[geoschmo]

Silent, that's neither a workaround or a bug. Drones don't show up in the ships/unit screen until they have been launched. What happened there is you launched some drones and forgot about them and never gave them a target. So they were sitting idle at the point they were launched. Or they were targeted but lost their target before they could complete their mission and were sitting idle somewhere between the launch and target points. Using the ship/unit screen merely allowed you to "find" them again and give them targets. If you had happened upon them while looking at the system maps you could have targeted them from there too. So you haven't "got around" the units launch limit there, they were already launched.

Geoschmo