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For reference, the feat's text is below:

CONVERTIBLE CHASSIS FEAT 14

MECHANIC
Prerequisites drone exocortex
Your drone easily converts into additional forms. Reconfiguring your drone into a different chassis is a 1-hour activity with the concentrate and manipulate traits. When you select this feat, choose one chassis as your alternate chassis (page 16). Your drone gains the Mobile Reconfiguration action.
Mobile Reconfiguration [2 actions] (flourish) Your drone reconfigures into its alternate chassis. It remains in the new configuration until you command it to perform this action again.

I have a few questions on how this works:

1. Do you get a second chassis immediately when you get the feat, and can change it as a 1-hour activity, or do you need to create the second chassis over the new activity?
2. Can you change your drone's original chassis?
3. Drones can choose whether they increase their size or not. This way, a small scout drone can stay small, but a big drone can grow into a huge mech. How does this interact with Convertible Chassis? In other words, if you chose to increase the size of your tank drone, does your scout chassis need to grow up as well?
4. Different chassis have different hit points. What happens when a drone changes its chassis to one that gets a different amount of hit points? Are any hit points lost or gained, or does each chassis have its own hit points?
5. It seems that any customizations and weapons don't change. But should they? For example, if you give your Tank Chassis drone Flier and Nightvision Sensors customizations and reconfigure the drone into Surveillance Chassis, you effectively lose those customizations.
6. Can you select the same chassis twice? You might want to just change your drone's size and leave other features as is. But an Imitator Chassis drone could swap between two ancestries in infiltration missions, for example.

Tech class playtest says this about robot companions:

Robot companions follow all the same rules as animal companions, with the following changes.

Rules for young animal companions include the following (emphasis mine):

Your animal companion is trained in its unarmed attacks, unarmored defense, barding (a type of armor for animals), all saving throws, Perception, Acrobatics, and Athletics.

Nothing in the playtest explicitly says that robot companions can't wear barding, but the Armor Plates customization implies that robots don't have separate armor, just customizations that fill the same role.

Should buying better armor for robot companions be possible (outside of using customizations)?

The 10th-level feat Flickering Shield has a few problems:

• 1. The mod's effect (emphasis mine): The creature wearing the modded armor gains temporary Hit Points equal to 5 + your Intelligence modifier and regains Hit Points equal to your Intelligence modifier for every round the shield is active. In other words, while the mod initially grants temporary Hit Points, it heals the target on the subsequent rounds. This is a spelling error, isn't it?
  
• 2. Modify says (emphasis mine): The item remains modded until the start of your next turn, but the effect ends early if you use Modify again or if the item is destroyed or a character other than you, your drone, or your turret attempts to use the item. Flickering Shield says: The flickering shield lasts for 1 minute or until dismissed. I assume that this means that the mod does function for 1 minute, and it ends early if you Modify again?
  
• 3. Is it really not possible to Modify someone else's armor? The text of the feat implies that it should be, but the new text of Modify forbids it.
  
• 4. How does Flickering Shield interact with Enduring Mods and Permanent Mod (both its duration and the following 10-minute immunity)?

In any case, Flickering Shield seems like a fun mod.

I've been trying to build a drone with lots of customizations, but it seems that no matter what, the drone can never have that many of them - especially if some of them are higher grade customizations. I'm new to the system (or rather, PF2e, which I assume people are basing their analysis on). Feel free to correct me if I got anything wrong or missed something!

For starters, let's define the feats affecting the robot:

• Maturity feats: Tactical Drone (4th), Refined Chassis (8th), Advanced Drone (14th), Elite Drone (18th) and Ultimate Drone (20th).
• Customization feats: Commercial Customization (1st), Tactical Customization (6th), Advanced Customization (10th) and Superior Customization(16th).

If the player takes all of these feats, they have used nine out of their eleven possible class feats. Only 2nd- and 12th-level feats are free - whether for taking even more customization feats or for taking any other feats. This results in a drone with six customizations: three commercial (one of which is always Integrated Weapon Mount) and one tactical, advanced and superior. This doesn't sound a lot.

• Let's say that I want to build a drone that can Repair things. This doesn't sound like it should be too difficult, but it requires a lot of feats: to even attempt Intelligence-based skills, the drone needs the Sapient customization, which is available at level 10 at the earliest. This requires Tactical Drone, Refined Chassis and Advanced Customization. We'll then need Skill Module (Crafting) and Manual Dexterity. One can use the free commercial customization, but the other need another feat. That's four feats to do this. This results in a drone with a Crafting modifier of +12 (+10 from level, +2 from trained, +0 from Int). For comparison, the mechanic themself likely has a Crafting modifier of +22 (+10 from level, +6 from master, +5 from Int, +1 from tactical repair toolkit). Even if we disregard any feats the mechanic most likely has, the drone's modifier is so far from the mechanic's that this doesn't seem to be worth doing ever. Pretty much any PC will have a better modifier if they invested in Crafting at all.

• Maybe drones are built for physical labor? Let's take Powerful Chassis, make it a burly robot and give it a Maneuver Module. This requires Tactical Drone, Refined Chassis and Advanced Customization. This gives the drone an Athletics modifier of +20 or +21 (+10 from level, +4 from expert, +6 from Str, as well as +1 to the selected maneuvers). For comparison, a solarian's modifier would be +21 (+10 from level, +6 from master, +5 from Str) - but they might have a weapon that can add its item bonus to attack rolls to these checks.

