Large fleet fights can't be effectively handled in any known way. Synchronizing 1k people for real-time battles leads to several minutes lag for any action (on a good day). On a bad day, the local 'node' will just crash. The total number of updates is something like O(n^2) for n active clients.
CCP have done pretty amazing things for the constraints they were under: real time battles, one shard universe.
erlang based server (pikko server) is trying for 1k people realtime FPS trial...
Don't forget the drones - that's 4-5x the number of player ships.
Anyone considering learning software engineering lessons from CCP should play EVE Online for a while. I personally prefer my lessons coming from people consistently delivering a working product, and not so known for breaking random stuff that people actually have fun predicting what seemingly untouched stuff will get changed by a patch (e.g. http://www.failheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=23... )
They're just being silly. Twisted has been using non-blocking IO since forever. One can easily use async IO in stackless as well.