Broadsides and Blindsides
Blindside vs broadside
It's common practice when arming military vessels: watch your blindsided and broadsides. Every weapon has a limited range of motion, called a firing arc. If an enemy ship is outside of that range, your ship can't hit it. When considering where to place weapons on a vessel, and what kind of weapons to use, you need to focus on where these firing arcs overlap, and where they don't.
A broadside is an angle of approach where every weapon can fire on a single target at once. All firing arcs overlap and the wider this range is, the better. The problem is that the wider the broadside is, the more likely you are to have a blindside.
A blindside is an area of the ship that cant be defended because it lies outside of the vessel's firing arcs. No captain would dare venture out into the void with a confirmed blindside. It's not just about engaging other ships. Debris like asteroids and random space trash can poke a hole in the hull just as easily.
Space and time
There's no way this battleship is alone in the system. There are probably close to a dozen ships patrolling from one side to the other. How do we expect to take this ship down and not have a small fleet bearing down on us, instantly?
Space is big, and even light takes time to get where it needs to go. Defending a system leaves you vulnerable. You won't know about an enemy fleet entering the system for maybe thirty minutes to an hour, but if you've been there a while, the enemy fleet can see you just fine.
That's the secret. We only need a few moments to launch a broadside. They won't be able to react to our ship in time. Why? Because they won't even know we're here until after we're gone.
Hardpoints
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Any weapon that applies a force will apply the same force to the ship it's attached to. The bigger the boom, the bigger the strain on the hull. Hardpoints are areas of the hull designed to handle that strain, but they have limits.
The general rule is this: if it fires a big chunk of metal, use a hard point. The only weapons that can be fired safely outside of a ship's hardpoints are particle lances and beam weapons. Beam weapons apply heat, as opposed to kinetic force. There's very little recoil.
Particle weapons technically apply force, but on such a small scale it's negligible to the integrity of the hull. It's a weaponized particle accelerator. To think we used to build massive buildings just to watch particles slam together at ridiculous speeds. the more I think about my species the more I feel like we're basically children.
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Amazing chapter as always! Now I really want some space tape, could come in handy...
Right?! So many applications.