Is it just me, or do the space battle scenes in The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand not make sense? If the ships are more than a light second apart (300 000 kilometers), wouldn’t one simply have to keep moving (in various, random directons) to avoid being hit by laser weapons? And torpedoes? You must be kidding me!
A light second… the time in which it takes for light to move from one point to another.
It sounds, based on the descriptions, that those ships are rather like the capital ships of WWII… big, heavily armed and slow to react. I imagine a laser weapon would be able to hit and do some serious damage in the time it took to recognize the attack, and move out of the way… during which time your gunner is probably tracking you, hoping to increase the time your Field is exposed to the laser wash.
As for rockets/torpedos… I don’t know. In WWII, torpedo’s would be fired and may take quite some time to impact. Maybe it’s the same way there. Fire a rocket at several thousands miles an hour, and wait an hour or two.
Dodging lasers at 1 light second? Errr. These ships are BIG. Really freaking big. Maximum acceleration is limited to that at which people can still function, and that’s the main engines, providing straight line thrust only. Turning will be via maneuvering thrusters that simply can’t spin a giant ship around on a dime. You’ll need considerably more time than 1 second to avoid being pegged by a laser using a computer to project where you’ll be at that time given your current velocity and thrust vector. Naturally the smaller ships will be more able to dodge fire than the big behemoths.
What’s wrong with torpedoes? They can have acceleration factors many times higher than that of a ship that has to avoid having its crew black out from excess g’s, and nuclear warheads on them will probably be much more effective at overloading Langston fields than lasers. Naturally, you’d need to be closer for them to deliver the energy in a timely fashion, and there’d be counter-measure issues, but I don’t see any reason in principle why they shouldn’t be effective.