1) Hey, that's interesting thanks.

2) in other words the reported firepower what you see when you move the pointer over a ship is totally inaccurate now?

3) hmmm... a very good strategic game element suddenly gets horribly deflated! lol, So I guess i won't be experimenting with that first fleet then? i can tell it where to go, that's it, no involvement in combat?

Thanks for your help

Although perhaps not relevant to your example in the original post, ship defenses in GC3 differ significantly from GC2 in that in GC2 defense against other weapon types contributed as the square root of the defense value (e.g. a shield defense of 4 counted as a defense of 2 against missile or mass driver weapons), whereas in GC3 it contributes nothing.

One could argue that a point defense that can intercept a missile might also be able to intercept a slug, but I agree with you about the beams.  Still, I think I prefer the GC2 system to the GC3, since they both have logical inconsistencies.

Now that i think about it....

Kinetic defense should not even exist,,, it should just be hitpoints - you have stronger amor = more hitpoints.

Shields should defend against everything, but you can have different shield specialty to defend more effectively against a specific type of attack.

Basically, Galciv2 had it totally right! Except that the defenses were 'labeled' things other than shield specialty.

In principle, intercepting an artillery shell is no different from intercepting a missile, and were it not for the difference in the size of the target might even be easier; most artillery shells are, after all, incapable of adjusting course mid-flight and follow highly-predictable ballistic flightpaths. If you know the velocity and location of the shell at some point in time, you can predict where it will be at a specific point in the future with a fair degree of accuracy. The problem is that it's a very small target, which makes it very hard to determine its velocity and position with sufficient accuracy to intercept the projectile and also makes it difficult to aim the intercepting weapon with sufficient accuracy to actually hit the projectile assuming that you can compute an intercept solution, and on top of that the projectile is moving fairly quickly and in all likelihood wasn't all that far from its target in the first place, meaning that you have to do all of this quickly.

That being said, there are already systems in existence which can detect artillery shells and determine their flightpath with sufficient accuracy to know where they came from well enough to bring counterbattery fire into play without needing to actually detect the artillery piece that fired the shell.

Consider what some of the missile defenses that the game uses actually are. Chaff is a cloud of particles intended to distract the targeting of a missile; such a system could perhaps scatter or absorb enough of a beam's energy to reduce the damage that the beam can cause by an amount that matters, though it's not terribly likely to stop the beam completely. ECM is simply one or more of a variety of methods of playing tricks with whatever detectors are in play to throw off the guidance systems of a missile; if the ECM is strong enough, there's no particular reason why it could not be used to throw off the aim of the guns or beam emitters of an attacking warship and thereby cause the attacker to miss, or at least not hit the target as squarely, and thereby reduce the damage caused by the attack. Point defense cannons can potentially function in much the same way as a cloud of chaff could, though I'd tend to favor the cloud of chaff for actually reducing the potency of an incoming beam. Point defense lasers would be completely useless against a beam which was a true laser, though they might be able to do something against the confined-plasma type of sci-fi energy weapons. Aside perhaps from the ECM, most of this probably wouldn't work well, but some of it could do something (I wouldn't really count on the ECM since, at least in GCIII, the evidence is that the ECM isn't good enough to fool whatever detectors are used by ships, just the detectors used in missile guidance systems, and if the missiles are guided by the launching ship rather than by an on-board homing device the method of ECM in use may just be some form of jamming targeting the guidance signal).

This is somewhat variable and dependent upon just how strong the armor is relative to the weapon being used. If the weapon I'm using is a 0.50 caliber machine gun and the armor I'm up against is the main belt armor of an Iowa-class battleship, then no, armor is not simply 'more hitpoints,' at least not on any practical timescale (this is a bit of an extreme example, but it gets the point across - it is possible to make armor which is so strong that insufficiently powerful weapons will simply not cause any real damage to the armor or to whatever the armor is protecting on any reasonable timescale; by the same token, armor which is so strong that my 0.50-cal machine gun cannot hurt it on any reasonable timescale may provide about as much protection as wet tissue paper against some other weapon, such as a 16" naval rifle).

