Is a spherical craft with guns sticking out ever where the ideal space fighter?

Light and all EM radiation lose energy as an inverse-square of the distance travelled–at a point twice as far from the origin, lasers have four times less energy. But bullets aren't going to lose any velocity as they travel, so their energy stays more or less the same from muzzle to impact.

If your target is far enough away that you can't lead effectively with bullets, a guided missile is going to work far better than a laser, as at those distances by the time your laser hits the target it's going to be too weak to really have an advantage.

Sure, losing the heat is best, but I think you missed my point. Using ceramics, heat is ridiculously easy to disperse over a wide area, to the point that it's far less dangerous–think about a single pinprick being heated a few hundred degrees and melting a hole in the material, versus the same energy spread out over a big plate that as a hole is only heated a few hundred degrees. The latter is much less dangerous, and it's really easy to achieve with ceramics and similar.

Good old-fashioned water might be more economical than liquid nitrogen, but yeah. Your only real options are big, flat radiator heatsinks and liquid cooling.

It's really difficult to say without a working prototype. But like the leaf said, once you ruggedize the laser and account for all the waste heat you're looking at quite an ordeal. Even if it's less than what the enemy has to deal with, it's still an order of magnitude less than the heat a kinetic weapon will put out.

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Ok, thanks for the info.

Unlike a lightbulb a laser is a coherent beam of light which means it doesn't spread out over distance in that manner. However your points about waste heat are valid.

A "true" laser wouldn't, but true lasers don't exist, for the same reason frictionless vacuums don't exist. Any laser you care to build will still slowly spread out over time and lose energy in the same way a conventional light source would.

In space, shape matters because it determines where your center of gravity is, and how far away your thrusters must be. A spacecraft can be any shape it wants, but having a cylinder(cones benefit from this too) eases design 'so' much. You just put everything in a line, and your cg is always sitting directly above the engines thrust vector. If your engine is pointing even a tiny amount off from your CG, you start spinning, and you have to burn fuel to stop. (solveable) problems arise when you want a spaceship with a non-cylindrical design; essentially, your engines must mow be angled to point into your CG, which now moves around much more(as you use fuel) than it used to. Also, your control thrusters must be re-positioned and angled properly as well as accomodating for possible CG locations. These are problems the shuttle faced and solved, but they are still problems. is right, some sort of cone (probably concealing a long recoilless gun pointing out the tip) will be the first/most common/most effective military spacecraft design.

The first manned military spacecraft (outside the Almaz stations) will more likely be a capsule design ala Apollo or Orion, except the capsule detaches, does a 180, and reattaches, heat shield forward. Either a dual-purpose or dual-layered heat shield to protect the crew both from reentry heating and energy weapons. Maybe even some kinetic ones, too.

recoilless guns are going to be the most effective weapons in space, debate me

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damn that pic looks horrible, im going to try not copy-pasting it

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Its true that perfectly collimated beams do not exist in the real world but a properly designed and calibrated laser still can engage targets many thousands of kilometers away in space.

A cylinder can't maneuver in every direction, or change direction instantly.

Should a 4 gauge shotgun be top loading or bottom loading? Would speed loaders like vid related work without those metal guides that would get in the way of loading loose shells. Maybe it can be removable.

They don't lose energy, the energy is just spread out. An important distinction(depending on the size of the target, of course).

jesus christ this shit again
missiles are the only viable option for space warfare
space 'fighters' will exclusively be missile carriers
the only potential use for lasers & guns is point defense

Something like the Soyuz would most likely be the first space fighter. Just replace the orbital module with something like a missile launcher or, as you mentioned, recoil-less guns.

Imagine the kind of gimballing you'd need to keep a laser focused on one square foot of hull at fifty thousand kilometers.

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Yes it can. This is space, there's no air resistance. A box, cylinder, sphere, or rhombus all have the same maneuverability. Especially if they are using gyros to turn, and in some cases (longer rectangles or cylinders) the length of the craft might actually help it turn if it used attitude thrusters.

