Space Stations, they are all engineless. If you have some decent Laser and Railgun STOs, you can defend them from enemy ships quite readily, but boarders... anything designed to board an actual enemy vessel will be fast and may very well get close enough to deploy and get out.

Versing a speed of 1 km/s... even regular old infantry would probably take 0% casualties... never mind your Fuel Harvesting Bases, Terraforming Stations, Orbital Mining Platforms and other such things which are not nearly as likely to be well defended falling prey to a slow, quiet, maybe even cloaked boarding transport...

Boarding combat is very useful, very useful indeed... Oh, and it's also really cool!

Do units in boarding combat use ground supply points? if yes, is it at the same rate per rounds of regular ground combat?

They do -- or rather, they are supposed to.

And they're supposed to do so at the the same 'rate' per combat round. . . remembering that a combat round is 8 hours on a colony and only 30 seconds in a boarding action.

- - - - -

But as many people have noted, it looks like boarding combat is bugged and not consuming any supplies at the moment. . . or possibly consuming them at 'one round per eight hours' rates, since nobody has yet managed to get a boarding combat last that long.

In addition to the above reasons given for why one would be interesting in boarding hostile ships (intel, tech, minerals, etc...) boarding has a place as part of a larger combined-arms approach to fleet composition. You might not want to build ONLY boarding craft, but having a few mixed in with your more conventional combat ships adds a lot of depth to the game.

also it provides you with very important inteligence about the exact capabilities of your enemies, and their technology, and allows you to plan acordingly, in acordance to the capabilities of your enemy. you can get important data such as their armour tech, and sensor tech, much faster than you would with salvage, letting you get away with more bullsmeg. you can then have a better expectation for what you are going to fae on ground combat, allowing for adjustments in ground troops long long before you even find their home planet.

Because no matter how crunchy they are on the outside, they're full of ooey, gooey, nougat-y crew members goodness inside.

...Security teams notwithstanding of course...

I haven't played with boarding yet - do some of the AI ships and/or spoilers come with troop contingents on board?
Are NPCs smart enough to start equipping their ships with troops if you're actively stealing their ships?

If you can knock out spoilers ships in early-mid game captured ships can provide nice boost

I wonder in what situation you'd actually want to board an enemy. Its very risky, both for the ship that has to get close and the boarding party which is probably very expensive for its size.

Works out a lot better than you expect...

Note that since writing that post, Steve changed boarding combat to take place every 30 seconds instead of the original 60 seconds. I've never run out of supply during boarding combat so the usual "10 rounds of combat for 8 hours per round" isn't changed to "10 rounds of combat for 30 seconds per round" - it's probably still the same 10x8 hours.

I didn't know that, so thanks for telling me so I can change my notes :-)

After 20+ boarding combats I have yet to see any of them drop under 100 percent supply.

Same here, even with the above I haven't seen any boarding combat to last more than 10 to 15 minutes.