@Sean
Hmm. No, I misunderstood what you were arguing for. I thought you wanted actual people on the ship, controlling bodies that they are inside.
The only benefit brains inside the ship have over brains connected by QEC, is that they don't draw QEC fuel supply, and they don't get disconnected if a QEC jammer gets developed.
I think the former reason is counter-productive, and see my response to Nik for the latter.
As for needing normal crews to operate ships... Why does it matter that we have allies? Must they be able to fly their own warships, even if it renders them less effective? Even if they need to, do we need to build that weakness into our own ships?
The only important method of remote control is QEC, used for the ship itself. The robotic repair crew would probably be controlled via radio or something, which would be... difficult to block, especially at the distances fight at. Even moreso since all our ships will be coated in hexsand armor, which is remarkably stealthy.
@Nik
If a QEC jammer were developed on a large enough scale to threaten us, that would disable so much of our infrastructure that it's practically pointless to worry about. We'd just lose, regardless of how our ships are designed.
Despite that, I'll offer a different methods to circumvent that: We could use a robotic AI, like what Arbiters have, and give it basic fighting capability and an order to return home if it ever loses contact. Since it doesn't need to be extremely skilled or smart, it doesn't need to be wetware. It could even be a normal computer, which just flies home if it loses contact.
Now, is doing anything more than the above worth it? Sure, we could build our ships with human crews. They would be
less effective, require more
maintenance and supplies, require a
more vulnerable design,
require more infrastructure, be
easier to subvert,
harder to recruit... all just so that
if the UWM develops a QEC jammer tech which is powerful enough to disable large portions of our navy, but too weak to disable much of our infrastructure, we will have a somewhat better chance of surviving.
Mind you, QEC tech should be pretty hard to break. There's no connection or transmission between the two points; IIRC the two points are actually just one atom that exists in two places. To break it, you'd need a method to manipulate ALL the atoms that are QEC fuel, through the hexsand armor. I.E. very accurate, precise, long ranged space magic, which means very very expensive and difficult to use automanips. Or a godlike intelligence that would be capable of gutting the ships anyway.
At best, I could see building a few ships with human crews, much like our growing of fleshsods, 'just in case'.