Yes, and keep in mind that the object your ships are trying to protect (aka. your planet) is directly in harms way if a heavy weaponry goes astray. In space you're alot less restricted when aiming your Black-Hole gun 

attack an enemy in space while your moving thousands of miles per hour over the planet and at the same timetrying to coordinate your movements with th other ships in the area and it gets a little more complicated

No it gets easier actually... Your enemy has to come to opne point in space while you are unrestricted. It makes no sense whatsoever to be able to attck with fleets before you can defend with them. If your agrument held any wieght then you shouldn't be able to attack a planet with fleets either.

You can't have it both ways and still make any semblance of logic.

If I can attack as a fleet in a gravity well then I can defend as a fleet in a gravity well.

I mean really... an enemy fleet appears on the horizon and you send up one ship at a time? Black-ninja style? Thats ridiculous!

"Oops there goes Bob. Well guess it's Tony's turn again.. sure hope he does better against all those ships!"

"Say do you think it might work better if we launched everybody liek we do in all other military operations?"

"Naw, that just crazy talk!"

when aiming your Black-Hole gun

This would make sense if the planet was a targettable item for ships. But it isn't and even then it would only make sense (barely) if you had heavy weapons (which is factored into logistics requirements for fleets that are big enough to have big guns).

Just had an odd thought. The AI has shown little or no interest in preserving PQ while invading (I had a PQ 7 colony get blown down to PQ3 in a single invasion, at that point, why bother retaking it?). With that attitude, and the fact that noone takes prisoners in this game, you'd be an idiot to let an alien task force near your planet to begin with. If you're engaging the enemy close enough that you firing away from the planet might damage the planet, the enemy, firing towards you, hence towards the planet, is much more likely to damage the planet, and given the ancedotal evidence above, they're probably a lot less concerned about hitting the planet as well. Sounds like an argument in favor of what you're saying, right? Wrong. The whole argument is bogus, as under these circumstances, no defender in their right mind would fail to engage the enemy before said enemy can fire on civilian targets. It's not like there's hidden ships waiting to attack the planet the moment you move away from it, you can see just about any ship out there from a week away.

If you want to read a recent and interesting SF book touching on the topic, read "At all Cost" from the Honor Harrington series. There's a battle or two in there that makes it clear that unless the attacker isn't worried about civilian casualties, he has to be more careful than the defender in situations like this, mostly because the defender line of fire is away from the planet. If you think that the enemy doesn't care about civilian casualties, then that just means that the encounter isn't going to happen in orbit of the planet. If it does, the defenders have already lost.

Early on, I have a logistics of say 5. I can put a small ship (attack: 4) and a tiny ship (attack: 2) into a fleet and take out pretty much any single ship on a planet.

I could see that except if you do that, neither ship can have any real life support or engines or anything can you?

I didn't even bother designing any real ships until I had at least one mini tech and a III-IV level weapon, because otherwise my ships couldn't go anywhere near enemy planets, let alone take anything out...

Then again, it's quite likely I don't really know what I'm doing.

Minor nits: Without Basic Logistics, your logistics is 3 in Beta 4C. So add time to research Basic Logistics to that.

It also takes some research to fit an attack of 4 in a small hull. Missiles are the shortest path, and even then I think you're talking Stinger IIIs before you can fit two in a small hull. You're still not going to get any engines, sensors, or life support in there.

By the time you've accomplished the research needed to overcome these two nits, you're in the second phase I was discussing. There, the game belongs to the offensive players. This is the phase that can get very interesting quite rapidly.

As for creating fast interceptors, it doesn't work without a tech advantage. Just getting speed above 1 in the early game takes up half your hull space. That said, one of the most intensly enjoyable game of ANY 4X space game I've ever played was a GC2 game where I was technologically far ahead, but the Yor were building single ships that could slaughter any fleet I could build. The only possible response was the light raider, too light to take out military ships, but fast enough to avoid anything the Yor had. Those little buggers could spend 4 movement points moving towards a target, one killing the target, then 5 running away. The Yor never got a non-fleeted transport near my planets, and couldn't take the planets landing one transport at a time. Any human player probably would have started including more than one transport per fleet, and I would have gone down fast.

I suspect we have vastly different play styles. I'm an empire builder, and only go to war when someone declares it on me (happens eary usually, as I focus very much on my economy and have no military until my relations with a neighbor go south). Once war is engaged, I tend to go into rabid pit bull mode and not let go until he who declared war is willing to make major concessions. Any allies he had that were only halfheartedly in the war can have peace, though I'll still ask for whatever concessions I can get. In GC1, I financed an entire war by letting the members of the opposing alliance buy peace one at a time

Still, I really wish the AI had feelings sometime, so that I could see the expression on it's face when, the turn after it declared war on me because my military rating was a third his, my military rating is suddenly in the lead by 50-100%. Beware declaring war against the tech leader, especially when his economy is generating money faster than he can spend it.

