Thanks for the reply. I've been racking my brain trying to come up with other sci-fi stories that include space battles (which is most of them) which are part of an actual "war" (which is fewer of them) wherein it is between forces more or less equal in number and tech (which is practically none of them).

I really dig the three layered battle at the end of RotJ. The intercutting of the ground, space, and lightsabre battles really does it for me. But it seems that the only way of getting the ground battle started was by sneaking a stolen imperial shuttle to the ground. Those forces were secretly in place when the space battle started.

My friend was saying that large ships could jump into a system, deploy small landing craft (almost the equivalent of para-troopers) and then jump out before the defense systems/ships could respond- That it wasn't necessary to win a space battle before taking to the planet... but I guess you'd want to win the space battle or else you'd be stuck on the surface. :(

Another friend was telling me about the PC MMO called EVE. That interstellar travel is accomplished through worm-holes and that the battlefronts are moved whenever control of the worm-holes changes hands. That's interesting, but I guess it has me more convinced that the "unlimited" travel of Star Wars makes a "front in space" something of an impossibility.