Abstracting swarms of ultralight combat drones as single vehicles

[BATTLEMASTER]

I've been inspired by the ultralight combat drone design created by Liam's Ghost:  https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,22247.0.html

Now I've created my own, which I plan on posting soon.  While I agree the best way to abstract a swarm of these things is as a VTOL infantry platoon, the problem is that I can't do that with MegaMek :D  So I'm trying to figure out how to best abstract a drone swarm as a vehicle instead.

I started the unit file off as a VTOL assuming 12 drones because I thought that managing the weapons for a bigger swarm would be a nightmare at 48 lasers total.  But during testing I remembered that MegaMek has an Alpha Strike button, so I can fire all the weapons at once without having to scroll through a long list.  So I guess I could have a single unit represent 100 drones if I really wanted to.

But now comes how to deal with damaging the unit.  I currently have it set up so that a 12-drone swarm has 3 points of armor on each facing so that a medium laser could knock out the entire swarm.  Again this is an abstraction, but it feels good to me for a medium laser to be able to destroy 12 drones in a single shot in laser-rave fashion.  Unfortunately it's still going to fire all its weapons until its dead - no drones to KO.

I guess I could abstract the drones with VTOL battlearmor, but that limits me to six per squad in MegaMek.  (MegaMek tries very hard to stick with canon rules.)

Any thoughts about how I should do this?