I have a lot of love for Servalan from Blake ' s 7 too . Supreme Commander in fabulous frocks , dahling . D <| sep |> First , what exactly would bomb us from light years away ? O . oThat sort of attack is not what a SurfaceSpace defense platform is going to be helping whatsoever . And while they do have thrusters , the enemy fleet is in orbit . Which despite what most games depict it as , is not a ' parking ' type of deal . You have a set direction you are going , I am just going to fire enough stuff around you that no matter if you speed up or slow down your orbit , you get hit . Or I use lasers , you aint dodging that . POn the worst case scenario , the US just spared half of the planet from bombardment . Which while still not a happy thing for Asia , it ' s still a step up from ' everyone gets bombed '. Plus this is now a side of the world you have to invade without as much support from orbit On the best case scenario , we can see the tile this building was on as an abstraction of a network of them across the globe . That ' s how I see the Planetary Shield Generator personally . A single facility covers all of the planet ? It makes more sense to me that it ' s a grid of them evenly space out across the planet to project this ' roof ' over the world , and the towers of the array are the ' pillars '.