes create a small ion storm above it, much like Scrin Harvesters.

When a drone platform undeploys into a drone ship, it can ram and destroy aircraft right above it, including motherships.

Changelog

 * Tiberium Wars patch 1.07: fixed a bug that caused the drone platform to self-destruct when coming in contact with an enemy upgraded Annihilator tripod.
 * Tiberium Wars patch 1.09:
 * cost/build time increased by 40% to $3500/35 sec
 * hit points and speed normalized