That's assuming that the UEF would be unable to simply get enough support out there to rebuild the Agincourt's jump drive, if given more time.
I guess that comes down to how long it takes to repair a subspace drive (and how much GTVA drives have diverged from UEF ones over the past 50 years

) Still, if it were easy to repair I figured that they would have shipped the parts in straight away rather than crawl on sublight for 6 days. Unless of course the GTVA could track the inbound repair ship and relocate the Agincourt that way...
Because destroying the gates isn't all that straightforward. And because all the important bits of the UEF fleet do not need the gates. And because destroying gates when you do not have to is a bad idea in terms of post-war occupation economy.
Yep, the gates don't matter to the military as all their ships have subspace drives, it's only the civilian commerce that really use the gates and that comes back to the point that the GTVA want to capture the Sol infrastructure intact. However, I'd have thought the disruption caused by loss of a single gate would be worth being able to hang on to the Agincourt.
Anyway, seeing that destroying the gates isn't straight forward, I'd like to know under what circumstances other the gates were destroyed during the war. I mean, was it accidental destruction, or deliberate?
Actually, I haven't played TBI yet, but I recall seeing people talk about the GTVA punting a meson bomb through a gate as an area denial weapon - how close was that to the gate when it went off? If it was close and the gate withstood the blast then it's a pretty resilient gate!