James Sterett :
"I'm not sure about the need for upkeep. For all their various capabilities, mines, sats, and fighters are ultimately defensive weapons unless deployed by a fleet. You can deploy thousands of mines, but they won't bring the enemy empires to their knees."
Actually, I've been experimenting with using sats as weapons pods. Against the AI they have proven incredibly effective. In mid game I was using a Med Transport, 15 Cargo II and 5 Sat bay III's. It was capable of holding 30 Large Sats (A mix of seeker pods/Gun Pods. Those 30 Sats between them had 3300KT of storage available (after the bridge) for weapons and gear. This ship took down a small fleet consisting of a Cruiser, BC and BB. No damage, no lost pods. With the exception of Warp point assaults, I never encountered a situation where I couldn't get most (if not all) of the pods deployed before engagement. Against fixed installations they are even more effective: Duck inside missile range, drop a set of 5 seeker pods, and duck away again. The enemy missles can't target your pods, and they just pound the defenses into scrap.
Another advantage of this technique is that it allows you to divide up the building of a ship across multiple build queues. You only need one shipyard to produce the ship, while even domed colonies can produce the pods.
Keep in mind that a similar amount of firepower in conventional ships (say in battleships) requires the maintenance on 4 to 5 800KT ships and their components. The weapons pods in this tactic though are maintenance free. So you are only paying maintenance on the ship, with 15x200min to build the cargo bays, and 5x100min for the Sat bays.
I'd never consider this trick against humans, but the AI sure doesn't like it
