[apache]

Yes, there sure are particles and gravity effects in space. However, both of these become much more irrelevant the farther you get from a gravity source.
The gravitational force is proportional to the distance from the gravity source, squared. Considering that nearly all combat takes place in empty sectors, or quite a few squares from a planet, we can ignore gravity effects. Also, based on the fact that gravity is totally ignored in the game, aside from black holes, weapons, and sensors, we can again figure that this kind of thing is not applicable to the game.
Now, particles are far and few between in space. You bet the Earth is hit by a lot of particles. But based on its size, and due to the fact that its a magnet, this is to be expected. However, atmospheric particles get much farther apart the farther from the earth they are. The Mean Free Path (MFP) between particles in the outer atmosphere at about 400 km can be on the order of 10m. This means that some object 9.9m wide could infact slip through any two particles completely unaffected as it flys around. Now note that the radius of the Earth is about 6000 km. So, we are talking less than a square away from the planet here, the particle density is so low that a small satellite can pass through it with very little atmospheric drag.
Now, the farther out you go, the less frequent particles are encountered. The truth is that any projectile weapon encountering these minute particles would have negligeable effects on the trajectory.
And beam attenuation is nonexistent unless it hits a significant amount of particles. In the atmosphere, beam attenuation is most severe, obviously, in the lower atmosphere, where the density is highest. However, in space, beam attenuation goes to approximately nil, because there are so few particles to actually run into. And even the particles that are encountered are not going to affect the beam enough over the distances encountered in space combat within the game.
Now, the reason there are ranges in the game is exactly for the reason BKrani said. By the time the beam/projectile gets there, the ship will have been able to move out of the way. But then again, a ship moving with 30 Gs of acceleration puts a force on the crew roughly equivalent to getting hit by a car going 70 mph. On the other hand, its safe to make the assumption that the propulsion systems in the game are based on non-inertial principles, so the crew would not feel a thing if the ship could move that fast.

[This message has been edited by apache (edited 31 January 2001).]