The best anti-missile/anti-fighters weapons?

[creativename]

What makes the most effective weapons for shooting down enemy missiles and fighters?

Are particular beams especially good, and what quantities should one be looking at (e.g. per 4 enemy fighters or missiles)?

Should they be normal, or Point Defense? Should they ave Auto Fire or No Range Dissipation? And is Armor Piercing useless for missiles and fighters?

[creativename]

I finally figured out that Enveloping Fusion Beams should be better than just about anything else, and I tried them out a bit and they did end up being way more effective than what else I had tried.

Also for some reason I had thought that you only only shoot down the number of missiles/fighters as the number of beams you have, but apparently not, because I shot down about 10 fighters with only 4 fusion beams. Don't know if that's because of Enveloping or not.

Still don't know if it's better to use Point Defense or not, but this is the first thing for me that really worked decently.

[Matthew]

Fusion Beams work well for that stage of the game. Lasers early on are ok and so are Phasors much later in the game.

They don't have to be point defense. Pd is useful for when your opponent is packing missiles on their ships. If they close to point blank range and fire, only Point-defense will shoot the missiles.