I'm not sure drones can give Stellar Manipulation orders. Their order set is highly restricted (Attack basically), so the SM button may not appear for them. That aside, it should work fine.
A possibility would be to remove all ways of repairing ships. I doubt you would like that, though you might justify it given your story. Another alternative is to make the component use a *lot* of supplies (as high as the game goes, if possible), and also provides these supplies. So, when the component is used, all those supplies are gone. If you make everything else use a lot less supplies, you should have a component that can only be re-powered by using five hundred ships or some such. This time, you would have to remove all "free supplies" stuff (Resupply Depots and Quantum Reactors basically).
A more interesting way is to create an Ancient Empire (or a slightly more inspiring name) with unique access to the Ancient Technology race trait (this trait would behave like Crystalline, Religious, etc). This Empire would then be able to research, build and repair the Ancient stuff, and give it/sell it/get it captured by the other Empires. However, you cannot repair components if you do not have access to all the requisite technologies, so these components would effectively be one-shot.
That approach is only worthwhile for a multiplayer game, of course, unless your idea of a fun game is to abuse the AI.
Re: Is this possible in a mod?
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