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1. More effective point defense. I'm defending a single point, trying to shoot down what is being fired AT me, which nearly boils down to (on the short range at least) finding an incoming warhead, and shooting at it. Missiles can only make so many movements and still be heading for a target. I have a smaller area to defend, all around my ship, at 100km, without even aiming, my point defense can cover the surface area of a 201m cube with a pellet for every m^2, every 26 seconds. And things just get denser the closer you get in. Come into just 25km from my ship, and every other second, a pellet passes through that plane.

Yes. A single point is easier to defend, however it also has the weakness that it is only 1 point to shoot at.

1000 missiles fired at 1 point is more likely to be hit (statistically) and a greater amount of damage done than 1000 missiles fired at 1000 targets. Sure, the 100 targets might still loose a significant number, but if it is 1 hit kill, then 1 hit on the single target is game over.

So this point has its good sides and its bad sides.

As for the covering an area with pellets, you use a period of 26 seconds for a distance of 25km. So any missile moving faster than 26km/s will be able to reach your ship faster than you can cover the area with pellets. 26km/s that is 93,600km/h, Fast I'll admit, but not beyond the speeds we have been discussing for the missiles (around 100km/s).

11km/s is the escape velocity needed to leave the Earth's gravity, and we can already achieve this with our rocket technology. 2.36 times this should not be a problem.

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Shooting at something head on, you can basically shoot at a flat plane, or nearly flat, provided you have a high enough rate of fire to make the time and space between the shots as small as possible.

However, shooting at something head on, like a missile, you have a smaller target. A missile is a long tube, usually more than 8 times the diameter of the front cross-section. So this means that the target surface that I would need to hit is larger than your by a greater factor than the ratio of Area to Volume. I would actually have the easier target to hit. This is why "Crossfire" is so effective in combat.

Also, I can bring more "pellets" into an area than you can, I can give a much larger source area for a given target area and thus have more PD weapons trained on a given point(s) in space which gives me a greater chance of hitting the incoming missile.

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2. I'm harder to confirm as a target on long range sensors.

Yes, if we are only using a single point source for the sensor. However we both have advocated the use of masses of small sensor packages.

These sensor "Cans" could be distributed into an interferometer. And as we have these spread over the entire solar system, we have a massive Baseline for this interferometer.

Interferometers can be used to produce very high resolution images. An interferometer that is planed (whether it will be built or not is still uncertain) with a baseline of several thousand kilometres (out at one of the Earth/Sun L points).

An interferometer with this length baseline would be able to resolve Earth sized planets around other stars. I think it would have the ability to resolve the image of a ship somewhere within the current solar system, and each of us would have thousands of such interferometers scattered around the system (this is another reason why I don't need to send a sensor probe to every point in the solar system as each "resource point" would also be a spot for an interferometer). Stealth would not be a viable option with this kind of sensor strategy.

However, smaller ships would need an increased resolving power to see, you might be able to locate the fleet (as a diffuse cloud), but using the interferometer to target my ships would be harder (or need a longer baseline). It is not impossible (and actually fairly easy), but for a give distance from the interferometer, my ships would be harder targets to acquire.

My fleet would be easier to spot, and you can launch first and relying on the sensors being closer before acquiring specific targets. But this is also the weakness, as my fleet has a far better PD than you. Just 1 side of my Mothership (and I can have 64 Motherships for the mass of just 1 of your Gunships) can hold off all the missiles fired from your Gunship (and then some), but you need all the PD form your Gunship to hold off the missiles fired from my fleet.

Interferometry means that neither of us can really hide from the other. My PD means that you can't actually hit me (but your PD also means that I can't easily hit you (although I have a far greater chance to do so as my Missile capability is much closer to your PD capability). Fast moving missiles and a rapid launch rate will mean that it is possible that I can overwhelm your PD capacity in a brief, short ranged fight, whereas you can't do this to me (due to my much higher PD firing rate - a potential of 384 times your PD firing rate).

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There is something else about regenerative armour I thought about last night as I was falling asleep, something to do with a larger ship being harder to ablade its armour, the larger ship, being larger, means you have to hit the armour hard enough to send the material out of the range of any field setup to pull it back to the surface, or enough that collection fields will cause the armour to sort of orbit, forcing the ship to either abandon the armour matter totally, or change its heading/speed to collect it.

This doesn;t sound right to me. If a small ship with an equal sized field will have as much capacity to regenerate it's armour as a larger vessel with the same sized field.

Yes, you could include a bigger field, but that would take both more mass and/or volume to install. Also, you would need more of them to cover the massive area of your ship's surface, further compounding any increase in mass/volume of the field generators.

