Space Battleship Armor?

[RainbowSingularity]

In general, armor for a space battleship would be prohibitively heavy/dense - in the absence of air friction, there is little to prevent accelerating large tungsten slugs to high relativistic speeds (besides power concerns) - it would take a lot of armor to ablate that kind of hit.

Then you factor in energy weapons, exotic particles (ala the Rapid Nadion Particle effect in Star Trek, that allows a handheld Phaser to vaporize several metric tons of rock in a single shot), and other such things (quantum singularity launcher, for example) and armor because a non-option. Add in the need for returns to shipyards for repairs/replacement (especially after high-speed maneuvers, as random space detritus ablates the frontal armor away) and it becomes a logistical nightmare.

Better protection would be offered by shields, which are limited purely by the ability to dissipate heat and/or available energy. Better still - not being hit in the first place. Given that, in space, combat would probably take place across distances far beyond visual range (which would make Sci-Fi combat quite boring, hence why everything is "knife fighting" in such shows)... yeah.

given the actual risk of ship to ship battle, i wonder if that makes cloaking the most prominant device, thus suddenly encountering another shi would be normal as both are cloaked and then de-cloaked, forcing instantantanious reaction to avoid combat and evade.
the cost of doing battle being soo high that i do gues if it becomes, a cat & mouse game of prediction to try & pre-empt an enemy action or position.

given the nature of possible technology a ship could simply trigger a solar-mass-ejection of the sun and wipe out a planet in 1 shot.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

In The Mote In God's Eye the idea was put forward that the Moties, battling each other for lebensraum at the interior of their sphere of expansion would just "drop a rock into the local sun and wait until the flares died now. So Niven and Pournelle agree with you.