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Aragonn wrote:

Same could be said about dodging punches. Just preemptively move your face out of the way.

By this I was comparing your starships dodging lasers to people dodging punches and jabs in fisticuff fights. Punches and jabs come at you so fast you can't react to them soon enough to dodge, so to dodge you have to try to predict when and where and preemptively move your face out of the way.

Rationalist Science wrote:

Looking at a realistic space battle with realistic ranges, you could be moving so far that your enemy simply wouldn't know where to aim, even with lightspeed weapons. And then you have sublight weapons, where your projectiles would be even more easily dodged and/or destroyed, considering that massive amounts of advance warning...

Assuming your sensors break the lightspeed barrier. If they're bound to the 1c speed limit, you won't see that lightspeed weapon fire until it hits you in the face.

Rationalist Science wrote:

Minor nitpick: 0.05c isn't exactly relativistic; until you reach around 0.1c, Newtonian approximations still mostly work.

My bad. I know you made that nitpick with ISF earlier on the RMB. I was just skimming through the RMB at the time though, so I wasn't paying much attention...

Rationalist Science wrote:

And when you get to those more realistic ranges, you'd want pretty much all your weapons to be guided whenever possible, because of how easily your enemy can move out of the way.

To have both speed and guidance you'd need a missile or torpedo with ridiculously powerful motors. I'm talking hugely disproportionate. It's not even an option worth considering. Guidance is out the window at that range. Hel, missiles and torpedoes are completely out the window at that range. Kinetic weapons are also out the window because they're slow, easy to detect, and easily dodged. Plasma is no longer a thing because the energy dissipates before it gets anywhere near the enemy ship. Every weapon which continues to exist is a laser or some energy weapon. Things that move at lightspeed. And then ranges get to be so ridiculous that you yourself don't even have to be in sensor range to fire on someone. Link your sensor feeds with another ship's sensor feeds and fire on the enemy ship that your ally is detecting. It gets to be so much like Star Trek except instead of fleets being right up in each other's faces they're light-years apart sniping at each other with their lasers and phasers and particle cannons. We don't want that. At least I don't want that.

You know what? That's what I'm gonna do. Instead of this being a sniping battle over multiple AU, we're going to be engaging at 25,000 km at the most. Aesir naval railgun muzzle velocity is going from Mach 17 to 0.005c which ends up being 1498962.29 m/s or 1,498.962 km/s (rounded out). This should make them remain competitive at least in short ranges of 3,000 km to 6,000 km distances. It'd take about 5 seconds for the shells to make impact at 6,000 km, but most ships are too big and bulky to move completely out of the way in just five seconds. And I can only imagine how much force would be applied to the shields of the ship getting pummeled since I've grown terrible at math now. See kids, this is what happens to you when you graduate high school but don't go to college nor exercise your math skills. You start to look like the dumb one.

According to Google and my own calculator, if ISF keeps her muzzle velocity of 0.07c it translates to 20,985,472.06 m/s or 20,985.472 km/s. Definitely the sniping weapon of choice for these close engagements. Though I'd tone it down a notch because in the 5 seconds it takes me to hit something 6,000 km away Novan shells would've already travelled over 100,000 km.