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Interesting analysis, however it complete misses the current trend military aviation of using unmanned aircraft. Why bother with heavy life support systems when a carefully crafted combat autopilot will do? It just needs to understand a mission profile and some orbital mechanics basically. Also, what would be the incentive of investing in large, vulnerable warships instead of large numbers of inexpensive drones which could even double as kinetic missiles?

There is very little justification for human involvement in space combat. We are very fragile, and space is a harsh mistress. Not only is aviation headed towards automation, every extra-terran spacecraft that has been built has also been automated. Even if the life support systems were entirely costless, having to keep acceleration under certain limits (i.e. below the point where people turn into paste) seems like it would be disadvantageous.

To me the question of propulsion is most interesting, and specifically I wonder how feasible it would be to solve the problem of engine design by using two different engines. Nuclear propulsion looks good on paper, but a ready supply of fissile material is likely to be difficult to obtain.

Lastly we might consider whether or not space combat will happen at all. Spacecraft are very expensive, and the conditions which give rise to warfare on Earth seem unlikely. When your political entities are light-years away from each other, it's hard to have resource conflicts. Or, in a universe with FTL, it's probably hard to have conflicts when you don't have causality.

It doesn't completely miss those points, it covers them actually.

"The fighter is probably nothing more than a glorified chemical-fueled missile anyway, no more sophisticated in principle than the missiles you already expend by the dozen. You can at least double its effective range by replacing the pilot with a computer and turning it into a disposable missile bus (I say at least because the computer will probably mass a lot less than the pilot and the life support systems necessary to sustain him). It may be able to accelerate faster too, since it’s now freed from the restriction of having to not kill the pilot with bone-crushing sustained G forces."

Also this:

"This means that, unlike in many pop SF depictions, warship crews will probably be quite small. Human beings require a lot of supporting mass in supplies, life support, and crew quarters, so spacecraft in general will probably be heavily automated. A warship will probably basically be a can full of weaponry on top of a big fuel tank, with the crew controlling the thing from a small habitat module. The crew will effectively be command crew; there to tell the machines what to do, not to micromanage the operations of the ship. You’ll probably have a small core crew to fly the ship, a few damage control technicians, and maybe a medic or two. Serving on one will be more like serving on a WWII U-boat than anything else."

Makes me think you actually didn't read it.

But why even have manned warships at all? Why not control everything from home base?

Best reason I could think of is just the sheer size of space. Say we have a fleet guarding Earth from the edge of the solar system, by edge I mean at or near the heliopause. Consider that at that distance, it takes home base, Earth, 10 hours to relay commands to warships at the edge of the solar system. If you have one "mothership" with manned crew stationed with the automated fleet though, that crew can control an automated fleet and respond to changes in real time, making the fleet better able to respond to threats.

Though, for redundancy purposes, you probably want to have some percentage of the fleet consist of manned motherships.

Otherwise, a single outage could take the whole fleet down.

Why not Ships, at that point (of the Banksian sort)?

Speed of light

I think you have to wonder why space civilizations would bother to go to war at all. Is it for resources? Space is effectively infinite. There are going to be a vast number of suns and uninhabited planets available for a very long time. Is it because of ideology? That doesn't really matter if anyone can simply move off one planet and find another.