Thanks for your in-depth reply. I do however disagree a lot with your opinions.

#1: Of course it is true that first attack is less relevant with more lines involved. It still decides the winner with the exact same numbers involved at both sides. Regarding the visaulization, this should not be an argument. Visualization might be a nice extra for some players with too much time on their hand, but the mass of players will not watch them, but just click on. All the browser games I played were perfectly fine without visualizations. It is a nice extra, but is certainly less important than balancing the battle module, and removing the first attack bonus would be a part of the latter.

#2 I think you did not read or not understand my proposal. I did explicitly NOT suggest to calculate every single ship, as I am well aware of the limitations. I proposed a calculation method that simulates single ships by still grouping all ships of a type together, and I am conviced that the implementation of such a model would lead to more intuitive results (i.e., with 120 vs 100 of the same ships, also the winner would lose ships^^) without requiring much extra calculation power.

#3 NEVER did I suggest to implement a 3D modelling. As said before, I don't need visualization. I suggested to create a battle algoritm which would lead to results that better match the expectations one has when thinking about space battles. Line vs line with always the first line taking all the damage is quite lame for a space game. Sorry.

#4 I am not against aborts. But being able to abort attacks in the last minute should not be possible, it really ruins the game.
Allow it for the first 10-15 minutes of a mission, that is enough. It doesn't need an extra timer. Travian allowed aborts for 1.5 minutes after a mission was sent, and then, the abort button just disappeared. Was perfectly fine and noone ever complained about that.

P.S. tagging also @rondras and @oliverschmid here.