Depending on what weapons are being used, it might not even have to turn. A missile will turn itself…

Dubious. Even if so, why waste mass on it when you can have a weapon which works better?
If you want low recoil and miss rate, go with missiles. If you want low latency and miss rate go with a cannon. If you want low recoil and latency go with EFP.
As far as I'm concerned a starship would have all of those, an EWAR suite, decoys, and yes even a laser. If nothing else, it could be used for communication, power transfer to decoys, or blinding missile optics.

what are you kidding? Here have this instead

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After this thread, I think the most cost effective way would be a fleet of drone cone head to directly ram enemy space station.

Only metal and engine required, cost efficient.

Yeah, alright, not a bad idea. I have an idea to make it even more deadly; add explosives into the cones. The cost/damage ratio would be even better. And if you added a way to propel them and maneuver them, like a rocket or something, you could get up to insane speeds and adjust for any maneuvering the enemy makes. Wow damn, how has no one thought of this before, this is ingenious.

The rocket is the engine, retard.

Going at high speed alone is enough, no need for explosive at all.

A kilogram of industrially produced RDX costs $30-$50, plus markup. Impact fuses can be made in a kitchen for nothing. 100 bucks more than quadruples its effectiveness, and you're talking about cost effectiveness here spergook.

As opposed to nothing with just hardened cone head and a high speed engine?

You're joking but that's not at all a bad idea.

Only reason why anyone would make a manned fighter is if they: A) were planning on sending it to fight beyond remote control range and B) couldn't trust computer technology.

The smallest manned ship would be twice the size of the ISS with a crew of maybe six (3 shifts of 2), deployment time of years, and its area of responsibility would be low orbit around a planet.
Most real ships would be about five to ten times the size of the ISS, their deployment would be a few weeks to a month, and their area of responsibility would be an elliptic orbit around a planet or the space immediate between a planet and its natural moon.

Fighting in deep space is retarded, you're more visible, farther away from help, dealing with more natural threats, and you can't even threaten your enemy effectively. It would be like Russia and China sending their armies to Antarctica to fight it out. Makes no sense.

Only reason to fight in deep space is to intercept pirates trying to jack civilian ships or redirect your cargo. And for that you'd use an inflatable fighter, two people crew, about the size of the ISS. Picrel.

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How retarded are you? You're basically describing a missile capable of operating in space so you're already 100000+ in the hole per unit regardless of whether you put explosives in it, and you don't even have it up in space yet thats just the production cost.
Now to make an effective mass driver you need either lots of mass or lots of speed (meaning lots of fuel, meaning lots of mass) so its going to cost way more per unit than if you put a couple hundred dollars worth of boom juice in the damn thing to begin with.

Not joking, anime has toyed with this idea i.e. the buster fleet in Diebuster.

But the point is that there is no need for explosive, you still achieve penetration with the cone head.

We have space telescopes that can keep steady for days so they can take pictures of distant galaxies. We can keep rotating a satellite in the same exact direction for months every orbit while it takes long exposure after long exposure.
I would say that we have the technology to focus a laser on a target that is within a few dozen earth radii.

The best lasers can manage a meter-wide beam at around 100km. Even at those ranges, you'd need a laser capable of tens of megawatts to meaningfully damage a properly armored warship.
Lasers do have some value (being able to directly target specific points on the enemy vessel is always useful) but they're not the superweapon you think they are.

It's not that bad of a concept. The main problem would be the propulsion: you'd need something with enough dV to reach the target at a suitably high speed and enough thrust/weight to perform terminal maneuvers, while also being cheap and light enough to be launched en masse.

psst its easier to focus on things that are farther away

This is after we build a dyson swarm and achieve FTL. Energy isn't an issue. Most of this shit would be built in orbit anyway

Would they be called missiles or torpedoes?How do you distinguish the two in space?

Depends if you're pretending you're an aircraft or a naval vessel that day. I always assumed torpedoes would be big, slow, and meant to be used against spacecraft that are also large enough to launch torpedoes. Whereas missiles would be smaller, more maneuverable, and meant for fighters and such if such designations would even mean anything in actual space combat, as opposed to sci-fi WWII with flashy lights.

I call it the Space Knight Fleet, cuz this is basically knight maneuvering like in the Middle Ages.

Maybe it could be determined on how big it is compared to the ship.

What about loitering EFP munitions?

