Now, something I find with large ship combat, is that lasers will be the beyond effective range weapons, along with missiles. Ballistics being "short range," due to their variability. Missiles are obviously the every "range" weapon.
Would lasers be a mostly ineffective weapon? obviously it can't carry explosives like ballistics or missiles that can be adapted for the vacuum (Hypothesis: warhead encased in oxygen, digs in via mechanical or laser drill, then explodes. Ballistic uses kinetic energy to dig in.)
I understand Lasers are all about the power output and distance to target, along with frequency, but would a realistic laser have any real power other than shredding some armor off an enemy before it got into the effective range?
Well, in space 'ballistics' don't really apply, we would call them 'kinetics'. A missile is just a guided kinetic.
Encasing warheads with oxygen and bombs and drills and whatnot doesn't really make sense, you want to punch your way through armor with brute force, as there isn't really any time for drills and suchlike, and their complexity is unecessary.
The limitations with kinetics are as such:
- Velocity is limited. Chemical guns have a limited muzzle velocity due to the nature of ttheir propellants (in a similar way as to how chemical rockets have a limited exhaust velocity). Rocket-propelled munitions have the same constraints that any rocket does: the faster it is intended to go (the higher dV it is supposed to have) the higher the mass of the fuel (and thus the fuel casing) will be. And all that mass also needs to be lugged around by the platform carrying these weapons. Electromagnetically propelled projectiles can have a high velocity, but need an external power source, like lasers.
- Orbital mechanics. It is not an intrinsic limitation, but it will prevent you from engaging some targets, or at least will make engaging them difficult. Also depends on the velocity of the projectile.
- Time of flight. It takes a 3 km/s projectile around 5 minutes to cross a megameter, which gives the enemy ship ample time to dodge and/or fire countermeasures. Higher velocity means lower time of flight, but this does not come without problems.
- Penetration. Purely kinetic hypervelocity weapons can be easily stopped by whipple shields (essentially, by placing a thin metal sheet or a series of thin sheets with a seperation distance from the main hull), which would obviously have a lower mass than solid armor that would be needed to deal with laser weapons. There could be ways to get around this, but there are ways to get around those ways and so on.
The advantage of lasers is that their time to the target is utterly minimal (since light travels at c in space), that they give no warning to the target that they're coming (since they are light, there is no light from the light travelling ahead of the light to warn the target), that they are not hindered by orbital mechanics at all, and that they require thick, heavy armour to protect against.
A laser is really just a way to deliver energy to a target... if you deliver enough energy in a small space and a short amount of time, you will cause a rather violent ablation of the target material. This, along with the physical destruction of structures it causes, is what makes powerful lasers destructive.
Of course, lasers also have range issues... the lens cannot perfectly focus at all distances, so the beam will disperse more and more as the distance to the target increases, decreasing destructivity, and also accurately pointing a laser at a distant object can become tricky.
