Someone asked recently what kind of weapon works well in space. This kind.
(www.defensenews.com)
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Yeah, missiles and directed energy weapons for sure. Not just for heat but because I also imagine the engagement range for any space combat is going to be absurd. You're going to want the ability to change trajectory mid travel or be firing at relativistic speeds so that even the most cursory of random evasive manoeuvres doesn't make hitting near impossible.
Maybe a dark horse nomination for weaponized particle accelerators if someone somehow manages to get something craft portable that can launch particles at a sizable fraction of the speed of light.
There was a style of combat described where two ships were blinking in and out of existence doing short-hops in their warpspace and dropping 5kg weights at near relativistic speeds toward each other. I can't quite remember where I read it though ... it was in an SF collection.
If I consider it, the biggest factors in space combat will be detection. Seeing the other guy first before he sees you. Unless someone invents magic and energy shields actually exist, attaining parity between defense and offense is likely impossible and thus it becomes something akin to submarine warfare.
Yeah, I'd see detection as the biggest determinant too. But if directed energy weapons are the choice you have the interesting situation where they don't necessarily do catastrophic damage instantaneously, and you're providing a giant beacon to return fire at, so I wouldn't discount defence entirely. Maybe even a simple reactive defence of explosively launched optical chaff, deployed fast enough, could buy a fraction of a second to return fire and turm an engagement into a mutual loss or a millisecond game of system targeting precision/luck.
Which is where missiles could potentially have a place. Assuming you have the detection initiative you could dumb launch one or many without necessarily giving away your position, then allow them to drift far away from yourself before igniting to mask your location.bThey would be incredibly vulnerable to directed energy weapon interception, but depending on the technical capabilities of the weapons, them firing on the missile(s) might provide the safe window to disable then with a directed energy weapon of your own without suffering immediate return fire.
In terms of defense I meant armor of some variety, not so much point defense or chaff. E-war can't really be discounted either, if they're blind they're dead.
In this context I was envisioning the chaff not as a targeting disruptor like usual, but more a cloud of launched EM absorbing material functioning kinda like reactive armour on tanks. Even as it gets vaporised it's still matter instead of vacuum, choose the right elements and it can continue to absorb or deflect a significant portion of energy at the right wavelengths even as a plasma. With that it might be possible to bring down the the delta E that actually reaches the hull down to somewhere where appropriately reflective/conductive/resistant materials can maintain integrity for a fraction or a second or longer, enough for automated retaliation maybe.