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.htmlNow 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?