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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lichmaster" data-source="post: 9471773" data-attributes="member: 6683330">Interesting points.I think all this also depends how much a group is leaning towards the sci part or the fi/fantasy part.Assuming a relatively sci inclined group, there could be a couple of other things to consider that may make some points less moot1) Travelling at lightspeed or more could require something like an Alcubierre drive, warping spacetime around the ship. This could mean that as long as the ship is travelling, any object or energy beam would be deflected and miss the ship (except for the very few hitting exactly head on). This could also constitute the primary method of defense. As such, hulls wouldn't need to be so extreme2) A lot of the radiation in space is made of charged particles. Shielding may be effective against that but less effective against non charged particles.Other things may make space ranged combat pretty much impossible:1) Even assuming it was possible to detect an object at distance moving at light speed, one would only know where it was. It may be possible to extrapolate where it went, but any slight deflection would mean missing the target by a huge margin.2) Not a physicist, so I'm not 100% sure with this, but there's the very annoying fact with relativity that contemporaneity is observer dependent. Thus even the concept of hitting something (which requires that the target and your projectile are in the same place at the same time) is not absolute. From your POV it may have been a bullseye, while from theirs your shot was ill timed and missed the mark by thousands of km.All in all, I think that the most plausible approach to this would be to either handwave everything and ignore science, or to embrace it and just deduct that space combat can only happen at very low speeds and relatively close range. In a lot of fiction combat can't happen at superluminal speed, thus they jump at lightspeed as an evasive maneuver, and sometimes this is considered a desperate measure for reasons</blockquote>

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