Hold on now, I'm not arguing that in a 20/30 minute space combat turn that a ship cannot change its course to anything it wants. I think even the moon could be made to do that if we stuck big enough engines on it.
What I am arguing is that it takes long enough to do it that you can mathematically guarantee a hit out to very long distances. Battlewagons having huge dimensions are going to be hittable out to maybe 100's of lightseconds (with c-speed weapons) because they can't turn fast.
In TNE, your hexes are .1 LS, and the maximum range-rating that a weapon can have is 80 hexes, or 8 LS. Practical concerns will drop this to ABOUT 40 hexes at TL15, and something like 20 at TL10.
These mathematical guarantees require a few things, though. You have to be able to get exact fixes on your target at all times. Your weapons have to be perfectly accurate too. There's a lot getting in the way of this, and is why even a point-blank shot may fail.
Regarding sensors, you have to have a wide enough dish to resolve the location of the target, preferably resolution down to a cm or less. I don't know the exact res needed, but you can be sure it is more than the minimum required to see the target.
A lot of games require that your opposing ships be within human-sighting distance to hit, and TV/movies are especially vulnerable to this. At these tiny ranges of a km or two, you can really only miss if you take the computer out of the loop, or you aim in the opposite direction.
Harder science allows you to hit things you can't see, as long as your computer CAN. A 500 mile range for a cruise missile is impressive, but it's absolutely NOTHING compared to shooting something as far away as Mars.
In order to avoid being mathematically guaranteed to be hit, you have to be able to move your ship out of a certain circle. For instance, at 1 LS, it takes a second for a sensor echo to return to my ship from the target, and one second for the laser to return. That's 2 seconds that the opposing ship has to get itself outside of a guaranteed hit.
A ship that has a constant rate of travel (it's drifting) may as well be standing still; you can predict where it will be, and can hit it at any distance at all, even out to megaparsecs if you can wait a few million years.
A ship with constant acceleration can also be hit just as easily; you can predict exactly where it will be when your laser arrives. So you must be able to randomize your position in relation to what's shooting at you.
A 2400 Dton ship (40 meter diameter sphere) with a 1G engine, can change its position by 20 meters in 2 seconds. If I shoot at the exact center of that ship, in 2 seconds, it will have moved JUST ENOUGH that I will miss. (Assuming it spent that whole time accelerating perpendicular to me, and all in the same direction.) I am not guaranteed to hit this ship at a range of 1 LS, if it can change its direction instantly and randomly.
But it can't. I can lead the target a little, and guarantee a hit at 1 LS. Whether it accelerates or not, I will hit it. Because it takes measureable time to turn, I win even more. The way things work, I can probably hit the thing out to about 4 LS, maybe more, but I didn't work that all out yet.
What saves combat from being a contest of shooting first (and penetrating, let's not forget that) is that weapons are NOT perfectly accurate, and neither are sensor locks. A higher res sensor will be able to get a more exact location. Your ship is probably twisting and turning to not only avoid fire, but spread out the energy from incoming beams so they do little if anything to your hull. Your ship vibrates from MANY sources, two major ones being imperfections in drive combustion, and ventilation and cooling systems (for crew and machinery).
Never mind the need for accuracies to even LESS than an atto-radian (we're talking about having even single atoms in your lense out of place, here), AND tracking the target (correctly) while the shot is being fired. In a millisecond (pulse-length for a TNE laser) a ship moving ONLY 1 hex per turn moves 16.67 meters. if you don't track the target during that time, your beam is spread out from 1 square cm to about 1700 of them, basically making your laser hit worthless. You've warmed the hull.
In REAL real life, that would be okay, because you don't HAVE to penetrate the skin to do damage. Warming the target is perfectly acceptible, as long as you can keep doing it. T4's ship-design sequence originally included radiators. These things took up so much surface area that you couldn't make ships bigger than about 5000 Dtons, and people complained about it.
However, the problem is that this is REALISTIC. Heat is a killer. Your reactor wastes about 50% of its power as heat outright, and most of your gear is going to have waste heat... You pretty much have to radiate the heat of your entire reactor output just because of waste heat. All you have out there to get rid of it is radiation, and that's the least effective of the three means of heat transfer. Nevermind that big, bright fusion reactor 93 million miles away heating you up if you're not in a shadow. It's almost self-destruction for a military craft to be painted black.
Heat radiation is such a problem, that even the ultra-hard-science fiction game
Aurora decided that it was too onerous to gameplay and got rid of it. (Please look beyond the chinsy graphics before rendering an opinion.)
I hope I haven't wandered too far away from whatever it is we're arguing about.
You start off with a good explanation of the trade offs between range and resolution as I understand it but then go on to wonder why an array of small sensors (less power/range) spread over the whole hull (bigger synthetic aperature better resolution) isn't the same as one big sensor? If I have it right.
Maybe it was my inability to translate my thoughts into a coherent question.
