Starting Games With Drone Tankers (missiles?!)

Why not make a separate station and use drones to ferry the fuel to the main fleet?
Only the station has to be crewed this way.

What I mean is starting the game with drone deployed. I don't want to launch them. So basicly I just wanted to be able to make an unmanned tanker. The reason is my super ships carry 60,000 tons of fuel and get all of 3ish km/s of delta v so if I can bring along a drone with 30k delta v and 80,000 tons of fuel I can refill my super ship with a drone so I don't need to put people on the tanker as it is easier to bring along a tanker than to expand the fuel capacity of my ship

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Ah, in that case a fleet of drones deployed from a station will work fine.  They'll be rather large drones, but a station has no upper limit on its mass (outside of mission requirements and whatever the game's absolute maximums are) because it doesn't need to move.

The fleet should also prove more efficient than a single 80kt tanker too, because the diminishing returns in terms of delta-V gained per units of extra fuel are harsh.  Basically, every rocket has an optimum mass past which adding more fuel becomes wasteful, and tankers are no exception.

Hmm, since these wouldn't have to maneuver in combat, I wonder if it would be viable to stick a reactor in there optimized to be as light as possible, and drive the drones with an MPD thruster (or a cluster of them) to take advantage of the really high exhaust velocities those can get.  The thruster itself can be made as light as a few grams, rendering an excellent thrust/mass ratio despite their pitiful thrust, the main difficulty would be getting a power source that can drive it while still being light enough to push around with single-digit kilonewtons.

Technically speaking these drones would only need a few tenths of a g of acceleration to keep pace with a capital ship in orbital maneuvers.

Well it actually turns out you can already do that in the game. Make remote capships. Just make a cap ship, give it a remote control, make the worlds largest drone launcher, launch the drone! if the game did not crash you now have a drone cap ship! I would do that with a station launching my tankers but it turns out the game does not like launching a 80,000 ton drone. It crashed you see.

It messes up some other pieces of logic, such as weapons with "targets shots" disabled (so as to not waste ammo on small targets) not firing on unmanned cap ships. This could be fixed--I want more flexibility with those options to, for example, make anti-drone missiles that cannot be spoofed by micromissiles.

More generally, there are maintenance concerns and such with unmanned ships that can be handwaved away for small, disposable drones that are harder to do for capships--one of the game's assumptions does seem to be that not everything can be automated.

A very simple solution to the "targets shots" problem would be to have the difference between "shots" and "ships" be an arbitrary cross-section size.

Which means basically, what it would really be asking is "is that thing big enough that I have a reasonable chance of hitting it?"

Its more about a shortcut to model things (which we have to do so we can run this on non-supercomputers) and operating within the constraints of the model.

Like I said, there are a lot of downsides to unmanned capital ships. Downsides we can't actually model well. So, if we implemented unmanned craft as is, you'd have all the benefits, if there were benefits, and none of the downsides, because the downsides (light speed lag, not having people immediately available for damage control, or a captain having a direct view of the battlefield, data transfer limits, electronic warefare, long term maintance, excetera) are things we can't actually model, or at least don't model right now.

Thus, at this point it's easier to say "you can't do that" because we can't model how you would do that. At least in a realistic way. We have a rough idea how a crewed ship would work. We have no data on how an uncrewed capital ship would work.  A similar thing is present with our current nuclear engines. 

If you look at, say, Atomic Rocket on its list of nuclear rockets, you will see a huge variety of options for the nuclear rocket. We basically just use a NERVA type engine. Why one option out of the multitude available? Well, on the one hand you have playability and designer time constraints: you have to limit options and depth so the average player can produce a working model and the computer doesn't crash trying to model it, and a designer only has so much time: if it takes a month of programing work to get one engine type to work properly, it be years before he could get around to doing even a small part of the possible models. On the other hand, there's the reality that NERVA type engines are at present the best understood Nuclear Rocket Engine. Any model is based on its underlying assumptions. With a NERVA rocket, a larger percent of those underlying assumptions can be backed up with real world data.

Which brings us to drone vs manned ships. No one has built a massive space warship. Thus, we have to rely on educated guesses on its crewing requirements. However, we do have some spaceships, warships, and aircraft to draw some information from to make guesses on broader crew requirements. With an uncrewed ship, we basically have nothing. We have no real world examples to draw on to figure out what is necessary to run a 10,000 tonne craft with no crew onboard.

The designer would basically have to guess, which would mean the game would have to be beholden to the designer's vision of what an uncrewed ship would look like.