[Suicide Junkie]

The best defence against those drones would be mines. A few at a warp point, and even cloaking devices are useless.

What about:

Normal ships have vastly larger control areas. Ie. 50% of the ship is livable space, life support, crew quarters, etc.
Even a master computer would take up a good fraction of the ship.

Drones, on the other hand, would have their 10KT computer core, so almost the entire thing is engines & weapons & shields.

Drones would be much more powerful weapons, but would not be able to change orders.

Thus, if you have a target you want to attack, you use drones, but for patrols & complicated actions, only regular ships will do.

The difference between drones and MC ships, would be that the drone follows a simple, linear series of commands (move, move, turn, fire, ram, endProgram), whereas the MC is vastly more complex, and can make decisions and change orders and do tactical combat.

A drone's weapons would be programmed to fire 5 Weeks, 2 days, 1 hour, 15 minutes, and 10 seconds from launch, and continue firing forever at the nearest target.

If a ship intercepted a drone that was not at it's target, the drone would be destroyed without a battle, and the sender could be identified. "We intercepted a drone from the Xi empire. Its orders were to plague our home planet!"

What do you think?