Looking for individual opinions/experience with just leaving most planets undefended. This would free up a bunch of space for more production.

For example, I have 30 VL toxics at 15/16x. Each has 16 space used for att/def. I'm tempted to demolish those and use 100% of the space for mining production. I will end up losing planets more often, so the question is: would the cost of additional planet losses be more or less than the benefit of the additional production?

Almost all of the planets I've lost recently had in excess of 20K def+att, and quite a few in the 40K+ range.

Thoughts?

If you are actually making those Toxics yourself, then you could probably replace them easily enough. I've certainly never used 16 space to defend, I stopped at 8.

Yea, I can build myself more. I'm wondering at what rate I will tend to lose them (something like x number per week on average).

I think there's no point defending any planets, there's about a 1 in 5 million chance of the planet being found anyway.

1/4,905,495 * average_number_of_scans_per_day = ?

And yet, someone found and stole my VM 15xMR arti terra with Large Moons... good bye whatever your name was, I'll miss ya!
lol

Most of mine are at 8 defense space right now, and I don't think I lose even 1 per month. Could have to do with my rank and Legion, though, so your results might be different. I have some with only 2 spaces dedicated to defense (Domain Walkers) and I don't think I've lost any of those (they do have some cloak from Accelerators and stuff, though).

I'd probably still defend the toxics with at least 1-2 Obv Shields, just to keep away the small ships. I have stopped defending anything less than mega rich and even then not with much.