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> one way to deal with this may be to have engineering teams on stand-by, ready to helo to a broken drone ship and do repairs.

If the ships travelled in groups of 3+ then in the event of a failure the other two ships could tow the failed ship? Is this feasible? I honestly have no idea.

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Not with current ship designs. It takes an enormous amount of power to tow a loaded cargo ship. They're built with some power redundancy, but not enough extra to tow another loaded ship.

Adding to gk1's comment. Adding the power redundancy needed to tow another ship would obliterate all the fuel savings these ships (potentially) can achieve.

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