That's the thing; it's a fundamentally different rule-set. But I agree - speed and 'clean table' play are two of the hallmarks of ACTA.
The problems of conversion from a detailled game to a fast play game have happened before - the original (Babylon 5) ACTA suffered from this with Beam weapons, which remained a persistant bugbear throughout the game's life. The idea of a 'raking' shot being translated as 'keep shooting till you miss' worked fine in theory but gave massive (and unbalanced) advantages against less armoured ships, or fleets with easy sensor locks. The problem was that the B5 wars effect that was trying to be represented (multiple smaller hits across several systems rather than one big blow) doesn't work with damage condensed to a single hit-point score.
The problem with drones is much the same; Intensify Defensive Fire! works - and well - but you either have to do it continuously (using your special action) or else accept that you're going to spend the entire game sucking on concentrated drone fire. You can't do it as a response, or manouvre as a response, or whatever because there's no 'flight time'.
You could use an 'incoming drones' counter. That would also make it clear how many salvoes were currently attacking a ship (making the channels thing easier), but my understanding is that Mongoose has a general philosophical dislike of counters on the board. More to the point, this is a fleet game; whilst tracking the exchange of drone salvoes is easy between 2-3 ships, with ten or more warships on the board, knowing which salvo was from which ship gets awkward in the extreme, especially if some salvoes have special rules as well as different attack dice numbers.
My personal suggestion is something I liked from Battlefleet Gothic. I think that it, along with ACTA, are the two best 'fleet' wargames going - there's stuff I prefer from both (weapons fire in ACTA is a lot simpler, not reliant on anything like the never-to-be-sufficiently-accursed gunnery table, for example, and the escalating critical hits means a critical on a battered ship is a bigger deal than on an intact one, as it should be).
One thing that Gothic does do very well is to allow Brace For Impact! (the equivalent order) as a response to getting a crud-load of ordnance flung your way, rather than having to guess in your movement phase which ships your opponent will subsequently shoot at (and knowing he will pointedly shoot at any you leave exposed). You could do this even if you were on a special order already, doing so as a response to the attack being declared, on the understanding that it replaced any order you were currently on and counted as your choice of special order in the next game turn.
This made it more reactive and quite a tactical choice; do you concentrate fire on one ship to try and kill it, or do you spread it out amongst several enemies in the hopes of making several of them turtle up behind their defenses?
Of course the problem with this approach is that Gothic is I-Go-You-Go rather than alternating activations. Therefore you'd have done everything you wanted to in your turn, and Braced in your opponent's turn, knowing you'd take the penalty in your next turn. In ACTA, the question becomes one of the effects of losing special actions mid-turn; which penalises some more than others - orders that don't affect anything until the end of the turn are lost with no benefit, whilst orders which affect movement are already done and finished by the shooting phase. Also, you need to understand how this affects stuff like power drain.
Lastly, one of the key problem with Drones isn't a problem with drones, just as one of the key problems with B5 beam weapons was actualy to do with initiative and the boresight arc of fire.
As noted (by several people) it's the problem of Drones and Plasma. Both use the seeking weapons rule, both are defended against by point defence and Intensify Defensive Fire!. However Drones generally seem to be considered some of the best weapons in the game rules and Plasma Torps some of the worst. I'm not sure if making Intensify Defensive Fire! more easily accessible is going to hurt plasma users badly. I'd guess not so much because (given reload times and range issues) plasma fire rarely comes as a 'surprise' in the same way - if you're going to be hit by a plasma torp you generally see it coming and would have been on Intensify Defensive Fire! orders anyway.
