[Taqwus]

It wouldn't necessarily take a full sequential scan for determining attack locations, since the plausible attack range is usually small.

Supplies are a concern, at least until solar collectors or the QR. A fleet *could* be launched beyond resupply range, but it would need to either rendezvous with a supply source along the way (which might be beyond the AI); bring a colonizer to create a resupply colony (which would be a nifty tactic to see it use -- but it would have to defend it well, or risk stranding the fleet); or capture a resupply colony (which takes intel, to figure out where one is, *plus* the WPs and so forth may be a problem).

So if it's limited to resupply range, that's basically a series of range Queries, which won't need to touch many disk pages that only deal with far-away systems -- at least with a decent spatial indexing method.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night