I think if they had a big f-ing rocket at their disposal and could bundle a couple dozen of them MIRV style there would be no political downside if a bunch went splat so long as a bunch didn't

"look guys 9/24 of the rovers are transmitting back, great success"

Testing of using commodity parts was part of the Mars helicopter and it worked well enough that making many of them seems plausible. I'd love to see multiple drones flying faster/further than rovers. Just not really sure what instruments would make them useful.

That's another great example. And ridesharing on the mission allowed them to prove it very inexpensively and with much lower risk than a dedicated mission.

So once Starship flies routinely could we mass produce rovers and launch them 30 at a time?

I think the question of technical possibility answers differently from the question of organizational feasibility. Starlink is optimizing costs because they have a financial incentive to do so. The less each satellite costs, and costs to maintain, the more income they make. I fear incentives are not so direct in governmental orgs. Outside contractors performing most of the work have outsized influence, and incentive to inflate costs. Budgetary decision makers all want to see investment in their own districts.

I think Starlink and cubesats have definitely proven the approach can reduce costs.

The engineering does not seem as challenging to me as figuring out how to get such a policy approved and pushed through all the administrative and decision making layers without watering down and budgetary inflation.

Maybe if we launched 30 Starships carrying 30 rovers each. With only 30 units, the prices would likely be similar to current commercial satellites, which are already built on standardized platforms.

I'd go even more radically low cost, and kit the first lander out with wifi, and a half dozen each of every commercially available robot dog, humanoid, and wheeled or tracked robot of any interest. Rumble in the Mars Robodome. Bit of publicity for the existing manufacturers who may be willing to pay for the privilege, and who will undoubtedly learn valuable things about how their designs fail and can be improved. And you figure out in one stroke if there's a COTS platform you can buy for $30k that gets you 80% of what you need. If any of them function for any period of time, you use them to prepare the space for future landings. Rinse, repeat. After a few iterations, you have a half dozen manufacturers with commercially produced platforms with a few strategic modifications to which you can bolt your science instruments.

All I can think about now is a bunch of e-waste littering Mars. At some point, other visitors will show up to investigate Mars and come to the conclusion that the Earthlings are just so trashy their trash even started filling another planet.

The surface of mars is roughly the size of Earth's dry landmass. They'd have to spend quite a lot of effort looking for it to find it. And at that point it'd probably look more like a treasure trove of useful thermoplastics, refined metals, magnets, and other useful things otherwise difficult or expensive to source on Mars directly.

man, you spent more time thinking about that than I expected anyone to actually do

I find that pessimism holds most of it's practitioners back from their full potential.

It's that very pessimism that allows me to be fulfilled in life not using social media, so I'm quite happy with it.

That's odd, because that kind of pessimism is all over social media and I'd think not using it would be an antidote. That and rage bait.