The ideal ship is a cone of reflective and ablative armor, scattered with PD and radiators, using casaba howitzer (nuclear EFP) missiles for expensive weapons, or railguns for cheap weapons.

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php

No, the ideal shape for a space fighter or any space combat ship is going to be an pyramid or cone.

Manned fighters are not likely to be a thing outside of planetary policing though. Fighters require enough fuel to accelerate to the target, maneuver, return home, and decelerate for landing. Compare that to a disposable bot. If the bot has the same fuel capacity then it can go farther and get there faster, fight longer, pull harder turns, and doesn't need to be recovered. It's not as dramatic but it is smarter.

The ideal drone fighter would look like a cross between a Star Fury from B5 and a Viper from BSG. Thruster clusters mounted on booms (arms) sticking out from the main body in the rear with one more mounted in the nose to facilitate flips. The majority of the craft volume would be occupied by either fuel or reaction mass. There may or may not be a large central thruster in the rear of the craft but it may not be needed since the maneuvering thrusters may be capable of propelling it fine on their own.

There would be little point to mounting a laser on such a craft since the mother ship would be able to mount several lasers much larger and more powerful, and those lasers would be able to reach the target much faster than the fighter.

The weapons will likely be mostly nuclear tipped missiles with perhaps a single cannon for intimidation or precision work.

We need entirely new names, none of the earth-based ones apply.

A space weapon is basically a small autonomous spaceship.
It's likely launched out of a cannon to about 2km/s.
After initial launch it boosts itself to 10km/s over a period of hours. Then it may coast for hours or days on a single orbit looking for enemies.
After that it would change direction or boost toward an enemy for hours.
Then it will coast toward the enemy location for a few hours.
And finally it will do minor maneuvers on approach to the enemy (approach equaling 1,000km).
When its sure enough, it will release a cloud of ball bearings and begin electronic warfare on the enemy, trying to confuse its radar system.
The weapon is hoping the enemy won't be able to locate the cloud of bearings with radar in time to evade.
Or if the enemy does evade successfully, at least it forced him to waste reaction mass maneuvering.
Reaction mass being water usually - a few such maneuvers will eventually cause the enemy to either kill himself of thirst/lack of air, or strand himself on a vector that can be easily bombarded.

What the hell do you call that?

It's a drone, shell, missile, mine, torpedo, flak, decoy.

Good luck describing it in one word.

None of that is how anything works.
An object going 2km/s would not be able to sustain any earth orbit. But I'm guessing you mean launched out of something already in orbit; so if it's launched at 2km/s from something already in earth orbit the munition's orbit would then be elliptical. A 10km/s orbit is slightly above the standard height for commercial satellites of 7.5km/s, so with what you're describing it would slow itself down. It makes no sense to have a single patrolling munition compared to how it does and will work- a target is spotted, a carrier gets itself into effective range, a large number of missiles are launched and create an intercept vector, preferably in the exact opposite direction of the target so speeds are effectively doubled.

Wrong
Semi-correct
Right and Wrong

Missiles will always be short ranged in space because in order to maneuver they will have to use thrusters meaning that any missile in space will be mostly thrusters and fuel. Compared to a missile on Earth that uses relatively little fuel and then glides towards target they will have virtually zero range.
Kinetics will be the long range weapon of choice as it's the only weapon viable at such ranges.

Most likely scenario is you are on 400km altitude orbit, trying to hit someone on 500km orbit. Or vice versa.

Solid rocket fuel is not useful, those burn out in seconds and have no ability to engage or force the enemy to maneuver. Space weapons MUST be powered by ion or plasma thrusters. Nothing else will give you the ridiculous time and delta v necessary to change orbits.
Given that…. why wouldn't you give your missile an extra boost at the start with a cheapo CLGG launch? In fact you have to do it, if you want to give your weapons carrier ANY standoff range.

I don't understand most of your post, why does the weapon need a circular sustainable orbit??

Do you have a brain tumor?
If your projectile cannot maneuver then it is regulated to distances where the enemy does not have time to react.
Missiles will intrinsically always have a larger range in space.

