I've been playing Sins for a few weeks now, and have worked my way up to taking on Unfair computers.  If it's a small map and I go with a rush strategy it's no problem; however, on a larger map which gives more time for teching up I've run into a bit of a difficulty.  The computer always ends up making carriers, so I opt for flak to counter the strike craft.  But it doesn't seem to work.  My flak can never take down the SC fast enough to avoid catastrophic losses in terms of cap ships, LRFs and support cruisers.  They always take down the SC eventually, but by then they've managed to destroy the meat of my fleet leaving me unable to win the battle.  I've tried more and more flak up to a ratio of 1 flak per enemy SC, but it just seems to take way too long.  So I'm wondering: when countering a carrier-based fleet, how do you determine the appropriate number of flak to get?  Or, if you go with the option of taking down the carriers, how do you deal with the fact that it takes minutes for a SC squadron to die after the host goes down (assuming it dies from no host, and not from being attacked)?

Another question relating to how shield mitigation works.  How does this work with Malice and phase missiles?  The shield mitigation obviously reduces the damage taken by the target of an attack, but it Malice is active does it reduce the damage distributed?  Since I'm an engineer I'll try asking that same question in equations in hopes that it will make sense.  Let's say that ship A is being attacked, and ship B is taking damage from Malice.  Damage to ship A = Damage * (1 - shield mitigation).  I think anyway.  So what's damage to ship B?  Is it = Damage * 0.3 or is it = Damage * (1 - shield mitigation on A) * 0.3?  And what about phase missiles?  Since they can have the effect of ignoring shields does that mean that shield mitigation occasionaly has no effect based on the level of research performed?