Okay, so let's run with this concept a bit:
It's 30 years after Capella. You are a student in the GTVA's officer academy. This academy has some really realistic wargame simulations running, and the fall of Capella is obviously one of the situations. One of the final tests.
I imagine it's a lot like the Kobayashi Maru Simulation in Star Trek: This is supposed to be a no-win scenario. Everyone knows this, and the whole point is that it's a test about what you would do when faced with unsurmountable odds. So off course every year there's a couple of people who try to win the whole thing entirely.
So let's start! The scenario starts shortly after the destruction of the GVD Psamtik - at the exact point the GTVA knows it can't win. The evacuation of Capella has already been underway since the first Sathanas was destroyed, and your job is to save as many people as you can. What do you do?
The first plan is to try and detonate the Gamma Draconis-Capella node. We'll say that you simply don't have the meson-ships yet in order to do that. They're still rigging up those Orions. We'll also say that we can't just shove the Colossus into the Gamma Draconis node and self-destruct it there. There's nothing to say that it can't do that successfully, but I suspect that two meson-filled orions have more detonation power then a Colossus, and the Lucifer must have just been really special (5 exposed reactors and shield-generating capability).
Plan two: We instead engage the Sathani on their way to Capella, inside the node. We'll bring the Colossus with us, and just do High Noon in Subspace! There's two disadvantages I can see with this plan: First off, no shields. In FS1 that was your one saving grace. In FS2 that's a liability, since Sathanasses are just glorified space excavators that assume that the Lucifer already wiped out the dangerous stuff. They have the advantage in subspace. Those frontal flak guns on the Sathanas are really quite deadly, and trying to do that bombing run without shields is quite tricky.
Secondly, assuming that Subspace tunnels are a line, there's no real way to engage a Sathanas except from the front. You'll essentially be engaging the shivans in unfavourable terrain - if there's anything that Sathanas is good at, it's clearing a path in a straight line. But, well, hey - if you blow up even one Sathanas, you'll probably kill the node. We could assume that if the Lucifer could detonate a node, so can a Sathanas.
But what if it doesn't? What if the Sathanas is a more well-rounded ship, and not basically a flying shield projector powered by the shivan equivalent of the Chernobyl NPP that the Lucifer was, and that means it doesn't blow up as nicely? Well, then you're ****ed. Because now you've elected to do High Noon in Subspace, 80 times. Without shields.
Plan Three would be to try and stop the Sathanans at the exit of the node. Just drop all the Mjolnir turrets you have at the exit, cover them with fighters, have bombers take care of the frontal beam turrets, and then send in the fleet. The good thing: You'll have shields, so your fighters and bombers will last longer. It's probably a lot easier to get in some meson bombs if you can drop them behind where the Sathanas is going to jump in too.
The bad thing is also a problem with plan two: How many ships are you going to commit to this? You'll have to kill the Sathans faster then they leave the node. You need to be able to do that 80 times, which is insane. You'll also have to deal with the simple problem that every other Shivan is also coming through the node, and if you let even one of them through, those Shivans are going to kill a lot of people, which you will need to protect since that's literally your job. How long can you keep that up? Your job isn't to kill Shivans, it's to save Terrans and Vasudans. Even if you somehow manage to destroy 20 Sathanas, and that somehow cancels that Capella detonation plan... Cool! What's next?
Because now you still have to shut off the jump nodes to Capella, because the Shivan armada is still running amok in there. You'll have 60 Sathanazzes that now can't do their primary task. They'll probably not go back to Gamma Draconis to get some more ships, they'll probably just decide to hunt down some of your own ships - even when fully task oriented we see a Sathanas take some time out of its day to frag the Colossus.
But if you do commit to plan 2 and/or 3, we do have to have a plan 4: How do we deal with the Juggernauts that get through? This is actually the hardest part. Not only are the shivans establishing air superiority basically everywhere very quickly, now you can't actually engage a Sathanas without having to worry about friends jumping in and blasting you from an arbitrary angle. Your forces will already have suffered attrition trying to engage these beasts directly too, so your ability to continue doing this diminishes significantly faster then theirs. You may have killed a lot of shivans. But the Shivans have killed a lot of soldiers and citizens. People who wouldn't have died if you actually had focused on saving them rather then a celestial object. And once the Shivans are out of the chokehold, they basically control the battlefield entirely.
Which brings us to plan five: Just ignore them. The best way to save lives in Capella is actually just doing what the GTVA did in Capella: Get everyone out of there. Even if you could kill the required amount of Shivans in order to save the Capella star, the point is that the supernova doesn't actually change much about the GTVA's plans. They had already given up the system and the one thing that saves the GTVA here is that the Shivans weren't actually all that interested in wiping out the GTVA, they just wanted to do their thing. The supernova happens at the very end of the evacuation. It doesn't actually kill all that many people.
If I were teaching this battle in class, that would be the point: You're here to save lives, not kill Shivans.
