Ship size vs. weapons

[apache]

Again, I will say that relativity is unproven. Nothing manmade has ever traveled to any significant portion of the speed of light, and if you want to believe it as fact, thats fine, but the truth is that it has never been proven absolutly.
Yes, a laser does attenuate over distance, (I thought I already conceded that in my Last post), but over the tactical combat distances in the game, and in a total vacuum, attenuation is extremely small, almost negligeable, and you are still going to get 99.99999999999% of all the laser energy to the target since it will not likely encounter many particles to reflect a significant amount of energy within that distance.
Since most beam weapons don't reach out farther than a range of 8, and about 3 spaces seem to be the diameter of an earth-sized planet, we can assume that the range of those range 8 weapons is about 32000 kilometers (less than a tenth of the distance from the earth to the moon). I hope we can agree that over this distance, in a vacuum, beam attenuation of a megawatt (much less powerful than my previously mentioned terrawatt laser) or greater laser is going to be small, and probably will be able to damage/kill something quite easily.