But we'll be going up against humans prepared for space combat. At most they'll have their spacesuits on, if that. Granted, military grade spacesuits might be armored (although, technically, MK2s ARE military grade spacesuits and aren't armored very much), but in that case we can just beef the lasers a bit above "red hand" and into "pulse laser rifle" territory.
Mind, if they were Red Hand level, they could just storm through the ship. Electrolasers are hard to defend against if you aren't anticipating what you know only as melee weapons turned into ranged attacks.
Yes, but that can be solved by designing the drones to be spider-like with magnets, like I said and only use thrusters, if any, to slow down before landing and to keep themselves attached to the hull long enough to enter a ship. The energy problem is as simple as adding a small generator.
Spider-drones could work, but this turns them into an outright guerilla weapon. Which has a problem as outlined further.
Because the goal here isn't to destroy the ship. It is to take it over. And it's much easier to take over a ship if you avoid direct confrontation and use guerrilla warfare tactics instead, sabotaging, taking enemies by surprise and then retreating to unreachable areas before they can retaliate.
Guerilla tactics. Well... okay. This could even work if we were, say, attacking a ship that is drifting in space, or maybe even fleeing from us, or maybe imposing an embargo or something. We're likely going to face a situation where the only crew that matters is the pilots and the gunners, and every minute the drones waste on trying to guerilla their way into the ship means a whole lot more orbital bombardment for us. It's not a viable defense tactic, kinda like stopping an enraged bear with a poison dart. There is no poison fast-acting enough to kill the bear before it mauls you.
Again, the goal is not to destroy the ship.
And 400 small debris-like drones will pose much less of a target then 150 drones dodging around with their rockets.
And I'm not so sure about power increasing non-linearly with size. If you give a laser twice the power it's not going to fire with thrice the strength. Unless you mean something else.
Yes, 400 small drones that act like debris are going to
pose a smaller target, insofar as they're not going to be detected as such. Not until they start to cling to ships at least, at which point... I don't know, deflector shields don't seem to be a thing, but I'm fairly certain interstellar ships have ways of dealing with both mines and micrometeorites. 150 drones actively dodging attacks, however, present themselves as a bigger target, while being a
harder target. They are, if you will, acting as their own fighter screen - the same guns that would need to shoot at incoming missiles would need to be diverted to shoot at incoming drones - or ignore drones to keep shooting at missiles, in which case we still win.
Once again, guerrilla tactics are more effective at fighting an enemy that has the advantage
Advantage being? Numerical? Situational? Once the drones get into the ship, they will have the absolute advantage, since they are little more than mobile weapons. If a group of 20 laser drones flies into a room with 20 people, the 20 drones will be able to engage 20 people more efficiently than 20 people can engage 20 drones, because drones are smaller, more accurate, and can distribute their fire between available targets when acting as a group; and the superior firepower of the people would, in many cases, be irrelevant, as the drones won't be armored enough to withstand any direct hits anyway.
But then you have the problem that they're unpredictable, since their collective programming evolves much like that of a biological lifeform. Also, they'll be easy to damage since they have no shielding. And they would need a generator that could provide them with enough power if you want them to act faster than bacteria. Finally, I'm unsure if the technology that would be needed to have those "drones" reproduce and destroy, the technology to re-purpose materials on the fly with just a small addition of energy is available to us.
True enough, although they don't need to build more of themselves on the fly, they would just be obscenely cheap to mass-manufacture in hilarious quantities.
Each drone will have a specialized role. One would carry a laser, another would just carry a more powerful cpu, another would carry communication equipment, another would carry breaching equipment, etc. Although the laser ones would probably be the primary ones.
And again, the goal is to be a danger to the people inside the ship, not the ship itself. We want the ship as intact as it can be.
And the best way to do that is a coordinated takeover, not a guerilla invasion. A surgical strike via remote units, if you will. Even if it'd be more efficient to do it with guerilla tactics, the timeframe it'd need to be done it simply won't allow it. If we could afford to sit there while the enemy loiters around in orbit, we could just starve them out, because we're on a planet, and they're not.
As a supplement to a boarding party, as a "parting gift" to ships fleeing in the aftermath of the initial assault, guerilla drones can work. For defending the planet itself, I think we better literally stick to our guns.