Steve -
Based on a recent battle in the Six Powers campaign, I have a number of observations and questions about this subject. Please note that the issues raised below are based on what I THOUGHT was going in in this battle, but I may have been wrong as to what I perceived happening. To wit:
1. In a situation where there are ships from multiple governments involved in a battle, how does Aurora handle selecting targets for PD weapons (both Beams and missiles)? I ask this because I noted in a battle where there were two sides, with ships from two governments on each side, the targeting seemed...interesting. I'm not sure exactly what I saw, but...it appeared that the laser PD weapons only engaged missiles aimed at ships of the same government. I couldn't tell with the anti-missiles, but they definited attacked missiles of the allied government that were aimed at ships far away from the ships that launched the anti-missiles.
2. Beam/kinetic point defense fires seem to attack incoming missiles in a squential manner. In other words, it appears that PD #1 attacks missile salvo #1, PD#2 attacks missile salvo #1, and so on until missile salvo #1 is destroyed, then PD#x moves on missile salvo #2. This creates a situation where one or more ships aren't attacked by any missiles because PD stopped them, while other ships are attacked by full salvoes, because PD never got to their missiles. Randomizing the salvoes targeted by PD would probably eliminate this as an issue.
3. As I noted above, it appears that beam/kinetic PD was only defending ships that were from the same race/government, leaving an ally unprotected, while it appeared that anti-missiles would attack any missiles that weren't launched by the same government/race, killing missiles from an allied government. There really should be a way to designate other ships/races as either exempt from anti-missile fire, or as protected by beam point defense.
I'm sure I'll think of more in a bit
Kurt