cthia wrote: I never considered that. So, essentially you are saying that a Spider can sneak up on a skunk and steal his stink AND his command codes?
No, I am not saying that. In order to properly hack, you need to transmit, which reveals your position. That's also the reason why hacking can't be done with recon drones either.
If you are within PDLC range, you get exactly one round-trip in a recon drone before the clusters engage you. The PDLC engagement time is probably measured in the two-digit millisecond time, if not less, so you'd need to be within 15000 km to send and receive more than one round-trip.
Above that, if you go out of PDLC range, you're still within laser and graser range, up to 1 million km. Let's say the engagement time is 2 seconds from receipt of the transmission. If the RD is positioned 1 light-second away and let's say that's outside PDLC engagement range, then you get two round-trips before the lasers and grasers find you. At this range, this is also lethal to a spider-drive ship and the only saving grace for an LD is its massive armour. But as soon as it's hit once, its stealth is compromised.
Beyond light-speed weapons, we have CMs and regular missiles. Let's say the engagement range for a CM is up to 2.5 million km and it accelerates at 200,000 gravities. That gives an RD sitting at 1 million km away 3 round-trips and change. Above 2.5 million km (over 8 light-seconds), the engagement is done with shipkiller missiles and that's also a 3-round-trip hacking exchange. Going further away from those numbers doesn't help because the missiles are accelerating, so doubling the distance only increases the interception time by the square root of 2, meaning you get fewer round-trips.
So the only way I could see an active hacking attempt work would be with a swarm of networked recon drones, with each one picking up where the previous one left off. Then you get as many round-trips as there are drones, assuming they're within energy range (if they're outside, the round-trip is 6.66 seconds, so humans have time to intervene). I frankly don't see this as worthwhile, unless you already know there's vital information you need.
Instead, those RDs can be better used in passive hacking. Gather as much information as possible from EM transmissions that leaked through, such as obtaining current cipher codes and encrypted commands, finding out which ships are tac net nodes, etc.