Granted, GCIII doesn't make this kind of distinction, and GCII only kind of did (if ship A had 30 effective armor and ship B had 30 or less mass driver attack, then the expected mass driver damage dealt by ship B to ship A was about 0), and of course none of the games in the series really pays any mind to the fact that a tiny ~10m long fighter probably isn't packing any guns which are as powerful as are on an ~800m dreadnought, even if both ships make use of equally advanced technology, at least not if we're talking about 'traditional' guns.

With the caveat that missiles/torpedoes bypassing Star Wars shields is much more of a video game and stories thing than an actual movies thing. Torpedoes were used against the Trade Federation Battleship in the Phantom Menace and failed to penetrate the shields, and the only time in the original trilogy where torpedoes are known to bypass shielding is against the first Death Star's exhaust port, which was explicitly not protected against that kind of attack.

Yea, i dunno, I've never come across proposals that seem like they would legitimately work as a kinetic kill vehicle against an actual kinetic weapon.  I'd be interested to see actual proposals where this would work.  Even with, say, a phalanx system, I don't think I've ever seen the suggestion that it could shoot down a slug. 

Disabling a missile is fairly different, fundamentally from disabling a bullet.  A missile itself is a fairly fragile precision instrument that is fairly easy to disrupt via either interception (with another missile, a wall of bullets or the like), or by simply confusing the guidance system into inappropriate detonation (chafe, flares).

Disabling a bullet is a very different proposition as your intent is not in disrupting a fundamentally fickle system (missile guidance and detonation), but rather overcoming sheer kinetic energy, which would involve enough countervailing kinetic energy to consistently do the job.  When you consider that even a Phalanx system could not overcome more than a few incoming missiles at a time (and this system fired thousands of bullets/second), the likelihood of such a system working against kinetic weapons seems to be fairly poor.  Especially when you think about the nature of a kinetic weapon itself.  You don't really just fire one bullet in situations where countermeasures would make any sense.  A tank is not going to be equipt with any countermeasure to a DU rod fired from an M1A1 tank, it's simply not viable in that sort of environment.  A Naval vessel might, but in that case whatever is firing on it wouldn't be firing something of that size, it would be firing a shell bigger than a man - and even if it were taking fire from M1A1-size/type munitions, the attacker would just fire a lot - such as a gattling gun mounted to an airplane.

Similarly most bullet-tracking systems do so retrospectively, not really in real-time.  Tracking a missile is easy because it has an obviously identifiable propulsion system.  Even in this case, as with the case of ICBM's, the technology to shoot these down currently does not really exist (and there have been lots of monies spent on this type of reasearch all of which is fairly suspect at best)...

In the case of GC3, if you have a beam-weapons, it might make sense that the projectiles could be vaporized as a beam weapon might actually be fast enough to do this...

Just my interpretation of the nature of the problem..

Bah, most stuff in popular Sci-Fi is complete nonsense. Just look at these "Lasers" - how come they are bullets? You see them flying slowly )))) A laser moves at lightspeed - it's a staigjt line that goes on/off, and it's impossible for a Jedi to defend against because in times when the eye would register such a beam he would've been already been hit.

With Star Trek it's even worse, they have so many inconsistencies. In STO that Andorian vessel which tried to sabotage the ambassador meeting would ramspeed enterprise at warp 6 or more, that is, at 36*lightspeed! But shields held... wow... funny because the kinetic energy of matter moving with lightspeed goes against infinity. So basically all you had to do to get a perfect weapon is to construct a massy torpedo that accelerates to (above) ligjtspeed and rams the hostile ship.

Although Worf slightly fathomed that idea when fighting the Borg when Defiance was disabled... "prepare for raming speed"... you see them crawling slowly... what the heck... my bicycle travels faster than that. How about getting lightspeed? 

Another thing is transporter technology. So we have races that can transport through shields, and they use to transport their troops onto ships and a fight ensues etc.... why not simply transport away the central computer core to disable the ship.. or anything, energy components... cables, outer hull... or simply transport a knock-out gas onto the ship...

IMO the transporter is hands-down the ultimate weapon. There was an episode where a transporter was tested that had as much range as you could reach other starsystems. It was deemed unsuccessful because the object couldn't be materialized correctly, but if you want to beam out something of a potential hostile ship that flaw would be irrelevant.

because of the way how battle is calculated it would be more like ~14 damage per round on average. this is one of the reasons why defense was so weak (the other reason was the how target-selection in fleet-battle was chosen)