I think that the remotely controlled unmanned vessel explanation just makes it worse.
A FTL link would imply that the research data was getting somewhere up to the point in which the ship was destroyed (you can’t remote control stuff without some return signal to be aware of its state, or at least not effectively, so the return signal could carry some rudimentary data on the experiment). So, the follow up is that you destroyed military assets to attain nothing at all.