• How about a scouting robot? Fortunately, Surveillance Chassis is a really good base: the drone has good Wisdom and Dexterity, Stealth training, an integrated ranged weapon, darkvision and fly speed. It also has an Integrated Weapon Mount for additional options (including grenades), and a free commercial customization. What could we add to it? Aquatic Adaptation will let it scout underwater, Cameras let us see what it sees (but not hear - no Microphone customization?), and Olfactory Receptors lets it detect smells as well. That's two feats worth of customizations. For more advanced drones, Tactical Drone also increases the drone's Perception and Stealth to expert, so we don't need Expertise Module for that. But we might want High Speed to fly faster and Burrower to reach new places unseen. That's already three feats, for a total of five. This drone is neat, but we don't have anything else: if the drone goes down, the mechanic doesn't have much else to do. And we haven't taken feats like Hunker Down, Coordinated Fire or Auto-Target, so while we can use the drone in combat, we can't fight in tandem with it. Is this scouting ability really that good? And if we want more customizations, such as Echolocation or Network, we need even more feats.

The chassis don't seem to be balanced in terms of customisations either. For example, Surveillance Chassis effectively starts with Flier and Nightvision Sensors customizations, so the player is a bit more free to add customisations of their choosing - or saving the feats for something else. By contrast, Imitator Chassis is obviously built for Charisma skills, but they need to take Artificial Personality to even attempt such checks. And if the player wants the drone to use other Charisma-based skills than Deception, they need to spend a feat to take Skill Module - potentially several times. At 1st-level, this results in a modifier of +4 (+1 from level, +2 from trained, +1 from Cha), which isn't awful. But a PC can use their skill increases to improve those Charisma skills, get item bonuses and increase their Charisma. The drone needs Tactical Drone and Customization feat for Expertise Module, and increasing the modifier further takes even more feats.

Are drones just meant to draw attacks? The turret seems to be better for this role, since it has hardness, uses the mechanic's class DC / Int for AC, saves and hit points, and if it gets destroyed, the mechanic can just collect and redeploy it to fully heal it. None of this takes any feats. At 3rd level, you can even use Reposition Exocortex to move the turret to chase or block enemies as needed. Maneuvers like Grapple and Trip seem to be the only major advan1tages the drone has over the turret.

Let's compare the drone to druid's animal companion. A druid needs just three feats to mature the companion: Mature Animal Companion, Incredible Companion, and Specialized Companion. Even if we disregard Ultimate Drone, this is still one feat less - or five, is we take each of the Customization feats. And the druid gets specialization for their companion 4 levels earlier! Furthermore, a level 20 druid with no class feats is still a full spellcaster with nearly 40 spell slots. What can a level 20 mechanic with no class feats do? Much less, I assume. This means that a mechanic's feats are more "expensive" than a druid's.

Lastly, how powerful are those customizations? Majority of them seem nice to have, but far weaker than feats like Coordinated Fire or Auto-Target. The ability to change them during daily preparations is good, but if the customizations themselves are too weak and/or poorly balanced, this versatility doesn't mean much. And you can't quickly change them to adapt the drone to a new situation. I can't see myself ever using customizations like Light Mounts or Olfactory Receptors, no matter how fun they seem - there just isn't room for them after taking the "mandatory" ones.

It feels like the best way to build a drone is to pick the five Maturity feats and spend your remaining six feats other things - and to leave the customizations on the shelf. This is a shame: to me, the appeal of Drone Exocortex is making a unique drone, but with so few customizations, there's not much to distinguish one drone from another of the same chassis. And if you pick other feats than Customization feats, there's even less to distinguish the drone.

Another problem is scaling. Mines are the easiest to scale: their damage goes up as you level up. Turret needs a bit more effort: UPB, time and a Crafting check. But the drone requires Maturity feats, and quite a few of them. And if you want to give your drone a mounted weapon, that one needs upgrading too - as does your own weapon (and the rest of your equipment as well).

If the drone matured like the turret (upgrading it as armor, rather than a weapon like the turret), the mechanic would be free to take both Customization feats and other class feats. This way, the feats are used to make the drone more versatile, rather than just keeping up with numbers.

Alternatively, instead of Customization feats, the Maturity feats and other feats affecting the drone could also give it more customizations. This way, the mechanic would be free to invest in something else than the drone (or they could get new mods / actions as well as customizations), while still getting a few customizations to play around. Or maybe the Customization feats could just give more customizations?

Or maybe the mechanic could just buy or Craft extra customizations for the drone? These ones could be harder to swap out of, which is more limiting than just deciding what customizations are online during daily preparations, but if you want your drone to do one thing almost all of the time, they'd be a smart investment.

Playing around with different customizations doesn't really seem possible even if you were to spend all of your class feats just to upgrade the drone. They seem far weaker than a "proper" class feat is. It feels that the drone works as a "killbot", but not as anything else - and the turret arguably works better as a weapon platform.

Am I not seeing something, or is the drone both really limited in what it can do and very hungry for feats? Or does the drone work much better than I'm assuming?