[pouslytut]

Nuclear warhead.

I anticipated that. It doesn't really matter - currently our power systems favor missiles, obviously, but the context is sci-fi. There's no inherent reason you couldn't power a laser from some future quick-discharge battery (e.g. a capacitor) to give it as much energy as a nuke.

Also the fact that the damage will be spread around the ship, rather then just punching a nice neat hole through it.

That brings up the inverse square law in a bad way - you don't want that feature of missiles. And lasers wouldn't punch through a ship, they'd cause an explosion on the surface (the expanding vaporized surface material absorbs a lot of the laser light, fueling the explosion).

Make a real objection above instead of just "why"ing like a three year old and I'll discuss it.



Nothing you said is necessarily true. If you don't have an argument for it, I'm not going to bother with your posts either.

You're assuming defensive technology does not keep up with offensive technology.

Nothing of the sort.

a) Determining the location of the target: can be made very difficult by stealth technology (or advances beyond that). A laser can't adjust midroute so if you find out you were wrong you have to re-fire.

I'm having trouble imagining a system where a targetting system on a ship would consistently be off by just enough that the missile would be able (with its obviously superior sensors and computational power) to make a correction and end up hitting the target.

b) This can take a lot of processor power, and if we're talking high speed ships with high acceleration why should this be simple?

And clearly more processing power will be available on the missile that's trying to adjust course in real-time to track this target, rather than on the ship that merely has to drive a servo to point a laser?

Also, defensive screens make this more difficult, particularly if they can fluctuate at near-lightspeed also.

WTF is a defensive screen?

c) The hardest/slowest - a laser must be moved, physically, into position. Unless we make a laser that does not require any moving parts, this will always take time. When you're moving at extremely high speeds, this will always be a slowing element.

A missile has to be moved into position too, and the process is far more complex. It's not that hard to predict how long it will take a laser to move into some position, and therefore where we should move it to so it's pointing at the enemy when it's done.

A missile that can adjust mid-flight is faster in all of these categories, assuming it has good maneuvering engines.

The technology that would allow a missile to track at those speeds would allow a laser to do so at least as well.