Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!
 

How do you deal with a realitivly hard space setting where you want to make conflict or war to focus of the setting, but at the same time don't want all the person to person or ship to ship fighting that players love to be ruined but people just setting off nukes everywhere?

More to the point how can you make "I just nuke them" not a viable option for players?

Re: Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!
 

Legality to start. If using a nuclear weapon - even in space - is a war crime, players are going to very much be hesitant to pull out the nukes. Exceptional point defense lasers (and/or making it very common to have huge batteries of small point defense lasers) might be able to make projectiles unviable, so you'd have to use your own beam weapons to take out their point defenses to reliably be able to nuke them - but by that point their ship is probably disabled already!

Re: Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!
 

You have mutually incompatible issues. Realistic setting means that nuclear capable sides will use them in space if and when necessary.

You need to add superscience like reality stabilizers to render nukes useless.

Re: Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!
 

Declare the in this universe uranium and plutonium can only be found in reasonable quantities deep inside of planets. The price of nukes is dramatically higher as a result and those who have them will be hesitant to go tossing them around.

Re: Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!
 

Well, nukes in space have a relatively short blast radius. Vaccuum is a lousy wqy to carry a shockwave. One of the things that makes Nukes so dangerous on Earth is an atmosphere that will carry the blast. (The atmosphere is also what produces the EMP effect, X-rays ionize the air a few miles up and that big mass of charged air molecules pulls in electrons like crazy, so using a nuke to short out a spacecraft from a distance isn't going to work.) The damage that comes from the blast is heat light etc for the most part. A very reflective armor on the ship helps tremendously.

Re: Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!
 

You sit down with your players and go, "For the purposes of this campaign nuclear weapons don't exist. They will not be available for sale or salvage, you can not make them, they will not be used or mentioned in-setting/in-game. Cool? Cool. Lets' play."

Otherwise you have: no one makes them (queue PC learning how to make them right quick), they're illegal (oh, like that has ever stopped the PCs before) or super-science negates their use (no longer "relatively hard science" setting).

I suggest invoking Genre Convention and write the entire idea out of the campaign/setting.

Re: Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!
 

This.

Space ships will already have shielding against hard rads, and ways to dump heat. Nukes have to detonate really close to the vessel to do much.

Moreover, they're expensive and complex pieces of machinery. Why would anybody use them, when you can just fire a rail-gun round at a velocity of 10 km/s? At that velocity, a the kinetic energy of the mass of the ammunition does 10 times the damage of an equivalent mass of TNT.

Alternatively, fire a missile with a submunitions warhead (basically, a giant shotgun shell) and have it go off so the ball-bearings get in the flight-path of the enemy ship. That's probably a little more expensive than a rail-gun round, but still nowhere near the price and complexity of a nuke.

Re: Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!
 

Don't let the players have nukes- detonating anything with a kiloton yield requires authorization from someone significantly higher on the chain of command than any PC.

Re: Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!
 

In addition to the fact that nukes aren't all that useful unless they hit the ship (or get very close)... standardize the use of weapons that make engagement ranges much longer (lasers, particularly UV). Nukes become less useful if the battle is over before they even get in range!

Re: Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!
 

Nukes aren't really all that dangerous (to ships) in most space RPG's.......it's what you can do to a planet with one (or several) that makes them really nasty.

See Traveller for this take on it. Just about all real warships have nuclear suppression fields, as do all real ground force units. Nukes are more of a terrorist/pirate weapon in that setting, as they are great for attacking civilian targets.