[kreios]

Tweaks
There's actually not many things I'd like to tweak. One of them, though, is the open-endedness of kinetic damage, which scales with velocity (it also scales worse with size than the beam weapons, but that's not a big issue for us). However, the threshhold for completely vapourizing an SM+15 spacecraft by a 12cm gun is roughly 175mps. Obviously, that's an issue when using reactionless drives. There would be a few solutions; mine would be to assume that every spacecraft mounts whipple shields. These ensure that the damage grows with the square root of the velocity, and that maximum damage applied to a spacecraft is 10x the basic dDmg of the attack. For the 12cm gun, that's be 180 to 1080 dDmg. Enough to effectively kill such an SM+15 craft, but you'd have to move at 100mps. That seems much more reasonable.
In addition, I think it's not good that spacecraft have to mount a gigantic array of 30kJ lasers. A usual SM+10 combat spacecraft would probably mount a thousand of these. Imagine the Iowa with a thousand machine guns to fight off kamikazes! This mounting is a result of the gigantic risk of collision with missiles, and that 30kJ VRF lasers give you the maximum chance to intercept them. To avoid this, I'm ruling that a) 300kJ lasers are the minimum you need to ensure destruction (30kJ destroys only one third of the missiles, 100kJ only two thirds) and that b) the missile shield rule is in effect against missiles, eliminating RoF missiles automatically when in point defense. Roughly 1/100th RoF projectiles can be killed since those are far smaller and must be vapourized.
In addition, I dislike the fixed damage of the x-ray laser warhead. Instead, look at the weapon tables and use the beam d-Dmg noted there. For example, a 16cm x-ray warhead does 3d, and a 48cm does 4dx10. Their RoF is reduced to 1/4 diameter (i.e. 16cm --> RoF4; 48cm --> RoF12). Rcl is unstated in the books, but I'll set it at 2. 16cm is the minimum diameter.
While the last two rules push missiles to x-ray lasers only, I believe that they're not useful anyways in any other role.


In summary, these rules should result in a) missiles being used as x-ray lasers, where they have to swarm defenses to be effective, b) kinetic weapons being used to deny the enemy manoeuvre space, since they have to avoid collisions, c) particle beams ruling large-spacecraft combat, d) AKVs being useful against non-combat spacecraft or during suicide missions.
However, there is still the issue of this - apparently - not having much tactics to apply. Spacecraft are easily destroyed, and I don't see much use for specific formations (unless for missile defense and to maybe allow you to hit from the flanks), nor for manoeuvres outside of closing and accelerating away. One possible change would be to abandon the reactionless drive and introduce limited dV.

That's where you come in, and one of the three reasons I've made that point (aside from forcing me to write up my thoughts, and to provide an example of how to tweak spaceships): How do you think combat tactics would look like? Are there any tweaks I've overlooked that would help me? Any errors I've made?

Thanks in advance, and congratulations for making it through the wall of text.