So with the aid of lua would it be possible to make a dropship that does the following:

Abducts "organic" or "human" actors (Team doesn't matter)

Close the doors.

When you reopen the doors instead of the people inside it drops out "meat" that can be picked up and eaten/thrown or what have you.

Also, how would you make it so when you close the doors it can tell an actor is on board and plays a grinding or processing sound, and doesn't play any sound if a robot, gun or if it's empty?

Now that I think of it, would a pie menu option on the ship that turns all cargo into X meat be easier?

basically the issue is determining whether any given actor is a human/robot

most likely your best bet is to assume organic unless it's either, specficially, a dummy.rte unit or has the word 'robot' in the presetname.

Also, a much easier way of accomplishing what you're looking for would be to avoid using a dropship entirely, unless mobility is absolutely necessary.

you could use the dropship and some inventory handing code pretty easily as well, with the added bonus of the whole floaty lines thing and the simplicity of clicking to open. You could bind WEAPON_FIRE to some neutral door's open/close (which I think is also done by WEAPON_FIRE) so that the doors closed while processing was happening.

well sure but you can do such FUN stuff with mosrotatings and some glows

True, but they don't have a controller so it'd have to be automatic.
A conflict of preference I think.

Well, I think lua could decide if actors are organic based upon material. If the Actor's Material's PresetName has "Metal" in it, it's a robot, and if it has "Flesh" in it, it's a biological thingy. And if it has both, YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED.

Last I knew, and this may have changed, objects' materials aren't readable through Lua in any known way.

But, you could wound the stuff that it eats as it eats it, and then detect if any particles spawn nearby that have the word "blood" in their PresetName.

Wait, how about detecting wounds?
But maaaybe if you want to make an RA2 Grinder, then gibbing said actor and looking for blood or meaty giblets would probably be the proper way.
And then there's some organic factions which doesn't bleed blood, like my Cordycs, so how'd you explain that?
Another idea that would need a lot of work would be to make a 'master list' of all actors in existence (or the ones people play anyway) and sort them as grindable organicbags or grindable robotybits.

A bit of trivia: Cordyc was originally supposed to only convert organic actors, but the robot/human problem makes it assimilate everything.

I guess it's not absolutely necessary but it would be a plus. Having it do all but dummys and things with robot in the name would be fine actually since 90% of mods are humans in nifty armor anyway.

Why would a dropship be a poor choice for such a thing? I thought it would work best because of mobility and because it can suck up and spit out actors. What else would I use? A bunker module or something? Although that would be pretty neat too other than the fact people would have to be "tricked" into going inside. The point of the dropship was to force things to be processed. Not just blindly walk into it. Also I think a gun or grenade that did this would be kinda silly.