>>96843850
>tech menial squad 7λ56 prepares their stubbers and power wrenches for a mid-combat emergency spacewalk to the portside egine secundus to cleanse the infestation before it spreads to the other irreplaceable subsystems.
Fun scenario, but that doesnt sound like a mild hazard at all.

>>96843979
>not even specifically designed to hard-kill enemy capital ship combatants, but disable near-unarmoured fighter craft
They work on ships of the line and fighters all the same, the bigger the target the more droids it simply takes to disable it efficiently. And if the droid finds any data circuit it can fuck with it and try to highjack it.

>Ignoring the point defenses
The target profile is tiny. The actual missile itself is no more than 5 meters long. You would need some insane precission or serious saturation to screen them all, and thats before it deploys the droids.

>meters thick armour that the buzz droid needs to cut through
Indeed its probably not capable of going through the thick armour plating of 40k, as it only has 2 relatively small plasma cutters. Any exposed systems are fair game however. And it will just take some time before the droids can indetify any viable entry points into the bowels of the ship, like torpedoe tubes or airlocks.

>got to hold onto the hull as the Imperium vessel maneuvers, and remain in roughly the same spot
It has a magnetic clamp to latch to the hull and thrusters to reach the target if it gets disloged or the missile overshoots.

>computational difficulties of hitting an escort frigate (given their operating speeds, there's a good chance they could genuinely be outrun)
Thats hilarious.
How fast are those things? How do you even compare two sci-fi settings sublight speeds?

>and isn't atomized by the power field the ship may or may not also generate
Interesting.
The buzz droids ball carapace is made to bypass ray shields, but most of those wont disintegrate you.