I'm interested in knowing what you (any of you) think of Clarke's "Superiority," if you've read that.

For those who are not familiar with this story, you might say it's "The tortoise and the hare," only set in space and with explosions. There are spoilers in the next paragraph, but since there are spoilers a-plenty in this thread, I'm not too terribly concerned with it (and it's not exactly a recent work).

The story is told in retrospect from the perspective of the losing commander immediately after the war was finished. The winning side relied simply on continuing to build their space fleet as usual, but the losing side decided to take some chances with more advanced technology, based on theoretical and laboratory work. The reason the 'advanced' side lost is because getting the technology to work in the field was something that required time (to debug), but because they wanted to use the rather seductive new gadgets, they ended up wasting time and resources that would've been better spent on more marginal improvements. You might say there were plenty of creative tactics, but they didn't work as intended.