You know, I think we should ask Steve/think about what kind of engagements we can expect to be facing. I suspect, for example, that most space battles will involve either holding or breaking through a FTL point blockade, and beyond that, I suspect most of the times our enemies will either be coming from the jump point, or coming from/staying at the main planet. So, battle at range seem to be the main part.
However, I once asked aresteve about it, and he told me this:
Protecting against fleets eh? Well, depends on the make up of the fleet. They bring a capital ship through and you're probably screwed unless you can put several "Hammer" rounds into it; and it's got enough automanips to make that sort of thing hard. Assuming they don't do that; which they probably won't, the nuclear landmines and lasers should deal with most things; or at least cripple part of the fleet. At that point they'd probably either retreat or head for the planet, if they're really gungho. Because the route they'd take is unknown, we'd have a hard time placing defenses along it, meaning we would need to either place them around heph, or create them to be mobile enough to go out and take down the fleet before it reached it's destination. We could do that the traditional way: ie we build ships of our own and have them head out and get in a slugging match; or we can use the fact that we're in control of an extremely powerful ai and create a huge swarm of modified steve bots with built in entanglement communications that would attack and disable the ships.
So, this seems to indicate that there’ll be close quarters combat, somehow. But when?
Well, as a fleet materialize and punches through a point blockade, they’lll be going… rather fast. And then they’ll spend most of their time braking and repositioning themselves. If we can predict at what position a fleet will be going slow enough to make using stevebot- like contraptions a thing, we could place stealthed containers floating there, to release their cargo when their ships get near (and yes, Sean, this also implies small fighter-like things might be appropriate in that situation
However, Pw himself says it's difficult to predict that, so... yeah, we'll have to look into it. Business as usual!