Nitrogen, you didn't read about it in my books! I've always been intentionally vague about alien weaponry, taking the lazy way out (natch). I do mention in my second book that a combination of conventional slugs (30mm and .50 BMG) and energy weapons are particularly effective against ship hulls: The energy weakens the hull and the slugs punch through.
I am hoping to provide more detail on alien weapons for my third book, hence the query. I'm trying to envision something like an Explosively Formed Projectile in the vacuum of space over distance. I was thinking the plasma could dump all of its energy into the copper alloy, turning it into slag, but the timing would be tricky.
AJ, I seem to recall reading that the plasma conduit lasers are easily dispersed by atmospheric interference. Do you think it would work better in space?
It wouldn't work at all. No air in space for the laser to ionize.
Niven had the "Kizinti Lesson" namely: Any spacecraft drive of sufficient efficiency is also equally useful as a weapon. Although it's a pretty short range affair. Except for the one story of the very first Kizinti/Human encounter where the Angel's Pencil uses a photon drive.
Although most drive exhaust products will still disperse quite nicely making "drive weapons" a pretty short range affair. IMO he missed the point that the biggest threat of any ship is
it's ability to get up to thrust and let things go which will keep on moving. For instance, a high-thrust "tug" devoid of any cargo pods, and armed with a few bags of sand or gravel and a crewmember to rip them open and toss them out an airlock could really ruin someone's day.
As far as the explosively formed warheads, it's neat, but again, all you need is velocity. Even at the modest sub-orbital velocities our ABM prototypes work at don't have any kind of warhead, just an impactor. A weapon system that explodes somehow right before impacting the target is just wasting mass it could be hitting that target with, either in impact mass, or fuel to accelerate that mass. It's not like on Earth in atmosphere where the explosive, such as in a HEAT style conical shaped charge self-forging penetrator can then step up the velocity at the last minute to penetrate an enemy vehicle.
Whatever velocity you put into the system in space, your going to keep until it hits something.
Nukes in space are way less efficient than people would think. Without atmosphere to heat, blast effects are limited to the actual mass of the bomb itself. And the radiation disperses with the inverse square law, just like light from stars or anything else radiating in space would.
Tactical battlefield lasers are making extrordinary leaps, however in space-warfare, you're limited to the minimum divergence to which a laser is physically possible, as defined by it's Rayleigh length, which is a function of it's wavelength and complicated mathematics as it relates to Gaussian beam profiles. Essentialy, this means even a perfect laser will diverge and spread out, given enough distance. You can extend the range, but the emitter diameter needs to be progressively larger to do so.
You can get close to a perfectly parallel colimated beam that needs no focus on it's target, but then you're talking about an ungodly power level.
Missiles and kinetics rule, unless you're postulating extremely high tech levels. If they have armor, just have a row of impactors that will hit in quick succession.
Maybe you could have the self-forging warhead also electromechanically charge a disposable coil-launcher which then flings the projectile. Well... but you're always dealing in energy conversions, which will never be 100% efficient, and all that energy is better put to use to moving the weapon, than fancy ways of launching it.
