Warfare in space is a complicated spectacle of maneuver, drones, scanners, ECM, ECCM, armor, defense screens, and of course... devastating weapons.

Here you will find a general overview of the most common forms of weaponry and defenses utilized in naval warfare.

Missile weapons are fascinating in that they can represent some of the most crude or advanced weapons available, as they are in effect extremely tiny space vessels that crash or explode into or near an opponent ship and are highly modifiable. Therefore the components one uses to construct a missile determines its efficacy and behavior enormously, but regardless there are some general aspects to missile weaponry in space combat.

Firstly, they are almost always short range weapons as they must use their own fuel and power systems to reach their target... furthermore, they are typically fragile and easily destroyed by active countermeasures at long ranges. There are exceptions to this, but in order to bypass these limitations the missile itself has to tremendously scale in size and capabilities. These larger and more costly examples are typically referred to as torpedoes.

Secondly, missile weapons tend to be extremely accurate when fired at short range, and allow for an effective weapon against smaller and agile vessels. Some missiles even specialize in targeting particular types of ship systems, such as engines, sensors, or communications arrays.

Thirdly, because the munition is used up and destroyed in firing, and because a ship can only carry so many missiles, they are a limited resource and poorly suited for endurance battles of attrition. Because of the need for resupply, their low power consumption, and versatility, many races prefer to use missiles on small patrol and defense vessels who cannot prowl far from resupply centers anyways.

In space combat, missiles provide an enormous flexibility, as a single launcher design can often fire a plethora of specialized munitions, and are the surgeon's scalpel of ship to ship warfare. Due to the aforementioned short range, one could also describe missiles as the "knife fighting" weapon in space.

Kinetic weapons are the most commonly relied upon ship to ship cannons and typically fire an inert projectile at incredibly high speeds towards the target, relying therefore on the velocity and subsequent kinetic impact to cause damage. While not immune to long range active countermeasures, kinetic projectile weapons enjoy a relatively medium to long range capability regardless.

Similar to missiles, kinetic weapons rely on limited munitions, however, these are typically far simpler, lighter, and cheaper, rendering that limitation more of a strategic than tactical concern. Furthermore kinetic weaponry completely ignores countermeasures that would be effective against missiles and beam weapons.

Ultimately, kinetic weapons represent a wonderful 'average' of power consumption, range, lethality, accuracy, and time to target making them the ideal mainstay for most engagements. Unfortunately, since kinetic weapons are the most likely to be encountered in combat, ships of all classes tend to carry significant armor, reducing the effectiveness of such weapons.

Beam weapons are quite interesting in space combat as they have the best accuracy and time to target and can be designed for very long range. Some of these benefits however, are easily counteracted. Firstly long range and time to target are irrelevant if the enemy has proper ECM facilities, relegating beam weaponry to the same ranges as most Kinetic weapons, and secondly, beam weapons can have their damage potential "diffused" by various fields of energy particles.

Such fields are commonly known as "Defense Screens" and come in a wide variety... and they tend to utilize less energy than an opponent's array of beam weaponry. This doesn't eliminate the utility of beam weapons though, as diverting power to defense screens limits the enemy ship's movements and firepower and also makes it far easier to accurately target. Both large scale and small scale beam weapon platforms have utility... small scale being ideal for taking out nimble and small targets that can't easily possess or power a defense screen, and large scale weapons which will be able to punch through an average defense screen and cause horrific damage.

Effectively, beam weapons are useful, but situational, and ships employing mainly beam weapons are a rarity, usually a specialist working in tandem with a fleet of more traditionally armed vessels.

Manned and unmanned vessels of very small size, Fighters can be armed with a wide variety of small scale weaponry and can prove extremely useful and deadly in short range warfare. Fighters can be launched in advance of a fleet as well an engage at long ranges in-system but their time to target is quite slow.

In general, the advantage of using fighters is their ability to accurately target a ship or its subsystems, the stealth their small size confers, and their ability to "tie down" enemy vessels due to the difficulty in destroying such nimble vessels. Indeed, some military strategists advise ignoring fighters altogether when engaged and instead endeavoring to target their carriers.

Militaries vary in the use of unmanned fighters versus manned. Manned fighters are more complicated to design and maintain but they provide the distinct advantage of being impossible to hack remotely and can be piloted somewhat effectively even if all sensors and targeting data is jammed. Unmanned fighters can generally outperform their counterpart's tactical abilities and can be used suicidally without compunction, but they are much more vulnerable to enemy ECM and cyber attacks.

In order to avoid cyber attacks a unmanned fighter can easily be designed to be autonomous, however, such weapons cannot respond to new orders during a battle (if they are open to receiving orders they could be tricked and hacked) and cannot easily coordinate with other fighters. As a result, swarms of autonomous fighters typically under-perform and are deployed more like a "minefield" than a true wing of strike craft.