A drone carrier is a type of long-range combat spacecraft. Several are operated by the AWSF.
As its name implies, a drone carrier provides various forms of expendable and reusable drones with support and long-range transportation. Most drones have small thermal-fission or chemical engines that have excellent thrust-to-mass ratios and give them outstanding acceleration but relatively poor efficiency; they can only make interplanetary transfers by impractically slow Hohmann transfer orbits. The drone carrier also provides command-and-control infrastructure. Although most combat drones are capable of mesh-networking and autonomous action, a drone carrier can house humans and large-scale neural networks (sometimes Synthetic Intelligences) as well.
Large drone carriers invariably include extensive in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) facilities, usually processing asteroidal materials into not only propellants for the carrier and drones, but also into new drone parts. A drone carrier may arrive in a system with only a small fraction of premanufactured drones, and thousands of drone-cores (modules containing electronics, and partial weapons and reactors) that will be combined with structural materials created with ISRU to build complete drones. This takes place in highly automated factories contained within the drone carrier. With the mission complete, the carrier will "shuck" extra drones to recover the valuable cores while saving departure mass.
Drone carriers are inordinately expensive. Heavier than a 21st century aircraft carrier (but much less dense, and, hence, larger), they are the largest modern military spacecraft, and are capable of supporting thousands of drones to secure space superiority in an entire star system. However, as such ships are modular for wormhole passage, it could be disputed if they really count as a single spacecraft at all. The AWSF currently has one active deployed drone carrier (the AWS J. R. "Bob" Dobbs), on station in high orbit over Dirac, and three more shut down in its mothball fleet.
It is considered unlikely that any more drone carriers will be built in the foreseeable future, but a number of designs have been proposed, including ships that can produce more parts of the drone locally ("reduced vitamin carriers," vitamin being a term of art for components that cannot be reproduced in the carrier's drone fabrication bays.)