The OBJECTIVE of space combat (Score 1)

What's being ignored here is the most fundamental aspect of space combat which is the objective of space combat. You can not discus the type of weaponry or propulsion methods with out discussing what they would be used for, the objectives they would be trying to achieve.

Space is too big to make most types of combat feasible. If there were a war between two planets then all of the fighting would happen in or near the orbit of the planet. The primary concern of the on planet government would be the defense of the planet and the only feasible way to do this would be to put missile launchers etc in orbit around the planet, as the area that needs to be defended gets larger the further out you go and thus the resources required to keep so many outposts maned would be impossible to maintain. On planet missiles would have to go through earths gravitational pull where it is at it's strongest so it makes the most sense to have all space combat originate from the planets orbit. All ships designed to invade a planet would be designed to wage war against missile launchers and ships in the planets orbit making "space combat" more similar to air combat simply higher up.

The attacking of passenger ships between planets, would ONLY happen once it had nearly reached it destination because it is too difficult to predict it's path through space and would be a waste of resources to send a ship to attack the ship with out any likelihood of actually hitting the ship. Thus ALL combat would be done near planets as there are no objectives in space. There is no reason for any planet to launch a large battle cruiser or space station out side of the planet's orbit.

The most likely scenario for space combat is simply on earth as it is now when missiles could be dropped from space to land targets. All war is designed around control of land resources. An air victory is helpful to gain control of land resources or area and thus space will simply become a continuation of that. However that will all happen in orbit of the planet.

The point is that all these discussions are mostly irrelevant because all space battles will be fought in the orbit of the planet and thus gravity will play a large role. And then there is the issue of falling debris. One of the unrealistic things about space battles in star wars and star trek is that the ships fall once shot, that wouldn't happen in the middle of space, but it would eventually happen in orbit. Obviously I'm not an expert about these things but I think it's important to take into account the OBJECTIVE space combat would be trying to achieve to figure out what it would look like.