When you said you could either use four drones to repair four ships or four drones to repair one ship faster, did you mean two drones at a time, or is there actually a way to utilize all four drones at the same time?

You can have all four out at the same time, but if you've got two people on the two support stations, then only two can be actively controlled at a time. When I said four on one, that's like chain them up, say four in a row. There's only one fuel port.

You can have one fueling, and while it's fueling, it's like, okay, that's actively fueling, now let me repair with this one.

Say I'm solo piloting my Vulcan. I go to the support stations. I program two to be fueling, one hydrogen, one quantum, one repair, one rearm. I control the hydrogen one first, fly it over, dock it on. Whilst that's doing that, I switch to the repair one, fly it over, start doing the repair, swap to the rearming one, that launches out, grabs a missile, sticks it on. The fuel one's probably done by now, so I'll fly that back and then fly the quantum one back out.

So it's like hot seat, you're just jumping on it as it needs attention and then setting it up and then jumping to the next one.

If you've got another player, then obviously you can do twice as much. If you don't have a second player, then you can always hire NPCs to do that job for you, although how good they are is up to how much you decide to pay them.

That still sounds like only two drones are out and active at a time, though. Am I missing something?

I think they can all be out, but only two can be under direct control. So you need to be leaving the other two doing a task. You can make changes to two at a time. That's just for this ship; other ships may vary.