Don't really have time to comment right now, it's quite late, but both the Sagittarius and Drones are actually meant to support infantry operations. One of the big drivers for the design of the QTT was:
Ah my bad, I mixed up the Sagittarius with the Accipiter anti-ship drone.
So! With a much larger contingent of Tigers/Hammerheads, there's less need for a blanket of drones from the transport itself. Hammerheads have drones themselves, and we can stack drone refills in the cargo bay rather than a dedicated drone bay if needed.
Stat-ing out a QTT variant with payloads:
Primary (10x): Bulk People Transport (unchanged)
Secondary (5x): Cargo Hold (from Drone Bay)
Tertiary (1x): Drone Bay (from Cargo Hold)
The cost of this variant is reduced from 28,822,800,000 cr and 90,071.25 pr to 16,462,800,000 cr and 51,446.25 pr (drones are far costlier than cargo space), which is cheaper than the LLP at 18,212,800,000 cr and 56,915.00 pr.
To carry all ground vehicles, and given we already have:
QTT (original variant) - 1500 personnel, 41700 drones, 700 m^3 cargo (holds ~10 Tigers/Hammerheads)
Dragon Lady - yet-unknown transport capability, but given how it's so much cheaper than the QTT, probably is little (if any) capacity to transport vehicles
We just need to produce for our 61 Tigers/Hammerheads (plus potentially more):
QTT (cargo variant) - 1500 personnel, 8340 drones, 3500 m^3 cargo (holds up to ~50 Tigers/Hammerheads)
QTT (original variant) - 1500 personnel, 41700 drones, 700 m^3 cargo hold (holds ~10 Tigers/Hammerheads)
while still having room for 4500 personnel + whatever the Dragon Lady can transport.
Instead of the 5 QTTs that are UberJJK's current production plan, we save 55,727,640,000 credits and 308,838.75 pr.
Given production is our bottleneck, that's enough for 5 more LLPs and 24,263.75 pr leftoever, which could be used to build more Hammerheads (up to 60 more!) or Tigers (IFV) and Atlases (mech). Although at that point, we'd want to build another QTT. Or that remaining production could be reserved for SA to buy whatever ground stuff they want, as was previously planned.
Maybe we can sell them to the Volus. They can't live on most planets so I imagine they would be interested in tech that lets them make the most of what they do have.
I figure the largest demand would come from colonies that are already building arcologies, or prospective colonies on less habitable worlds, assuming our arcologies are cost efficient enough to break even with upfront cost in a reasonable amount of time.
Is it possible for us to produce charged particle weapons like the protheans? Also ship mounted black hole guns based on the Blackstorm?
Edit: also what would the civilian applications for those kinds of things be?
We do have a particle weapon tech tree under Repulsor Cannon, but it's not high priority given the current effectiveness of our laser tech.
Ship-mounted Blackstorms are probably also possible, although unless the power output from arc reactors can supercharge them, I have some doubts on their efficacy against the enemy we'd want to use them against, Reapers, whose mastery of mass effect will always surpass ours.
Repulsors already have civilian applications, but their military importance means SA is keeping a tight hold on them.
