Is spaceship armor useless?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

That's being picky over semantics. There are multiple possible universes where missiles have limited _practical_ ranges.

Also cases where beam weapons (such as very long range ones like X-ray lasers) can be used at ranges where missile launch will not be practical.

So no, your statement is not a universal truth when discussing practical combats.

You mean like I addressed in the immediately following paragraph that you cut from your quote?


EDIT: So I ran some numbers. With TL9+ missiles using 10 mps to close and reserving 10 mps to cancel out evasion, shooting from rest, against a ship with 5 high-thrust TL10+ fusion pulse drives, the effective range goes down to a bit over 30k miles, which can be covered by a 100 GJ UV laser (SM +12 major battery). That's a bit extreme, but not impossible. They'd pretty much have to be battleriders of some kind, since they only get 20 mps per tank at TL 11 and at TL 11 that's embarrassingly bad for travel, but it's doable. High-thrust water antimatter plasma gets moderately longer legs but lets the range slip to over 50k miles, requiring a 3 TJ beam (SM+15 spinal).

Orion or nuclear salt water of course can get it to fairly short ranges (8k miles or less), but burning 10 mps to dodge a missile volley is brutally expensive when you get at most 8 mps per tank. So the tactic there would be to use missiles to force the beam-ship to exhaust its maneuver reserve at a safe distance, rather than going straight for the kill.

Bringing in superscience, cosmic power beams or grav lenses let you cover a bit more range. Super drives smash the whole thing, obviously, but shouldn't be used with regular missiles. Reactionless drives certainly hammer it too, though again I'd argue they're also rather unfair to the poor missiles. I have to admit, though, that even fusion torches (preferably TL 11+ for the delta-V) severely limit the effective range of missiles against evading targets.