If my goal was to immediately change its orbit you're right. But with that comes the caveats of being unable to launch multiple simultaneously and being unable to delay a launch, i.e having it float alongside you for a period of time.
It doesn't necessarily, but if your munition happens to be near the periapsis of its elliptical orbit when a target arrives, or not even 100% the periapsis, there's many more inconvenient places they could come in if you're elliptical, it would cost multiple times more delta-v and take longer to intercept.
You were talking about guided mines essentially, that sit in orbit for long periods of time.

Not exactly ideal, but these are quasi-realistic.

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With hemispherical back. Such back alone reduces RCS of cone by a factor of x100

What about mech? Limb movement allows free spining and direction facing without burning fuel.

So Star Destroyer?

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Anything other than this is incorrect.

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I swear I keep seeing this image over and over. Limbs are shit compared to gyros, and there is no need to make an over-complicated design as with a mech.

You can get the same effect of spinning limbs with flywheels. Except the flywheel is more compact, easier to build and maintain, can house batteries or other components, and it isn't a stupid fucking mech leg. Mechs have never and will never make any kind of sense in any environment. Everything they can do can be done better and cheaper by something else that already exists.

Yeah, that basic shape is right. The internal layout is all wrong and the weapons are a joke, but it's for pew-pew space opera, not hard SF.

The engine placement of the N1 makes them unstable and needlessly expose the pilot to exhaust hazards.

You would want manned fighters because completely unmanned weapons is a bad idea. It fucks up and everyone dies including you. If the enemy can hack it you're in an even worse state.

It's super easy to threaten enemies in space. They have no way to get into cover. If you have any way to target them they're pretty much fucked. Space ships are not going to be small fighters, they're going to be colony ships of sorts. They will be equipped with rail guns because it's super effective to throw small objects at hyper speeds in order to cause nuclear weapon tier destruction. Especially when you can pick up an asteroid and it requires minimum processing to launch out the guns.

Limbs are incredibly useful things to have. In space where weight isn't an issue limbs may end up being the optimal option for weaponry.

The gun launcher is a self contained concept, you can take the weapon and push it away from the ship, it will work just as well. That's why thinking of it as a missile or a shell is silly, it's so many different things.

Nah it's just a fact that it takes days to change an orbit, anywhere from an hour to a day in the Earth-Moon system. Then, once the orbit is changed, it doesn't mean the enemys orbit is at the same angle, so you have to wait in that orbit until you can spot the enemy, after which another boost is required to catch him.
2km/s will change a lot of orbits, the extra ion boost is needed to actually turn to attack an enemy while both the weapon and the enemy are in the same orbit, or to escape and kill an enemy on approach to the planet.

It's the same faggot who reposts it in every space thread.

And just how the fuck do you power the limb movement? Do you think its just magic like in your fucking korean cartoons?

What material is the railgun going to be made out of? Magic metal?

Space combat isn't in visual range, you can't point at a guy and want him gone.
The very nature of space instead means you have to rely on munitions that are so incredibly smart, they're comparable to a manned fighter.

It's less "shoot that guy in front of us!" and more "find where that guy is and kill him tomorrow!"

Neither does an asshole mooning me from across the valley, but if he's 800m away and all I have is a shitty 5.56 with 3MOA accuracy…. he's got plenty of cover. Space is all about range and range presents its own difficulties especially when your bullets have to travel for hours at "point blank" range.

A railgun is completely useless, it is not cheap to have to carry around dozens of replacement barrels because each is only good for a few shots. Or to carry hundreds of tons of capacitors and reactors and thousands of tons of coolant just to use this inefficient system of launching a dumb rock at an enemy that can evade with a freaking solar sail. I don't know where you got a hardon for railguns but my suggestion is to do equations in your head.

Yes, but you're forgetting one thing.
A E S T H E T I C

The closest thing to that may be the B5 Thunderbolt fighter, which has some damn fine aesthetics as well. I always liked the White Star, which is probably the only other fictitious spaceship with looks as sweet as the Naboo starfighter. The whole concept of the White Star as a medium cruiser that handles practically like a heavy fighter or gunship was amazing, and a picture of it should be posted so people who haven't seen it can salivate.

starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nebula-class_Star_Destroyer
Here's a version of the Star Destroyer that comes from the Expanded Universe. It fixes many of the Imperial-class's design flaws, particularly the exposed bridge tower.

