What works? How are ships and vehicles armed?

[whartung]

Agreed, better range than any other weapon, but even more importantly, better penetration than anything else.
High-powered lasers basically ignore armour.

The truly "game breaking" nature of lasers is that they scale to enormous sizes. Normally this would be constrained by the mirrors and lenses, but with gravitic focusing, that's all out the window.

On the other hand, if you can have a spinal PA, "why not" a spinal laser. But then you get into issues of beam size, so even with all the power, the beam would be over a larger area, diminishing the value of that power. 10,000Mj in .5mm beam, even with gravitic focusing, just not sure how practical that would be without melting something important on the way.

Maybe its a meter wide beam that is gravitic focused down to pencil lead size.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Spinal Mount Lasers would (most likely) be Beam Lasers that can be "swept" across a hull to slice it apart with ruthless efficiency.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

The truly "game breaking" nature of lasers is that they scale to enormous sizes. Normally this would be constrained by the mirrors and lenses, but with gravitic focusing, that's all out the window.

You don't need enormous size, just decent power.

A MCr 1 laser barbette is easily better than a MCr 115 large PA bay:

Both penetrates ~800 points of armour at short range, the laser still does it at maximum range, unlike the PA bay.
The laser emitter itself is tiny, only the capacitor takes any space.