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The analogy breaks down in an important way here. The planetary equivalents of those islands don't matter. If you need intermediate bases for your fleet you don't want them at the bottom of gravity wells. If you want to deny your enemy bases you have to contest not just the planetary surface...

All of these were wars over territory between nations on the same planet. Most shared land borders and the one that didn't was a one sided curbstomp where the lesser naval power never had any real chance. Where ground forces need a carefully crafted handwavium-unobtanium balance to keep them...

A gigaton is a very big nuke. Tsar Bomba with its uranium tampers as originally designed would be a tenth that size and it was 27 tons. Assuming the number of stages required relates to the logarithm of the explosive power a gigaton nuke would need to be a six stage device. A nuke that...

If you have an effective orbit to surface weapon on something the size of a space shuttle you don't need to hit a planet because you're trying to hit weapons small enough to use the SCUD paradigm. You need to hit something the size of a space shuttle. In fact you need to hit all of the...

Such armor may be handwavium or unobtanium, but I think it's handwavium or unobtanium you have to have to write space battles on a larger scale than American and Russian spaceplanes disabling each others satellites. To have a space battle both sides must each be confident enough in their...

Another possible answer is fortifications. Planets are great honking huge heat sinks. If you have big capital ship beam weapons that can fire down through atmosphere with useful precision they can also fire up through atmosphere and a planet can keep firing long after a starfleet has had to...