So I don't think this would have a significant impact on the armour's regeneration capacity due to the size of the ship.

I have also though about ablative armour and how to counter it. If you had missile with an armour piercing tip that is designed to punch through the armour and then explode, this would tear off large chunks of armour rather than ablate the surface of it.

Another counter for ablative armour is a likewise AP tipped warhead, but it also has a drill (laser drill if you prefer a better Sci-Fi tech) in the tip. Once the missile has lodged into the armour of your ship, it begins to drill through it and once through it injects the warhead (maybe an antimatter charge) into the ship's internals through the hole. The AP tip would also be a good counter to any PD fired from in front of the missile as the AP tip would be hard enough to penetrate armour that can stop the PD pellets. This would make your earlier points about you PD all coming from in front of the missiles a weakness, not a strength (my ships can attack from the sides so you would need to put this armour all over the missile which would make it exceptionally massive and dampen down the explosion in any case).

Anyone else have comments on this issue? we should recruit new people to give their ideas on how this works and punch more holes in both sides./quote]
I agree, it shouldn't be just us. I am interested to hear other people's ideas too.

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I original starships concept made starships be about couple of light years in size and made of pure energy. It would be a fairly loose structure that would allow planets or even stars pass through it.

How would the ships actually damage each other? Matter can't harm them, or all the stars and planets pass through them would destroy them and Energy can't destroy them as entire suns emitting vast amounts of energy has no effect.

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So essentially a cloud of electromagnetic micro components on a galactic scale. That would create new ships by splitting.

If they can grow by splitting, and the micro components can make more of themselves, the vast distances involved ("galactic scale") means that it would be almost impossible to directly attack the individual components.

Because the "ship" is so diffuse, each component must be able to make any other component (otherwise it would take far too long to actually build another ship if the resource has to be transported throughout the ship). This means that if just 1 micro component of a ship survives, the ship can survive. In a ship that is Galactic in scale, finding an object a few thousands atoms in size would be harder than the proverbial needle and the haystack.

This is not to say your idea doesn't have merit, just that in reality, it would not be feasible. But that is what "Suspension of Disbelief" is all about :D .

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What do you think will be the most fun starships system to play? Take all the realism aside.

I think a system that encourages an action filled combat would be more fun, as long as it can also be interspersed with the stealth concepts.

the stealth will provide the tension and the action sequences of battle will provide the release of this tension. It is a common system used from Movies to Music (and not just modern music or music for movies).

As such, I think the Scissors/Paper/Rock works for this, as long as it is a bit more than just S/P/R. This might be having more than 1 role for a specific ship. The PD Drone could also double as a scout or AWACS (by artificially limiting sensors and not using interferometers), the Striker can acts as small transports and Con-Com's, the Motherships can act as bases of operation, factories, Carriers, Large transports, Colony ships, etc.

There could also be different sub-classes in each major class. So you will have PD Drones that specialise in destroying missiles, destroying the Strikers or even for attacking and destroying other PD Drones. A Mothership could be equipped to launch missiles to provide a long ranged artillery support for the main attack (it stays right out of the battle front). The Striker might be equipped with PD systems and be used as a boarding transport (although the Mothership would most likely be better suited for this).

Heavy PD drones might be better for long ranges exploration or defensive situations, There will be many variants on any one class of ship as well as some designs that blur the line between them (multi role for greater flexibility at the cost of the advantage of specialisation).

So, for a game, I would definitely prefer the S/P/R system as it does offer more varied strategies and tactics.

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Or would you just try to pump out as much ship and have it be a battle of attrition?

I don't like the "Battle of Attrition" for games on an aesthetic level. In a battle of attrition the player with a small advantage at the start will usually win. This means that the game must have perfectly balanced start conditions for all players (boring) and this must be maintained throughout the game (which would usually seem artificial).

Battle of attrition can be interesting, but only when it is one of many valid strategies available to the players, and even then, the players must have a way of countering it. If in the first 3 minutes of a 30 minute game you can see who is going to win in a battle of attrition (and it is the only available strategy), then what reason is there of playing the other 27 minutes?

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A ship that is just one 'level' below still stands a chance of winning, but would take heavy damage and is more likely to lose anyway.

I think a better variation of this is that tier 1 units/ships should be generalists, but as you progress through the tiers the ships become more specialists. Not necessarily more powerful over all, just more specialised.

This way the tech tree is not about becoming more powerful, but is about opening up more strategies for the players (this is one of my design philosophies, "give the player the tools to craft their own rewards" - where a the successful use of a strategy is a reward and the tools are the means to implement that strategy).