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Originally Posted by reinloch
Question: How much damage does a nuclear weapon do when it misses its target but detonates in proximity, say a 1 MT device detonating about 1 km from a 300m warship in space?
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Don't underestimate nukes. That warship is toast. Its hard to say whether the absence of an atmosphere makes the nuke more or less deadly.
You could possibly make a warship that could survive near-miss nuke blasts, but your ships are going to have hull thickness in the tens of meters. Think a solid tube of titanium. Even then, most of the exterior systems are going to be destroyed.
Once you start slinging nukes about, space combat becomes a zero sum game. Once you are detected, you launch your long range nukes - expect that weapon travel times could take days, and that your target is going to launch nuclear countermeasures to destroy your nukes in transit.
Space combat could start to look a lot like submarine combat. Lots of stealthy designs, doppler radar to determine relative speed and heading (so you know where to launch your missiles to intercept), towed array (your active sensors dragged 30/50km behind you) and advance intelligence (UAVs etc.).
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Originally Posted by Newtyped
we are talking about lasers meant to cut (forgot that name sorry lol ^^; 
no but photons carry heat. laser is traveling heat |
No a laser is travelling light. Once those photons impact matter they will excite and heat it. The absence of matter between them and their target is in fact a good thing, as the laser won't lose energy heating the intervening air molecules that it would normally encounter in an atmosphere.
An ideal laser weapon would not 'cut' a hull but dump as much of its energy in as concentrated a spot as possible in as short a time as possible. Instantaneously boiling off a section of the hull and causing a surface explosion that would cause more damage.
'heat' is a property of matter. In order to transport heat from one ship to another you would fire a plasma (very hot gas). THough a favoured staple of science-fiction, plasma isn't that effective as a weapon really. Slow, by comparison with light, which limits its range, its charged, so its trajectory will be affected by magnetic fields (thats its countermeasure right there) and the one thing a hot gas won't want to do is stay in a nice coherent beam.