Interesting ideas, though I wouldn't expect to see them any time soon. The idea of cheap little beachball landers shotgunned at Mars intrigues me because I think it's possible in the near future. Pathfinder demonstrated a cheap and robust landing system ideal for rough--interesting--areas, and with that pretty well handled I'd expect figuring out how to mass-produce the chassis and common subsystems like power and radio would be fairly straightforward. "Cheap" has a whole different meaning when you're talking about spacecraft hardware...a megabuck apiece means we could build a hundred for half the cost of previous single spacecraft. Works for me. Let's start a petition!

--Robert