I am also a bit sad by the fact that drones will be expendable. I would rather have them a noticable cost (let's say 50k per drone) and reusable, and have them need fuel, maintenance and repair, but instead of carrinyg hundreds of them in your big mining ship, you'd maybe have some "drone hangar" space in your ship dedicated to carry and service 10 drones at most, all of which you care about and hope to bring back after a mining run.
It's not so much about saving cost - persistent drones could easily be balanced with regards to fuel and maintenance cost to cost on average the same as cheap expendable ones - but the wasteful, throwaway nature just not feeling that good or interesting. At least for me, these drones won't make mining any more interesting. If find chase-the-chunk annoying, and was somewhat looking forward to the drones, but I am probably not even going to try out mining with them being just a throwaway thing.
And I can't even imagine why you'd want to bring prospector drones in the first place - just cut a bit into an asteroid to estimate the yield and carry more collector drones. Why would anyone not just fill the entire cargo hold with drones then?
Plus, I would like to see the ability to remote-control individual drones, not just have them run on automatic. And the idea, as already mentioned, of drone paint jobs, of naming them, of caring about them - it sounds lovely but it seems we are never going to get that.
Edit: And thinking about it from an in-character, in-universe perspective. Even if the drone tech is so cheap, why throw it away instead of having them return to the ship after the work is done? Like, what even happens when they expire?
Fuel runs out? Why then they could return in time and be either refuelled from the ship's tank (Could be a reason to carry one of those upcoming extra fuel tanks!) or have to be refuelled at a station! Heck, even if its fuel runs out while it is still out, why couldn't you manually scoop up the drone then in order to refuel it either inside your ship or at a station?
What else? Some built-in self-destruction mechanism? Why would someone build that? To boost drone sales? When then would every company in the galaxy that produces drones do the same? I could therefore imagine there being both cheap drones for situations where you don't expect to be able to bring them back alive, and more expensive reusable drones for when you care about your little swarm. And it would be up to you to choose which approach you prefer.
In the end the way the implementation is currently presented feels just so 100% game-y, and like nothing what would happen if you approached the topic from a story, a lore perspective. Like, the only reason for them being expendable seems to me that a game designer said "but it needs to have limited ammo", just for the sake of having limited ammo, not because it would upset the game balance or anything like that if you could simply reuse them (as I said, fuel and maintenance could also provide a form of running cost).
Seems on the same level as why fragment cannons and rail guns only have 30 ammo, as if someone high up just said "I don't like these two guns, but when we must have them, at least limit their usability so people rarely use them", not because they would be overpowered if you wouldn't have to fly back to a base after a handful of kills.
