At first I tried this with lots of small ships, but they just never kill enough of them. I mean maybe I need multiple fleets in one place or something?

Then I moved on to bigger ones but their guns... aren't great shots, it seems, except flak which utterly obliterates the meteors AND all the small allied ships in the entire area. Like flak would be brilliant at it if I could just radio these guys and tell them to go away, but I can't. I'm at the point now of using the game's biggest ships with non-flak turrets just to get sheer overwhelming numbers of cannons going, but these manouevre so slowly that their window to attack seems to dimish pretty quickly unless I'm lucky with where the meteors spawn.

It seems like relative to repairing the damage, trying to intercept is just a really bad idea. And those missions are just free bad reputation, whether I kill the things with flak and take out all their ships, or try something else and only get a bit over half the meteors before they hit something.

What's even worse is that now that I've got combat ships it seems these are pretty much replacing all the trade missions I was doing for half the game. It's like meteors > fighting > VIPs > trade.