Engagement ranges 1

Engagement ranges are on the order of tens/hundreds of kilometers, not more, and they are mostly linear Weapons are largely ineffective farther away (we'll talk about this in a bit), but since range is a tremendous advantage, no one will survive a prolonged closer encounter. Unless your intercept is retrograde, one side will die before anyone can maneuver appreciably closer or farther. The battle space is also mostly linear (two sides facing off across a no-one's-land). A battle "line" is really a 2D plane in space, but aside from this, it's not much different. 2D-thinking (or even 1D thinking!) is quite sufficient. Why should this be? While ostensibly space is 3D, when you're flying a real ship, you have delta-v constraints. The space of engagement is large relative to that, and your acceleration is slow to boot (you do have a low-thrust, high-ISP engine, right?). Additionally, since you're probably rendezvousing from a different orbit, you'll have a single dominant direction of approach. You spread out when you attack, sure, but if you're at the distance where you can completely outflank your opponent, you're at a distance where both sides have long since torn gaping holes through each other with k-slugs. Maneuvering is almost worthless As a direct result of the above, the only purpose for thrusting at all is to dodge k-slugs. You can't do it very well, though, since unpredictably dodging requires rotation--but rotation is slow, and costs lots of delta-v. Moreover, to move laterally probably means turning, which means exposing your flank to the enemy. That makes it a bigger target. In CoaDE, this is balanced by the fact that weapons shoot sideways, so to attack, you must make yourself vulnerable. In reality, all weapons just shoot forward.