Noob question concerning satellites

Take a look at what kind of weapon mix the sats are using. If they're chewing up your ships, there's a good chance that they're mounting generally slow, heavy, inaccurate weapons. If you have fighters, set them to prioritize targeting sats and send them in. If not, but you have decent point-defense tech, design frigates that are mostly point defense and armor/shields and send those in. (Frigates are harder to hit, and a swarm of smaller ships will usually last longer than a few big ships in this sort of situation.)

If you don't have either fighter or point defense technology... you're going to have to either develop some, or throw overwhelming force at the planet and accept heavy losses.

How about ramming? I imagine these sats don't have a lot of armor, either ram with drones or full size ships. Just an idea.

SEV, more than a feeling.

Short answer: it's all about the point defense.

At tech level five in point defense, you get the bomblet missile (or something like thet). It's a point defense missile with 200 range. I find it to be the perfect weapon against satelites. Alternately, theres the slightly less long-ranged (100) flak cannon, which also comes at level five. If you can get closer, combining research in point defense with research in your Meson Blaster can get you a Poin Defense Blaster, with its one second rate of fire. In lieu of all those, any direct fire weapon works, though sats are hard to hit. Include high level combat sensors, and if you have the religious talisman, it's a godsend.

Final warning: There's a glitch that may make sats deploy INSIDE a planet, which means you need a lot of range to hit them.

The "religious Talisman" is from SEIV, in SEV you have a variety of "Totems" which give other perks.

SEV, more than a feeling.

Check the range of the enemy satellites. If the satillites' ranges are greater than the range of your ships, build ships with a greater range. Next, go to the fleet that you plan to attack the planet with (to create a fleet, select a ship and press 'f', click 'create new fleet') and set the strategy (bottom right of the fleet window) to 'Don't Get Hurt' or 'Maximum Weapon Range'. Also, missiles don't work against satellites, if you have missile ships, retrofit them to direct fire ships. If you really want to be successful with a minimum of losses, use tactical combat instead of strategic.

You might want to try these suggestions in the combat simulator (bottom right of ship design window) so you don't lose any ships until you're sure it'll work.

The planet may also have weapon platform which may be the ones tearing up your ships and no the sats. You can't tell, though, unless you enter tactical combat.
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