No one stands a chance against the Techno Union Army.
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My only quibble about the missiles in The Expanse is their long torpedo shape. There’s no air to cut through unless they were making an attack on a planet or moon with an atmosphere. A sphere or cube would be more maneuverable, unless the Epstein drive has to be that long.
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What’s 720 coverage? Is that like twice round?
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There’s a table top game I’ve never played, but have been fascinated with for years because it takes a hard SF approach to space combat called Full Thrust that does something similar. Lasers and guided torpedoes are the main weapons, and guns are used to create screens to force your opponent to change direction, lest the get their hull perforated.
Again, depth charges are destructive because water in incompressible, so it propagates explosive force extremely well.
In a vacuum, you have the force of the expanding explosive mass, and that’s it. With enough nukes, you could deny access to a volume of space, but I think it unlikely that mines would be used offensively. (And that’s still a lot of nukes.)
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Children of a Dead Earth bills itself as a realistic space combat game; all the spaceships are boring cylinders lobbing ballistic ammo and nuclear missiles at eachother at orbital distances and speeds.
I think that means 360° coverage along two perpendicular axes.
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Like in one of the Uplift books where they dump a bunch of water mid way through a gravity sling shot around a planet and the pursuit craft just “whomps” into it.
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Crash Couches!!
They also use the railgun to maneuver the ship at one point when its regular functionality is…inhibited.
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Essentially, because one of these two ideas is in effect:
Most writers are humans, with experience of navigating in an air and water filled gravity well, so the metaphors employed to tell the story to the audience are things that make sense to that audience, rather than derived from an in-depth look at space combat physics.
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Snowflakes are dangerous in large numbers.
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360 is a flat circle, like the compass rose. In space you also have “above” and “below”. I figured adding a z axis would give you 720 degrees? It makes a kind of sense in my head, at least. Heck if I know.
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Maybe the spacecraft have to bank and turn like atmostphere-based aircraft because of the limitations of their meatsack pilots. Our current atmosphere-based aircraft are already operating at the limits of human survivability, so you could assume similar maneuverability limitations in space. An instantaneous 90 or 180 degree change in direction would basically slosh us liquid-based lifeforms to death.
But this is really a failure of imagination, because the optimal small combat spacecraft is probably an autonomous AI-controlled munition without any of the limitations of a human pilot.
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Isn’t that also how Ripley disposes of the Alien™ that tried to hitch a ride on the Nostromo’s lifeboat? Fired up the ship’s drive while it was trying to break in, and happened to be in the way of the jet.
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Yes. Lots of nukes. Planet destroying firepower is still basically a scalpel in the vastness of space.
I think the measurement you would use is a solid angle. An ordinary 2-D angle in radians is the length of the portion of a circle you cover, divided by its radius. For a solid angle you can take the area of the portion of a sphere it covers divided by its radius. Full coverage would be 4π steradians…which works out to about 41253 square degrees, I guess is the other unit.
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Space Battleship Yamoto just use turrets like most battleships do. Everything can move and direct firepower where needed.
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Same book, yes. That is pretty weird. I meant the one where the excitable Avatar confesses to his freaked out passenger that, “actually, this is a recording of the battle we were just in, cool huh?”
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I think that’s The Player of Games, but am open to correction.
Not a bit Banks fan - kinda sadistic for me - but I did like that one a lot, plot- and idea-wise.
Ah, but you’re talking about SC2 
My post was SC1-specific, and I welcome the chance to embellish it: not only did even the biggest and meanest dreadnaughts have their nemeses, but said nemeses were usually pleasingly, poetically tiny, in a David/Goliath way! I would bet $10 I could take down any Urquan with an Arilouleelay skiff (the auto-aiming laser cancels out the fighters), for example, and the aforementioned Umgah was holy terror against a Chenjesu (because the frontal mining ray made mincemeat of its DOGIs). Ah, the memories…
This is actually SC2, but is a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40aKz3SRbyc
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The Arilou was nice due to its non-inertial drive and the auto-aiming laser, but iirc the auto-aiming laser always pointed towards the enemy ship, not necessarily towards the launched Ur-Quan fighters. The Earthling ship’s point defense lasers did take out the Ur-Quan fighters though, and was always my ship of choice against the Ur-Quan.
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