antibor, while your example does not fit with the above formula (and therefore one of them must be modified), it seems you don't understand how defenses work. This is understandable, as it changed from DL to DA.
The AI-or the targeting AI-should not consider its ships worthless because while each ship may only have 88 attack against even a hypothetical 880 defense ship, due to defense depletion (on a per-round basis only), 11 such ships have the aggregate firepower necessary on a purely one-to-one ratio.
Granted, a one-to-one ratio, particularly given multiple ship spreads and therefore the attrition that will no doubt occur, is likely insufficient, but simply because a single ship is ineffective by itself does not necessarily mean that a 5- or 10-strong fleet of said ships is.
What you appear to be suggesting is that the targeting mechanism choose the single ship which has the greatest chance of destroying it first-but it's easy to concoct scenarios in which a large, heavily armed battleship is used as support to flank a number of smaller fighters, with larger aggregate firepower as well as potentially more flexibility in targets.
That is, while it might be interesting to have the targeting mechanism employ that algorithm, it would not always be ideal; there are plenty of instances where, rather than the largest threat, the easiest-destroyed threat will prolong your own survival. And having the targeting AI differentiate between these two would be a nightmare.
One of the nice side effects of the way that things work is that your transports and support ships are always targeted last-presumbly because even if the pilots of the enemy ships were attempting to target them, your other ships would attempt to intercept and provide cover fire. But as they are among the easiest to destroy, if not the easiest by far, and particularly since the combat modules in TA can have a rather large effect on a battle, easily causing it to swing the other way if the ship in question were lost, it would play hell with the easiest-destroyed-threat option.
