Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by SuedodeuS

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!

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.