Alright, here's the comment to the Newtonian Combat:
I still haven't run through the battles involving the Rama cruisers, but my conclusions so far:
> Lasers are very good at point defense. Solid round rail-guns are very bad at point defense.
That's not really a surprise, I'd say.
> Having a higher acceleration may be of minimal use in strategic movement, but is a significant advantage when closing to direct fire weapon ranges.
> Direct fire weapon combat feels right.
That's great, and it looks like it from your descriptions.
> Missile combat mechanics feel like they need work.
Maybe, but maybe not. The problem with the missiles you used, as far as I can see, is that they're all only five tons - the equivalent of 2 MSPs of aurora. That means they're quite small. What could one do with quadrupling the size of missiles? Let's take, for example, the Killer ASM:
Killer Pumped-Laser ASM
Mass: 5 tons
Engine: 1x G.F. AMM-Standard Warhead: 135 kTon Nuke
Starting_Accell: 3.0 m/s DeltaV = 38.4 km/s, Reserve DV = 8.4 km/s
Max Burn Time: 2.8 hours
Proximity Detonation: 1.5k km Damage at PDR: 0 MJ/m^2
Lasing Rods: 1 Rod Output: 708 MJ Jitter 7 m/k km
Beam at PDR: 3m wide, 100 MJ/m^2
Quadrupling the size should leave us with something very much like this, probably even better:
Killer Mark II Pumped-Laser ASM
Mass: 20 tons
Engine: 4x G.F. AMM-Standard Warhead: 540 kTon Nuke
Starting_Accell: 3.0 m/s DeltaV = 38.4 km/s, Reserve DV = 8.4 km/s
Max Burn Time: 2.8 hours
Proximity Detonation: 1.5k km Damage at PDR: 0 MJ/m^2
Lasing Rods: 1 Rod Output: 2832 MJ Jitter 7 m/k km
Beam at PDR: 3m wide, 400 MJ/m^2
Still too easy to intercept, right? Well, that's not what I actually wanted. Instead, let's use the bigger size to increase the Proximity detonation range. In fact, to make this easier, let's quadruple it, too, leading to a proximity detonation range of 6k km:
Proximity Detonation: 6k km Damage at PDR: 0 MJ/m^2
Lasing Rods: 1 Rod Output: 2832 MJ Jitter 7 m/k km
Beam at PDR: 12m wide, 100 MJ/m^2
(I'm going with the idea that doubling the range doubles the beam width, too. I'm not sure about that, at the moment, and it changes quite a bit)
That would mean that the weapon detonates at 6k km, outside the point defense envelope of the Barbarians, inflicting 100MJ/m^2 over an are of 12m. While this would (I think) pretty much only boil the armor away, a third or fourth missile is basically guaranteed to hit components inside the ship, probably killing it. So, that should just be the end of that ;-)
Alternatively, implement the arbitrary fire delay as you said, but with a difference in hit probabilities: A given fire control needs to track its target to increase its hit percentage, this being an additional point of tech research and component building. Basically, when a FC has twenty seconds or so for tracking, it's basically guaranteed to hit the enemy - when it has to switch from missile to missile every four seconds, the shots are going to hit a lot less.