Frogboy: Actually, Mass Drivers IV may be a shorter path to 4 attack on a small hull. I really hope the game becomes stable enough soon that I can explore the tech tree, my own meanderings through it have obviously missed a few things.

CrispyMouse: True, the enemy has the choice of engaging. Doesn't affect the topic at hand, however.

Second, speed isn't the advantage you think it is. The ability to ALTER your velocity/vector is a big advantage because you can determine/maintain a favorable engagement distance, and neither the attacker nor defender win here. Sure, the attacker can start a run up to a huge speed from well outside the system, but that just means you're moving very fast in a straight line. Your ability to divert from that straight line is no greater in absolute magnitude than my ability to start accellerating from a standstill.

If your fleet is actually capable of more accelleration than mine, then this point may have some validity, but since I don't need to carry any supplies, my mass is going to be lower, so if anything, the defender would have the advantage here.

And, as you pointed out, space is big, a fleet stationed at a planet isn't necessarily in orbit around the planet. Again, this doesn't apply to the topic at hand.

Third, yes space is big. However, you'll notice that I addressed this point already. We can see ships coming from a week's travel time away. They're not going to be able to sneak around behind us. It should be a fleet vs. fleet engagement. Besides, the technology to let a planet host a defensive fleet in no way would change this, so the logic is flawed. If I have to patrol space, I have to patrol space. And yes, you can throw asteroids at me from as far away as you want. But keep in mind that not only do I have weapons to destroy the asteroids you're throwing at me, I have the same technology that you do to divert them from their course. Your only hope is that you can manage to throw the asteroid at me without me noticing, or to overwhelm me with multiple asteroids. Seeing as I saw your ships coming a week out, I really doubt that I'm going to ignore the way they're dancing around in the asteroid belt. If you did that, I'd assume that you're pushing asteroids out of orbit, and direct the observatories to watch for them. Heck, we have had people watching for asteroids back in the 20th century. The only real question, and one we can't answer, only the devs can, is how easily 23rd century technology can spot the redirected asteroids.

I'll agree that the attacker has the advantage around the planet IF AND ONLY IF the attacker doesn't care about damage to the planet. I'll grant that this is probably the case in the GC2 universe. However, I did address this point as well in my post. We can see them coming, we're not going to let them get close to our planet, because if we do, we've already lost.

As for the fortifications, bypassing? I put weapons platforms around my planet. How do you bypass that, except by either swatting them with asteroids (which may or may not be possible given GC2 tech) or simply by not going near the planet? Remember, in GC2, a star system is several squares in each direction, so in any given square, the planet, its satellites, and any infrastructure in orbit around the planet are the only possible targets.

Another interesting question concerning GC tech: would defensive satellites really be immobile (given their orbit)? Heck, with their technology level, there would be little reason not to put just enough of a drive on them to subtly alter their orbit once an hour. So, unless you're riding your asteroid or throwing it at C-relative speeds, you're gonna miss.

The idea that a fleet becomes a non-fleet as soon as it moves into the same square as a planet is what needs to be analyzed. The only relevant claim that has been made is that a fleet is harder to maintain near a planet.

You argue that the need to patrol the space near the planet means that the fleet couldn't concentrate. I disagree on this point, since as I pointed out, we saw you coming a week out. Besides, if I've got 6 ships stationed at a planet and only enough logistics for a fleet of 3 ships, the other three ships can do the patroling.

BoogieBac mentions the need to maintain weapon discipline. Given that the square that contains the Earth (a diameter of about 12KKm) also contains the moon, (who's orbit has a diameter of about 768KKm), that means that at worst, the earth takes up a very small fraction of that space. Unless there's a need to stay near the planet while we engage, I think I can find a place to engage the enemy where I'm not going to have any reasonable chance of damaging the planet. And, as I pointed out before, it is in my best interest not to engage near the planet. I also pointed out that being in a fleet or not doesn't matter if you're firing weapons that could damage the planet , and what we're firing matters less than what our opponents are firing.

I'm not closed-minded on this subject. It's just that the arguments supporting the status quo have been far from convincing.

Orbital Fleet Controller Illogical

Oh yeah? YOU'RE ILLOGICAL!

I have to agree with the OP on this one. The term "planetary defense" just makes no sense. If the purpose of this device is to improve coordination among orbiting ships, then it is really a Fleet Operations Center...a far more descriptive term.

Planetary Defense has the connatation of consisting of some form of ground based or orbital weapons platform or it could also be fighters. I was hoping that building a military starbase would assist a planet but I gather that it only can defend itself and not a nearby planet. I think this is a bit odd too.

Sabre21