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Starhawk said:
Hey I don't use "dylithium crytals" or anything that "hand wavy" 
For that matter I didn't put any "throw away lines" about projectiles in my story just telling you .
And for the most part I haven't mentioned anything "totally" unrealistic except maybe the shields but that's just subjective so you can't really just label mine "soft sci-fi" because you disagree with the one little bit about my shields and then turn around and say black holes being slung at people is 'hard' as that has to violate a whole lot more areas of physics then mine heh.
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I didn't say you had put in any such lines, but it can be good to establish such facts
before the action. It does look a bit Deus Ex Machina if during an attack the captain goes 'What are the chances? Those weapons do us no damage. That was lucky, we'd be dead otherwise.'
Before I start this is not personal. These points don't affect the story, it's science FICTION, making things up is the name of the game. I know what you're like, so take this in the spirit it's meant.
Flat out violations of physics in your story:
No those shields are not subjectively wrong, they're flat out impossible. You cannot magically kill an objects KE for less energy than the object has.
FTL, casuality and realtivity in the same universe don't work. At all. At the most basic level the paradoxes FTL would introduce are horrendous. Now as your opening warp points with happy abandon they aren't natural wormholes (which are 'just' local spacetime distortions and so sneak through) so that's a potential problem.
Admitedly you could be making wormholes, but that's highly dicey in and off itself. All you'd need is 'quantum foam' to open it and 'exotic matter' to produce 'negative energy' to hold it open. I'm not making those terms up the way (you couldn't
), they are hypothetical particle physics concepts. For instance 'exotic matter' is amazingly usefull stuff as it has negative mass, if it exists.
BUT if you had all the stuff that you'd need to do all that then you would be far in advance of the rest of the Icaran's general tech level. As in chucking black holes around advanced.
As your still working out what the I-lasers
aresuspend judgment on them.
Oh and I'm pretty sure you have non-rotational artifical gravity, although I could be wrong on that one. I'm sure if I poked around I could find more, but I don't particularly want to I think that's enough to be going on with.
Ian Banks stuff however has a solid basis, it has however assumed that the hugely difficult has become possible, indeed easy. It doesn't violate any physics, it's immensly difficult, horribly expensive and requires horrendous ammounts of power. But it's not impossible and doesn't violate any physics we know.
Not knowing the details I can't comment on the throwing black holes, this is just based on his other stuff. However, off the top of my head, stupendous amounts of ultra dense material subjected to massive pressure would form a black hole. That's how they form in nature. Moving it around, well look at spinning black holes. The singularity inherits the angular momentum of the star it formed from. So just launch your large mass (3x a solar mass if your using self gravitation, less if your compressing it yourself) and as the mass races along and turns into a black hole it will inherit the momentum of the forming mass. So there you are, nothing in there violates any law of physics. But it ain't easy.