Interesting...
I need to go look at the TNE FF&S stuff more closely... Is it also in FF&S for T4?
As for the missile approach, they might be good as fire and one time use.. as in a quick tactical check on what is going on, but I am looking at it more in light of intelligence gathering and reconnaissance that play a big but under recognized role in any fleet ops.
I have designed a 10ton item using a slight modification of High Guard Small Craft rules.. the crew chair becomes the drone avionics-radio comms unit, and another 1/2 ton for sensor packages....
But using some of the suggestions others have presented about fighters, I could see this as a low end of such a long term recon drone:
1 Ton Fuel
1 Ton Power Plant
1 Ton G drive
1-2 Ton Computer (Factor 1 or Factor 2)
.5 ton drone avionics-radio comms unit
.5 tons sensor package.
-----------
5 Tons if Factor 1 computer
6 Tons if Factor 2 computer
These would be the minimums no?
Well... the drones with a fusion power plant computer and a radio receiver with a 1 AU range laser comm and a battery that allows the pp to be off for months at a time is a better item to use, put a folding EMS array on it so you can get a higher sensitivity. Don't forget the PP fuel for the T4 and TNE FF&S is rated in a number of l per year per MW so you do not need large piles of fuel to be able to have several decades of time on post endurance.
The Meson communicator is a huge and power hungry device that needs a precise location rather than a direction and IMO is only useful for communicating with asteroid based listening posts where you are not trying to be as small and stealthy as possible.
For drones usage you would install flight computers that are 10 % the mass and volume of a standard computer but do not aid maintenance tasks.
So what does it mean to be stealthy?
Try to be as small as you can so you do not reflect much energy, or occlude stars, try to use as little energy as you can so your waste heat does not make you a beacon (when you have detected bogies you use the radiators on the side away from the bogies) never use antigravity or thrusters based on gravetics as this makes you detectable to a gravational sensors, in short the long term system listening drone needs to be as small as you can make it and still be able to complete the mission.
The sensor tasks put forth in the T4 FF&S errata show that a +2 signature after subtracting range mod from sensitivity is an auto detection and every -1 you can get in signature gives you an order of magnitude closer to the target before you are detected.
A
Tigress class battleship has a sensor suite that is in the range of a 15 to 16 sensitivity, for both active and passive, while one of these drones has a sensitivity of 12.5 on it's PEMS array. But what does that mean?
Can the battleship detect the drone before the drone detects the battleship is the real issue here.
So look at visible sig 100dt is rated as 0 sig with a -1 or +1 for every order of magnitude. At 500,000 dt the base visible signature if the
Tigress is at +3.5 even if they apply stealth coatings they are still at +2.5, and a lot more expensive, now the drone is at -2 with another -1 for it's stealth coating
for difference of 5.5 in favor of the drone so 16-12.5 -5= -1.5 says the drone can detect the battleship by it's reflected visible signature 50 times further out than the battleship can detect the drone's signature but as you need a +2 to guarantee detection the battleship gets a +.5 (impossible task) signature detection task attempt when the drone is at auto detect on it's task.
The engineering signature is based on power consumed with 0 sig set at 10 MW with a +- .5 for every order of mag change. We'll assume the drone is powered down and operating on batteries for .01MW usage for 3 orders of mag reduction, sig = -1.5 extreme EMM masking reduces by another -1 for an engineering sig = -2.5. The
Tigress is J-4 so at pump for jump time it is producing 4 EP per 100 dt or 20,000 EP where each EP is 500 MW so 100,000 MW for +4 orders of mag, sig +2
Tigress does not have enough surface area to mount extreme EMM masking and so only gets a -.5 sig mod for a total sig of +1.5 So on power emitted the drone only has a +.5 advantage after comparing sensors.
So the gist of this is if the drone used more than minimal power a fleet can detect it with a +.5 advantage over the drone.
My T4 CD is in another computer at the moment so the sig gain/reduction per order of mag may be off, and I invite you to look them up, but this gives you an idea of what to look for in a covert sensor drone.
