Best satellite design?

[Steven-n-Donna]

I've found large sat's good for no maintance mining rigs. You can only fit one on each satellite, but it's absolutely free.
They're great for large asteroid belt systems.
In higher tech level games, they are great if you get your combat turn first on warp points. Put some big a@@ wave motion guns onboard and tear them up before they have a chance to move.
If your fighting an enemy that uses torpedoes and fighters a lot, then large sat's with a load of point defense on board will screen a large number of them from your planet and or other fighting sat's and ships.
A lot of big guns can't hit a sat like the wave motion gun, this puts the offensive party at a slight disadvantage, and if they're close enough to use the big guns on your planet, chances are you can get them.
I only wish that instead of the way the Sat's are stacked, they would be spread out in an orbit around the planet. that way you could actually defend the planet from all sides effectively.
I don't think you should beable to shoot "over" a planet to the other side. It dosn't make sense for an empire to clump all their satellites together and send them around the planet together.
Their best feature I think is that they don't take any cargo space once their launched from a planet. That way you can have planetary defense stations as well.
Just my thought,

-Steve