The fighting at Tithonus in 2298 is messed up. Further, the astrography is messed up, and in the AEH etc.
Tithonus casts an 87 light-second STL zone. At warp-1, it takes about 6 h from the shelf to Aurore, or about 4 h for a canonical Kafer BB. The dead zone (i.e. what Colin calls "the Wall") of Tithonus is 827 Mm (million meters) in radius, and Aurore orbits at 927 Mm from Tithonus. It is outside Tithonus' dead zone by a margin of about 100,000 km.
Indeed, if Aurore was inside the dead zone, it could not reasonably be settled as starships could not reasonably reach it.
Aurore casts its' own dead zone 12,419 km in radius. The planet is 9,450 km in diameter and so the planets dead zone is ca. 7,700 km in altitude above the surface of the planet.
On page 9:
"The first wave of alien starships was seemingly defeated just beyond the Wall. As the human forces closed, more alien ships dropped out of FTL speeds to reinforce the invaders. Human forces had to withdraw towards Aurore and were forced to rely on their reaction drives below
the Wall. Military forces on Aurore mobilised regular troops, militia and law enforcement to defend the colony in case the aliens defeated the fleet."
This is a nonsensical statement. The astrography is, not the scale:
I think it's clear here that Colin doesn't understand the astrography of Tithonus and Aurore. A warp 1.8 starship "dropping out of FTL" (i.e. crossing the FTL shelf) is still 4 hours travel from Aurore. He's written like he thinks like it's a Traveller jumpship emerging 100 diameters from a planet.
Further, the reason it is called the "dead zone" (in prime canon) is that stutterwarp drives do not function properly, and starships cannot maneouvre, use screens or launch missiles and fighters. Since they are not warping, they are trivial to hit. However, they are fully in range of all weapons of ships outside the dead zone.
The entire point of combat in 2300AD was to knock your enemy out of warp. Normally vast numbers of shots were fired to obtain a hit, but when the target isn't warping (such as the Sung systemships during the Slaver War) then the target solution is trivial and basically all of them hit. Once you've knocked out the enemies warp drive, destroying their ship was trivial. In the scenario involving shooting at landers on the ground, each shot automatically destroyed the target without needing to roll. The same applies here.
By going below the shelf, the Terran forces would have essentially "beached themselves." All Kafer attacks automatically hit, doing massive damage (since instead of one shot from of a volley hitting, all of them are), and they can use missiles and screens. The Terrans gained no advantage in terms of avoiding being hit, and lost much of their defence (the screens of the larger ships) and firepower (neither missiles nor fighters can be used).
Further, the writing seems to imply the Kafers went into the dead zone. Why? The Terran forces have made themselves fish-in-a-barrel. Shoot them like such...
(Edit, I forgot a divide by two in my calculations of speed. Corrected)