You might never have traditional mecha in a military setting due to the complexity of the hardware, but you could have traditional military vehicles like tanks and fighters acquiring more mech-like traits. You could even have an all-environment mech-like vehicle that transforms into different forms to negotiate different areas, but it probably wouldn't look humanoid.

Did you miss the entire point that space ships won't be small manned craft like our ships are? They're going to be absolutely massive. There's no reason to make a ship to travel between worlds that isn't self sustaining, it's just too dangerous where failure kills you. Think closer to Star Trek than Star wars.

Helicopter maintenance and aircraft maintence is on par with a mech's maintenance once you get past the baby stage we're at now.

Zig Forums is not the place for you

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You sure are angry at people for discussing military use mechanical machines. It's almost like tanks exist and small robots are already seeing military use in bomb disposal/rescue missions.

See if you can find the difference between pic related and
If I call my dick a military use liquid dispenser it doesn't make it any more relevant to the thread's topic, or reality.

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At even orbital ranges a ship the size of new york city can easily avoid a fucking railgun shot, because it would take four hours for the bullet to reach it. And that's assuming the projectile even hits…. if its built like the space station the railgun shot might go clean through without touching anything, or might just depressurize a minor section.

You still have not addressed:

...

Honestly I don't know how people can as stupid as you are and not realize it. If I was as dumb as you are I'd kill myself. Tell me, how would tech advancements solve this problem of 'it cannot maneuver'. Oh, of course, because it's completely non descript and unprovable you can say they're gonna make a $1 FTL drive and put it in the shell.

Helicopter maintenance and the maintenance of high-performance jets like the F-22 costs a pretty penny, so your mech had better do enough to justify it, or else it has to have a unique capability like a helicopter's ability to linger over a target and perform VTOL. My faith in the power of a true mech, as opposed to a conventional vehicle with mech-like qualities, is stronger than that of many here. Unfortunately, the designs of the mecha theorists of today are still too focused on replacing existing aircraft and ground vehicles when they should be focused on carving out a new role for mecha. A mech is going to be to other vehicles like a chopper is to a jet. Both are aircraft, but the similarities of the two types of craft are far outweighed by their differences.

I think I'm going to start calling my dick this.

The best use for a railgun on a spaceship would be for a ship designed especially for orbital bombardment. It'd be totally worthless in ship-to-ship combat. Missiles will be the bulk of a space cruiser's weapons. Lasers will only have any use for point defense. If you want a weapon for space battle cruisers that approximates machine guns, you're probably looking at a rapid-fire particle cannon because recoil will be a much greater concern than with a maritime naval ship, meaning your projectile has to be a hell of a lot smaller and lighter if you want to get it up to a speed where it would be useful in space combat. Particle cannons have the potential for their projectiles to reach high relativistic velocities.

This post is so meaningless it hurts. In a thread where discussion is about potential weapon systems based on what we know and already possess/research, positing a system that relies exclusively on vague handwaved miracle technology with no particular research or developments provided to back up the possibility of them existing is useless. You might as well claim that this super science will make it possible to generate portals directly to the heart of suns within the enemy spaceship and render all ballistics useless because it's not as if "Technology doesn't advance so it's always going to be exactly as it is now."

As much as I like the Star Destroyer, it's actually a very bad design. Wedge-shaped ships can only attack with all their weapons when pointed directly at the target, and when flanked from the sides, they can only use half their guns. When flanked from behind, they're fucked for two reasons:
The ideal design for a ship is one that's fast and nimble with a good power-to-mass ratio that can move fast enough to prevent laser weaponry from being able to focus on a specific spot in its hull for too long by constantly altering its angle (thus only heating up the outer plating at best), has omnidirectional strafing and three-dimensional turning/axis rolling capabilities. Small, but sufficiently sized for its weapons which are placed all over the ship, with a sloped hull design to deflect debris. A cilindrical design is ideal to reduce chances of collision with things like asteroids when travelling. The Imperial Tartan Cruiser fits the bill, save for the bridge window at the front, which is unnecessary in a spaceship. Other than that, it's a good design.

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...

There is no armor that can protect against collisions at cosmic speeds, and spacecraft don't really need broadside batteries of cannons.

