Weapon Types

Lasers

Directly converts energy to directed energy. Range is line of sight and velocity is the speed of light. In atmosphere the intensity falls off at range. The beam that comes out can be shaped so it can be narrow and higher intensity or broader and less intense, this can be overcome with larger energy throughput.

The damage caused by lasers is burning, much more effective in atmosphere and against soft targets where the burning has a chance to catch fire and do lingering damage and soft targets get burned through. In space the danger from lasers is less burn through and more heat applied to a ship. Lasers could slowly cook the people inside if they don't have proper heat dispensation systems. Hitting the same spot long enough to burn through is impossibly difficult in space, and even if they did how often are the exterior hulls on ships soft? What is the melting point of the external material? The higher it is the harder it is to burn through.

Kinetics

This is the most broad category as it ranges from small blades to asteroid mounted rail guns. The act of pushing material against material at high enough velocity to do damage. This is also the easiest to intuitively understand.

The damage caused is often piercing but can be blunt or slashing.

In atmosphere Kinetic firearms can be unwieldy but the instant damage to targets is unmatched. The projectile can be affected by its environment and often shoots in an arc taking skill to use effectively. In space dealing with the recoil requires extra systems, often reverse thrusters firing at the same time as the canon. Either way the projectile will move at some velocity, often faster than sound but no where near light speed. The exact velocity is munition dependent, requiring skill in which munition is used, the barrel its fired out of, the platform, and a number of other factors.

Plasma

A general step up from lasers in that they require more energy, act more like a kinetic at impact with no recoil like a laser. The projectile could be a beam, but also a short burst. Beams would be far more energy intensive. The gas burns what it hits like a laser but carries with it fumes.

Unlike lasers plasma needs some sort of gas to be used along with its energy, so it has two inputs instead of one. Like a kinetic I could see a cartridge being built that store the gas and energy required into one package to be used by a machine, but I can see early versions being dual loading.

This hits harder than lasers, but not as hard as kinetics, and doesn't have a lot of the same problems as kinetics. Plasma is mostly used on ships as a point defense system since it creates a cone out of its barrel naturally as the heated plasma attempts to disperse. This also limits its effective range even in space. After some distance the wave of plasma is hardly notable as it passes over, or through, your ship. At close range though this plasma is hotter than lasers, wider effect than kinetics, and can fry electronics as it melts away physical things.

Plasma for defense

This is in development across the galaxy, the only faction that has solved the energy storage and dispensation issues for now are the Monsi but this is under wraps and not public knowledge. Even still it uses detection software to predict the impact area and builds a small shield in that area, if the calculations are too far off the shield may miss. While the shield is active it draws a lot of power, regardless of effectiveness. The second major issue is that it only fully stops laser, it meshes with plasma attacks and creates a barrier but the weapon uses less energy and will win unless the defenders have much more energy. When dealing with kinetics its a mixed bag, smaller munitions can be completely destroyed in the shield but larger munitions, like railgun sabots, are turned to slag and have their velocity reduced a negligible amount so instead of a spear hitting the ship something resembling a lollipop does. The best case scenario is that the tip becomes too soft to puncture the ship too much, but this is assuming the heat doesn't help it move through the softer interior of the ship.

Missiles

Truly the king of warfare in the space age. Each and every ship should have at the very least small missiles to act as missile interceptors and I do mean every ship, the cost to opportunity cost is insane and the small explosive warheads can be used for anything.

Missiles travel slower than other kinetic munitions but can change course, pack a better payload, and operate in stealthy ways. Not to mention they can scale in cost and performance in either direction as much as one could want.

When Biona launches its ambush on the Republic it does so with a very special missile and ship. The missile has its own FTL system and enough energy to get it across a system. The ship operates in total stealth and why normal missile launch is detectable, pushing the missile out of the ship using an arm is not. It does not have an engine plume. It simple hits the target and even if it fails to detonate the FTL impact hits harder than a rail gun even if its smaller, the force can tear away parts of the ship. This also means it can penetrate the ship, then exit FTL, then detonate. These are insanely expensive, and so far no one has more than thought about it. The scale seems impossible, the smallest FTL engines that can be made seem to be limited by entropy to be Corvette class ships, this tech feels like magic.