Joat42 wrote:Whitecold wrote:In the end it boils down to "because the plot says so."
6 orders of magnitude more energy trump about every targeting consideration, and missiles were used before laser heads were invented, and could achieve kills.
Not really unless it's directed in a specific direction. An object traveling at near c velocities hitting a sidewall will do negligible damage to any ship but the impact will look very spectacular and probably mess up sensors but nothing more.
A focused nuclear blast will have a much better chance penetrating a sidewall since it's energy are focused on 1 small area.
In other words, the inverse square law is not very forgiving on undirected energy.
Except the energy is very, very directional. If a nuke can take down a sidewall, then can a kinetic impact. If you scale it down, why should something be susceptible to a ton of TNT, but immune to a Megaton thermonuclear explosion?
Also any sidewall deflecting a missile should generate an awesome amount of radiation, simply due to the fact that particles are accelerated, and the radiation will be focused in direction of the momentum of the missile.