TL 14 fleets are generally inferior to TL 15 fleets in fighting power. That is of course as it should be and it is reflected in FFW and HG2 - although the difference is IME more pronounced in the latter.Zho fleets are different from Impie fleets. Different strategic mobility, different options for combat strategies. Designing a TL-15 fleet to primarily fight TL-14 fleets and vice versa is a lot more interesting than just TL-15 across the board. See the Old Islands Campaign where powers are distributed from TL-11 to TL-13, with vastly different budgets, a lot more interesting than everyone are the same.
And of course, battles between forces of different TL are good, they're part of the appeal of the TU. It's just that if you make the TL differences even more important than they already are by piling on relational DMs, that appeal is lost. Because there won't be any real battles, just higher TL forces effortlessly slaughtering nearly-unlimited numbers of lower TL ones.
At a guess, you are talking about fragile civilian shipping, not defended warships?
I was, for effect, but it probably holds true (maybe not the "combined" and "ever" parts) for warships. If you take capital ship sinkings (other than scuttling) in WW2, you'll find that most of them were due to torpedo attacks (usually by aircraft or submarine.)
But I fully agree with you that missiles in space combat do not directly compare to torpedoes.
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