>>42627But the bombers wouldn't even be able to get close to the target unless they are as big as a warship themselves because of a lack of propellent. They would have to be one way trip vehicles and at that point they might as well be an extra stage for a nuclear missile, and even then they would probably have to be really big and unpractical for them to even reach a target that is manouvering. And that's ignoring the necessary compromises on armour you would make which would leave the bomber vulnerable lasers.
>What about inertia? Dodging depends more on bursts of acceleration than net speed, so i think they could outmaneouver large spaceships at close ranges.Basically all spaceship engines I can think of work on an economy of scale too. A nuclear reactor is better the bigger it is. So you will be accelerating much faster with a bigger ship too. Obviously if you cut out all the armour a smaller ship could accelerate faster… but then the ship would just be killed basically immediately by lasers. Maybe you could have a few lighter varieties of vessel but idk.
I was thinking about a way missiles (talking about guided missiles when I use this word, obviously anything is a missile) could be useful. Basically they would be tie breakers or like wildcards, a way for a losing force to maybe have a chance of equalizing things. Space battles will take a really long time and you will know who will lose very early into it (not saying tactics won't happen but it will be obvious when both have been lasing each other for a month who will run out of armour mass first). So you can have a missile, as smart as any other ship and even more armoured but maybe with slightly less propellent because it doesn't need to come back, and if the enemy runs away from it for long enough that will be a mission kill basically. It could even have weapons of its own. So it is fired off, maybe accelerated up to speed by a laser from its home base if possible, and when the battle happens there is something just ramming for the enemy, or detonating a fission lance nearby to hit it. But at that point… why not just make another normal warship? That's how I came to the conclusion missiles are useless.
The only weapons I think are practical are lasers and other electromagnetic weapons, and magnetically accelerated particle cannons like dust guns, or basically coilguns shooting a stream of really tiny projectiles at a fraction of the speed of light.