Armor has to protect an entire object, while a weapon only has to apply destructive energy to one part of it. Just mess up a vital system, and suddenly the whole thing stops working. A weapon doesn’t have to destroy the entire target. Machines rely on moving parts – be they a heart and lungs, or a fuel injection system. Even heavily armored tanks can be easily destroyed by much less sophisticated weaponry. Modern body armor can usually stop small arms fire, but it is absolutely useless against anything more powerful. Throughout history, weapons have gotten progressively more destructive, and armor has been unable to keep up. It turns out that destroying something is much easier than keeping it intact. In real life, we are already at the point where a single missile can sink a large warship, and that curve is only going to get more pronounced with new technology.
The iconic image of two capital ships slugging it out broadside to broadside simply does not work in space, and that’s because neither vessel would be able to take more than one or two hits from the other. In a more realistic world, getting from where you are to where the enemy is can take days or weeks, even with a relatively high level of technology. In a lot of scifi franchises, travel is near-instantaneous due to fancy warp drives or what-have-you. What’s more, because space is so big, travel time can become a serious factor. While this can work pretty well in novels, it’s a major problem for visual mediums that depend on action packed dog fights to keep things interesting. Long range missiles and laser weapons would mean that the opposing sides would never get close enough to see each other. Instead of a Romulan warbird filling the viewscreen, enemy ships would appear as little more than blips on a radar display. Objects in the asteroid belt are often millions of miles apart, and that’s considered densely packed in space. The distance between Earth and Pluto is about 53 times the distance between Earth and Mars. To quote the great Douglas Adams, “You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is…” Models of the solar system don’t really do it justice. The issues are so numerous that it’s no wonder filmmakers keep going back to a futuristic World War II. Space is an alien environment, and it’s difficult for us puny humans to understand all the potential difficulties of fighting there. Unfortunately, things get complicated when you introduce real science into the equation, and not just because there’s no sound in a vacuum. From Battlestar Galactica to Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War, some of our most riveting science fiction has come from spaceships trying very hard to destroy each other. Who doesn’t love giant space battles with lasers and missiles and shields, oh my? Communists, that’s who.
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