I like to see a flak platform put inplace. Right now u r defenceless aganists swarms of fighters and bombers.

What about smaller turrets that come in batches - sort of like buying zerglings in starcraft? You could buy them once, and place perhaps 2 or 3 smaller turrets in various locations, that way you don't have to put all of your defence in one central location like with a gauss turret. They could be defences against fighters that are small, like turrets in games like Wing Commander 4, if anyone remembers it. That could be a solution to the fighters and bombers.

Here's another idea: Minefields. Since there are definable chokepoints already, such as with dead asteroids and the areas where jump lanes meet, it could be very advantageous to place minefields of various types. For example, a minefield for disabling craft, and another minefield for destroying craft. Only effective against cruisers and cap ships for example? That would make frigates more valuable in the mid-late game.

Just a few thoughts.

The problem I guess is atm we only have one defensive cannon emplacement which needs too be powerful enough that it is a threat the whole game.

Flak and missle turrets would round it off nicely I think. Missle for long range, flak for shooting down bombers and fighters.

I've been thinking about this ALL day at work. I'm of the mindset that if you want to hunker down and defend a key planet or asteroid, then the more power to you. I don't think we should make emplacements completed overpowered, but I had some additional ideas for assisting in defense operations:

1) Capital Ship specific emplacements: If a swarm of 5-8 enemy capital ships jumps to a planet of yours, well you are pretty much screwed, unless you have 5-8 capital ships at that planet as well. How about making some emplacements that can only target capital ships, not so much to make turtling an ultimate strategy, but to give the enemy fleet commander at least a run for their money... You could have different turrets like you mentioned Craeshen, but maybe only allow one or two per planet so that they don't overpower cap ships, they just assist in defense of a planet.

2) How about an emplacement that slows down enemy ships approaching via phase jump (maybe you could research to first only slow down frigates, then cruisers, then finally capships). I'm not talking about slowing down to a crawl, but maybe just enough to get some reinforcements en route to the defense. Just an idea.

3) In another post today, I mentioned the idea of an orbital structure called a privateer platform - this could supplement planet defense by having CPU controlled ships (like trade ships) assist during pirate attacks and other enemy attacks. I'm only talking about a couple of frigates and maybe a light cruiser for the privateers, but this will at least help when your main forces are scattered over the rest of the map...

I've got some more defense oriented ideas brewing, I'll post once I work out some more details.

What can a missile turret do that a missile frigate cant? I mean, i think we should encourage defensive fleet use more; god knows theres enough tacticals use already.

Gauss cannons with a missile upgrade would be way too powerful. The only reason LRMs aren't the ultimate ship is because they have very little health. We already know that gauss cannons have a lot of health. If you add in the ability to hit ships right out of jumps, they'd be very overpowered

I have to agree something more needs to be done on the defensive side of the house the current gauss only defensive system as I said leaves me very underwhelmed. We should have missile platforms as well as EM, disruptor and mine options to flesh things out a little.

The current system puts me in mind of the old "sandbag" defense for the TA franchise.