I heard this reference before. Dates from war in the Age of Sail, right?
So what does it mean to have battles center around planets and colonies as points of supply?
How do things change from Starfire, where every planetary battle is pretty much to the death, to one in which total conquest is very difficult, but surrendering on terms is fairly frequent?
How much toughness does a post need, anyway, to be significant?
If a warship costs around 1200, that is about 10 launchers, without the maintenance issues.
How many posts are there? Is it likely to have 10 launchers per warship that might attack the post? Would that likely be sufficient?
But that just considers the use of launchers as offensive against ships. What if the planetary launchers are used for defense? You can make cheap large missiles with HUGE maneuverability, to shoot down missiles and fighters as needed.
And hiding behind the planet, or behind a moon perhaps, lie a whole bunch of particle accelerator ships just waiting to jump an enemy at point blank range.
With planetary launchers firing anti-missile missiles, an attacker couldn't take out the shipyards at range, but would have to close really close.
And since a planet generally won't surrender without enemy ground troops present, that means that an attacker needs to get enough control that an unarmored troop transport can get through, or he has to build an armored troop transport, or run the enemy out of missiles or all three.
Which brings up the question:
If you plan to take a planet, where do you store your troop transports during the battle to take control of the space over the planet? You don't win the planet if some pirate-minded enemy puts scouts out who fight your troop transports and launches a nasty alpha strike on them.
In Starfire, troop transports are relatively safe behind the warp point the attacker came out of. That is less guaranteed in Aurora.
A defender could respond to an attacker by swinging around them and heading for the warp point they came from. At the very least, they could force a communications jump ship to back out of the system.
A lot depends on fleet composition.
Perhaps one fleet is armored, fast and laser armed, relying on controlling the range to win.
Perhaps the other is heavily shielded, and quite slow, relying on heading towards a target that the other must defend or pass through eventually.
Or a fighter or missile barge design, counting on getting the enemy deep enough into its envelope and overwhelming it with firepower.
Perhaps the role of missiles on the ships is just to be able to force a post to surrender, Gunboat Diplomacy.
Whatever, I suspect that scouts will play a big part in this kind of game.
