after missing some drones, i found a train with quite some kill count :-)
it looks as if the drones can stand next to tracks and mine under them (with no guarantee on which side they stand, including on top of another tile of the rail), but i think it is only the graphics and they really stand at the location where they dig ore and it only looks as if they were standing next to it. thus they will be hit by trains no matter how it looks.
i never had the idea to test whether they can open gates. now this will be a nice challenge to build a safe crossing for them. thank you !
but in the above case (digging ore from under rail tracks) a safe crossing is not possible if you don't include the entire ore field in the crossing's area. i had tried to exclude some area by building walls, but the bots seem to walk long distances (even outside the marked colored area) to get between the walls to dig there and then are even more probable to be destroyed by trains. it still should be possible to build safe crossings as long as no rail is built on top of ore.
btw: similar seems to apply to construction drones too (i had many deaths when building somethibg near rail tracks). thus for the construction drones to be safe, i now toggle my personal bots: using slow bots with short range near tracks, and disabling the roboport to use the drones for faster work with a much larger range (more than 2 chunks radius) but the risk of being killed by trains. would it be possible to have separate toggles for bots and drones so that i can also disable both at the same time ?