That said, have a rare and even more megalomaniacal Star Destroyer.

Suddenly finding yourself flanked and surrounded in space warfare is about as possible as lasersword-toting space wizardry powered by microbes.

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Not by ships.

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You do know what these are right?

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An Imperial admiral would tell you that the solution to this is to just not get flanked. It's true that Star Destroyers are much more limited from the sides and especially from the rear, but Star Destroyers carry 72 TIE fighters and various other ships. Star Destroyers have a much better chance in a realistic space combat environment than most Rebel capital ships. If you support a Star Destroyer squadron with some good frigates and light cruisers, you can fix the flaws of their wedge design. Every ship is going to have something it's not good at, and you need to think in terms of how a fleet of ships would operate to cover for each other's weaknesses instead of focusing exclusively on individual ships.

You might not have space marines using lasers or plasma swords, but cool exosuits have a very good chance of happening, so it's not a total loss.

space fighters will be shaped either for maximum agility or to be as stealthy as possible
until we come up with some exotic energy superweapons the only truly viable weapon in space will be missiles so the biggest priority will be placed on detecting and accurately tracking hostiles while not getting hit yourself
nobody will bother with armor because a collision from a missile at 0.05c will instantly fuck up any size of ship

Stealth in space is impossible. Your heat signature will be obvious.

I'm sorry but railguns are NEVER going to improve enough to be a viable weapon.

2,000 years from now when railgun shots are traveling at mach 100, there's going to be some cheapo particle beam weapon which fires the same energy value at .98c.

Just drop the hardon, do what you're told for once. Think of the queen.

Exactly.

It doesn't even have to use external thrusters, those waste reaction mass. Modern satellites use torque attitude control. Basically they use a servomotor to spin a heavy weight within the satellite in order to turn it in the opposite direction with the torque.

How are you going to surprise a spaceship in space enough to "flank" it? Any ship or weapon is going to take hours or even weeks to get to you, and is going to be visible for most of that time.
I'm seriously getting annoyed with the naval bullshit in the space thread.

Not only is this stupid but a cone permits HALF of your weapons to be retargeted in a sideways combat. In terms of weapons this is as efficient as a fucking sphere, and in terms of armor it's either equal to a sphere or twice as efficient depending on angle of attack.

I AM NOT POSTING THIS AGAIN, NEXT TIME YOU PIPE UP WITH A DUMB IDEA I AM JUST CALLING YOU DUMB.

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Traditional power sources. To move in space you need to expel mass as there's nothing to push on, but all your internal power could be done the same way modern ships are done. That is realistic space flight 101.

You are strong in the Dork Side.
Have some Vindicator picket cruisers made by Fractalsponge.

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This is the Bellator-class battlecruiser. Just by looking at it, you can tell that Alderaan shot first.

Lasers and particle accelerators are hardly exotic, and spaced armor is efficient against them.
But they still have to be relatively close, in cosmic perspective, to be accurate against maneuvering targets.

Even a kilometer-sized object is effectively impossible to hit by lasers at a range larger than 0.5 lightseconds.
Direct visual contact itself can only track where the target WAS at the time its light reached your retina, and the target only has to perform modest-G maneuvers, at the speed spaceships have, to be already somewhere else by the time the lasers shoot, let alone by the time the beams arrive.

You'd be surprised how much energy it costs to accelerate up anything with a stationary mass to 0.05c. All of that is lost if you miss, which you will.
And even if you hit, the projectile turns into plasma on impact that can still be dissipated by spaced and ablative armor.

True "stealth" is impossible everywhere.
Energy signatures, however, can be dimmed in certain directions.
If the enemy doesn't know where to look, an energy source - if baffled enough on the side facing him - is capable to hide in plain sight.

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No, a gothic cathedral with the nose of a galley and more weapons than sanity is the best possible spacecraft. On that note, could a guided missile survive if it was accelerated by a Voitenko compressor? I of course mean a missile that is comparable in size to a smaller building.

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For fuck's sake, do you faggots understand the concept of firing a missile and having it perform a wide-angle turn AROUND the enemy's ship to hit its WEAK SPOT?
That's why I mentioned the fucking Javelin. It can fly OVER MBTs and hit them from the top, i.e. the are where their armor is at its WEAKEST.
I can't fucking believe I have to actually draw this shit for you.

