If you're a space faring race the first line of defence would be ships, then fighters, then "GOD sats around Earth" then planetary based missile systems.
The problem with the latter is that too much of the missile would be taken up with propellant and less on warhead.
Your heavy destroyer busting missiles would be on orbital sats/stations. Missile systems on planet surfaces would have to be light, fast, long range affairs; otherwise there seek times would be very slow as they fought against gravity and the atmosphere.
This is less of a problem on planets/moons with low gravity's and thin or no atmosphere. e.g. Mars or our Moon.
In fact it makes more sense to have a nice strong, concrete, semi-buried, pop up missile system on these worlds than a nice sore thumb of a satellite. How do you reload a satellite any way? I would think mobile ground system would be more easily maintained on fledgling colony worlds and easier to conceal.
Why not have Planet based missiles as Fast firing e.g. 2 or 3 missiles per turn*; rapid seeking; but very low damage.
*OK I know it can't be done. Let the launchers be 3-5kT?
Let them be multi targeting e.g. ships/fighters/seekers.
This would be more realistic. Fighters should not be able to attack planets with too mush success. Missiles would be taken out by antimissile missiles; leaving it up to the capital ships to have to get within range.
It is important to allow planet based missiles to have very long ranges as they are only trying to destroy small targets.Ship based missiles designed to damage planetary facilities would have to be heavy yield ;slow and shorter range in order to impact a much larger stronger planet based target.
This would result in a tech battle as capital ships designed for planet capture would develop and carry armour that negates the effect of low yield planet based missiles. So research would have to be done to increase the effectiveness of the opposing technologies. IMHO
However I'm glad it's not me working on the AI
[ August 25, 2002, 03:28: Message edited by: Nomor ]