You’re right, there are a lot of factors that come into play here. If you mount weapons and thrusters on gimbaled appendages, for instance, then you don’t have to worry about turning the whole spacecraft bulk around to point them in some desired direction. I suppose it’s all about what our future space admirals want to achieve!

My opinion on stealth is basically that it’s a balance between your camoflaging ability and your enemy’s sensing capability. You don’t have to make yourself undetectable to be stealthy – you just have to make yourself hard enough to detect that you can loose your missiles before the opponent finds you. Most of the stealth naysayers I’ve seen on the Internet completely neglect the challenges of sensing, and just assume they have a device at their disposal that will detect everything (something I think is unfeasible – and I recently took some more flak for that opinion! ). On the other hand, to the wannabe-Romulans, I have to note that every cloaking device invented for a sci-fi plotline invariably seems to fail all the time, or encounter adversaries who find a way around it.

Thanks for the comments!

Making a spacefighter very spherical might make it as manouverable as a gnat, but weapon design always involves tailoring the tool to the job, which might not require that level of manouvreability. Thats’ pretty much the same reason we don’t have Mach 6 jet fighters; though very possible to build, they would prove quite useless except in very narrow tactical situations. Your Starfury example show this very well. Very agile, but no fuel to do anything useful!

I love the concept of using debris to deny an enemy “orbital superiority”. Unlike other discussed topics related to space warfare, this is actually one that we can actually study as a real phenomenon, since it’s causing problems for space agencies right now!

Your view of stealth is a lot more balanced than that of both the stealth-naysayers (who doesn’t seem to understand the conditional situations that allow stealth in warfare) and the wannabe-Romulans who want stealth as simply a button to be pushed.