Request:
When reading the description of several vanilla ships, one thing became clear in the game backstory:
"Explorarium" had as one of its main jobs, enforce the "law" on frontier where the main navy wasn't present yet, or being more obvious: They would use AI fleets (that were technically, illegal), to crush any rebellious colonies until they could build a gate that would gate-in the navy.
Also several ships descriptions mentions rebels loved fighters, with Legion being invented to counter rebels inventing their own carriers, and a bunch of other random ships descriptions mentions how they were intended to counter the fighters the rebels spammed.
And then there is the fact that Explorarium was a company that you could legally sell AI ships to (for example Mbaye-Gogol had contracts to sell AI ships to them).
The request is: can you make some drone mech fighters and strikecrafts that were intended as "rebel killers"? They probably would look different than normal explorarium drones (ie: normal explorarium drones are defensive self-replicating drones intended to defend probes, these would be offensive drones intended to kill fighters, then land on planets and attack cities until they capiulate), probably they used the official color scheme (explorarium color is cyan, not green, you can check the "mothership" sprite for reference, it is the only vanilla sprite that use that color as far as I know. The "nebula" freighter use a similar color but I am not sure why, also explorarium own flag has a dark cyan part), and looked not too low tech I guess, explorarium drones we see on vanilla game are intended to be self-replicating cheap stuff made en-masse, the "rebel hunter" mechs probably were still cheap, but not THAT cheap, they probably looked "scary", since their job would be intimidate rebels in allowing Domain to build a gate on their system and bring in the main navy.
They could even be crewed too in a sense... Maybe have more of those "strikecraft carriers", you have a main mech with a pilot that controls a small army of smaller AI mechs, the pilot being there more to tell the AI what to do, than fight, although obviously he would be able to defend himself since if such tactic was common rebels would quickly realize they could win by killing the pilots or something.