What obvious example am I overlooking?

[james_davis_nicoll]

I'm trying to think of a good example of an SF story with a crewed exploration vehicle armed with a large flotilla of robotic probes (The idea being the meat stays where it's safe, but close enough to the remotes not to have significant time lag).

Comments

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

But the situation isn't quite the same because the (non-Arkdweller) characters in Incandescence aren't fleshers (though they may manufacture and inhabit bodies from time to time)—we'd describe them as AIs, even if some of them have DNA ancestry, and they travel as AIs do, as streams of data at the speed of light.