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Are you being ironic?
This has just turned into a retard containment & fantasy thread.

You're also use arbitrary numbers for the total number of weapon placements in that picture you fucking strawmanning nigger. You bitch about people analoguing space combat to naval combat yet you exemplify your "point" by confining spaceship combat to a 2 dimensional scenario. In case you've forgotten, you can spin a spaceship in 3 different axis at will, and this is a fucking problem for wedge-shaped ships because it exposes more of their surface area if you turn them sideways to point all of its available guns at the enemy. This is remedied by using a more cylindrical design, which surface area doesn't change all that much when rolling.

What did you expect when people are basing the entire premise on a design from a fantasy-in-space franchise with depictions of space combat that explicitly takes inspiration from naval combat? Those are the rules you're playing by just by picking a star wars ship design.

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Solid projectile railguns are retarded granted but plasma railgun are a thing.

I can't fucking believe you can use a keyboard with a brain like this, so I suspect a caretaker is doing that work for you.

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You must have a list of illustrated instructions reminding you how to breathe hanging from your wall because this level of stupidity is unfathomable.

Let me explain this in terms that your retarded monkey brain can understand.

Changing direction in atmosphere is cheap. You point your missile's aerodynamic surfaces in the right direction, and your 300m/s forward speed is turned into 250m/s of lateral speed for no fuel cost.
Changing direction in space is really fucking expensive. In order to turn a missile around you have to first stop completely, which costs just as much fuel as it did to get up to speed in the first place, then spend that same amount of fuel a third time to get back up to speed. The end result is that you close at probably a third of the speed of a missile that you launched directly at the target.

The total number of guns is arbitrary you retarded chimp. It doesn't fucking matter if the ship has 12 guns or 120000 or 2, as long as they're evenly distributed the geometry is the same.
The ship either facing you or perpendicular to you. Whether the enemy is pointing up or to the side makes absolutely no difference.
What the fuck are you even talking about? The cone and wedge layouts have all guns facing forward, that's their entire fucking purpose.

What prevents my ship from turning as well?
Or firing on the missile that actually slows to zero relative speed at one point?
What prevents my ship from firing on your ship from over 2x the range, because for some reason your stupid missile wasted half its fuel turning, and thus your weapons have less than half the range of mine?

That's pretty fucking funny.

YOU ARE DUMB.

Actually its worse…

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Absolutely retarded.
You can make use of a rocket's thrust with proper use of maneuvering thrusters. You don't even need to waste fuel launching it at a good speed, you can catapult the fucking things out of the ship and counteract the counterforce with the ship's thrusters, then use maneuvering thrusters to send the rockets on a wide angle of attack around the target to maintain as much momentum as possible, not send it on a straight line, then turn it 180 degrees and thrust the other fucking way. You don't even need exclusive use of propellants to turn or spin rockets because reaction wheels and gyroscopes exist. You don't dump all the propellant into one direction, then change it at once. You manage the trajectory and momentum over time for maximum efficiency. We've had this shit since the fucking Hubble you goddamn idiot.
Do you have the slightest idea of what conversation of angular momentum is? Or vectoring? Of course you fucking don't, your skull full of fucking lard instead of brains.
Yes it does you retard. Depending on its orientation, your chances of hitting a specific area differ. You're not gonna be able to hit its top side as easily if it's facing away from you, unless you employ weaponry that can maneuver around in space and hit it from its flanks, such as what I just explained to your autistic ass just a second ago. How the fuck do you not comprehend this?

Power-to-weigh ratio. Also, yes, do that. Turn your entire ship around so you won't be hit from behind by a missile, that'll expose your backside to direct weapon fire real nice. If you don't, you'll get hit in the back by a flanking missile. Either way, you get fucked. See how that works now?
I've already explained that this is not the case unless you're as retarded as the burger. Also, that argument can be used against any sort of projectile that doesn't change its trajectory, in which case you'd be fucking retarded to use weaponry with no onboard targeting systems or trajectory-altering capability and relied upon predictive trajectory for the enemy ship in space.
Arbitrary again, leaf faggot. See above.

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