This is feeding the troll, but the bug's importance is overblown IMHO. It is exploitable on systems that are otherwise full of holes anyway.

Of course it's pretty much irrelevant. The bug doesn't matter in practice unless you're doing other, severely braindead things.

Maybe if you insist on reading it on a cellphone :/

There isn't much fighting going on for no reason at all. Fights are usually over influence or resources. They'll be thus focused on a planet, a planetary system or some other resource - say an asteroid. Say there's a planet with resources you need. A defensive force can be assembled in orbit to make sure you're the only one who can mine it. Etc. It doesn't mean much that space is big - the battles won't be fought over the empty space, unless that empty space becomes a resource in itself. Say if there was some spacetime-bending stuff that needed vast "empty" space to operate.

Orbital mechanics are easy if the UI is built to let you deal with that fact. Given the popularity of KSP and its various add-ons, I'd say that everything depends on how you present stuff. Orbital mechanics are only unintuitive because we are surface dwellers and have no first-hand experience. Your job as a game designer is to provide a bridge between our everyday experience and the game mechanics.

I don't think it's a problem, just the physical reality. Vacuum laser-based warfare is short distance unless you've got a big ship that can support big mirrors. Duh.

With powerful lasers, the main problem in the atmosphere is most definitely not any "diffusion", but self focusing - a nonlinear optical effect. When you've got air, or really any sufficiently dense gas, even a desktop-size laser beam can exhibit self-focusing. If you're not trying to destroy things, it's actually a problem, since a self-focusing beam has this nagging tendency to destroy the optics places in its path :(

There's no point to artillery shells in space. The kinetic energy alone is all you need as it will dwarf the chemical energy you can pack within the projectile. What's the point of a kiloton of TNT when it can have a megaton of kinetic energy :)

The 10-20s warning you get doesn't depend on the presence of thrust, but on a radar echo. The ionized exhaust plume is, I'd think, a net radar absorber and actually hampers detection. Using radars for space combat threat detection requires big antennas if you wish to detect far-away threats.

You can, because vacuum is not vacuum, at least not in any practical sense.

A shock wave can form in a fluid medium of a very tenuous pressure. You have shock waves forming in the solar wind at the fringes of our Solar system for crying out loud, and that's vacuum that's much better than any we can make on Earth! You have spectacular shock waves forming in relativistic jets, and that stuff too is fancy looking but very good vacuum nevertheless.

They do - perhaps not in the way you'd tend to think - but man, they most certainly do. All of the laser energy for various laser fusion experiments is channeled through fiber optics and mirrors. You have either internal reflections in the fiber optics, or surface reflections on mirrors. And they route what, gigawatts these days? All going through multiple reflections.

Umm, just no. Remember that maneuverability implies a change in momentum. Good luck changing that orbital plane - you have to change the orbital momentum. For example, setting up an orbit perpendicular to the one you currently have requires you to shed all of your existing orbital momentum first.

While lasers don't self-focus in vacuum, in gases, though, laser beam self-focusing actually a problem! Yeah, when you have a beam of sufficient intensity in air, it'll self focus and stay that way until its intensity decays below the self-focusing threshold. Non-linear effects FTW :)

I know I'm feeding a troll, but systemd is quite likable, and I like it better than launchd. I'm looking into getting rid of launchd on my OS X box and adding a launchd-compatibility layer into systemd so that the rest of the system would be happy in its ignorance about not talking to a real launchd...