Weber put a ridiculous amount of effort into contriving ways to justify his ships of the line cannon battles in space. He does a better job than many, but the efforts to make his space battles resemble wet navy battles are almost comical. But I do like some of the considerations he gives, such as how all is lost if the space opera standard inertial dampeners fail given the accelerations needed in his battle sequences.
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Depth charges, like bombs, still deliver most of their destructive power through the concussive force of explosions traveling through matter.
If you’re trying to do real physical damage in the vacuum of space you’ll get a lot more bang for your buck with weapons that can hit the target directly.
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I recall reading some classic pulp story (E.E. Smith or similar) where the crew essentially did this when their unarmed exploration ship was attacked by an alien craft. Flipped around and cooked them.
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I basically just read the Honorverse as Hornblower in space.
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Yeah it was basically a case of “this form of combat I made up makes total sense given the sci-fi physics I made up.” It works fine in-universe but that doesn’t mean real space battles would follow similar rules.
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I forget which book, but in one of them they program momentary high-G flip-arounds to use the railgun on pursuing ships that were behaving too predictably dodging the missiles. Good way to have a stroke, but effective.
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Was a B5 scenario where a crippled Earthforce ship mined an asteroid with a nuke then sent out a distress call to lure in the enemy cruiser close enough for effect.
One of Niven’s short stories has this. Humans have finally solved the war problem and the world has become full of pacifists and now they’re exploring the stars on their light drives. They meet a hostile alien race (the Kzin) and are getting slowly cooked alive because the Kzin want to study their technology. One of the humans isn’t quite as pacifist as the rest and makes it look like he’s turning to flee, but their main drive is basically a giant laser and the Kzin don’t realize until it is too late.
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Unless you’re Jango Fett I guess.
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‘Jewish Space Lasers.’
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That could have been it. Didn’t that have a closing along the lines of, “The humans didn’t become pacifists because they hated war, but because they were so very good at it.”?
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That was more of a Bass Battle than a Space Battle.
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It would be a very good idea for a movie. Aliens hiring humans mercenaries and bodyguards.
EDIT:
It was done before in the 1950´s
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I remember hearing that Lucas based that sequence off another film, but I wasn’t prepared for the dialogue, moment-by-moment mirroring.
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Going back to my allotment shed now to sharpen up my nerdometer with a rusty trowel because, frankly, I don’t understand a feckin word on this thread. 
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