Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

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.

Sandcasters, in other words. With the advantage that accelerators are far more energy efficient as well as mass efficient than rockets.