Starship Weapons And Defenses
Space is a dangerous environment, and when you're literally light years from home a functioning starship is often the only thing between you and death. Therefore they are made to last. Besides the obvious requirement of keeping the crew alive under ideal conditions, any crewed spacecraft comes with a number of defensive measures:
- superconductive armor to stop radiation and neutral particles;
- strong magnetic fields to deal with charged particles;
- deflector shields against small impactors and
- point defense to vaporize or crack impactors too large for the shields.
Put together, these layers make any starship into a fortress even before considering actual weapon systems.
Now, when it comes to offense, in space there is nothing more effective than a chunk of solid iron travelling at high relative speeds. Unfortunately, those take up useful space and mass aboard a starship. Also they travel much more slowly than a laser beam, and as such they can be intercepted, especially at long ranges. Therefore, lasers are in high regard despite their inefficiency.
For a civilian ship, the typical self-defense set-up is a pair of 75MW phased array lasers. These can focus further than regular lasers -- up to one and a half light seconds -- and track their targets more readily, but are more delicate, and suffer from heat dissipation issues. Military lasers are more traditional, trading size and flexibility for reliability and raw output power.
Military ships also use missiles. These are normally kinetic kill vehicles, fired from coilguns early in the battle so they'll have time to cross the distance to their intended targets before they are made useless, either from the engagement being already over, or from premature detection. Once at close range, missiles fire their rocket engines both to stay on target and to dodge point defense. Even with those caveats, effective range for missiles is maybe one tenth of a light second. Then again, space battles have been fought at even closer ranges, so that's not such a big handicap in practice.
Missiles come with various warheads, from plain through buckshot to bomb-pumped lasers. Effectiveness on the battlefield varies wildly depending on local conditions.
