If I were king of the forrest, here is how space travel vehicles get done. You build a relatively small submarine looking craft and then go find yourself an asteroid. The manmade portion would be mostly engine and that engine would need mass. Essentially you would ideally have a square mile or two square mile volume asteroid with a compartmentalized manufactured space ship buried into the center of it. The ship would "burn" the matter it removed to make room for the ship. You could scale up or down for size according to the purpose of the ship. Obviously the asteroid serves as protection from micrometeroids as well as intentional kinetic weapons. Plenty of room for storage of cargo or supplies or whatever and plenty of fuel. (but if you need more fuel, go find another asteroid and attach it)
Battles would need to be energy weapons exclusively except for the most callous of concerns. Kinetic weapons that miss their intended target will eventually hit something. Ideally, you would have energy weapons that had multiple components that all had to focus simultaneously to be effective. However, as long as your have an asteroid to work with, there is no reason that you could not aim a stream of mass in whatever direction you saw fit.
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If I were king of the forrest, here is how space travel vehicles get done. You build a relatively small submarine looking craft and then go find yourself an asteroid. The manmade portion would be mostly engine and that engine would need mass. Essentially you would ideally have a square mile or two square mile volume asteroid with a compartmentalized manufactured space ship buried into the center of it. The ship would "burn" the matter it removed to make room for the ship. You could scale up or down for size according to the purpose of the ship. Obviously the asteroid serves as protection from micrometeroids as well as intentional kinetic weapons. Plenty of room for storage of cargo or supplies or whatever and plenty of fuel. (but if you need more fuel, go find another asteroid and attach it) Battles would need to be energy weapons exclusively except for the most callous of concerns. Kinetic weapons that miss their intended target will eventually hit something. Ideally, you would have energy weapons that had multiple components that all had to focus simultaneously to be effective. However, as long as your have an asteroid to work with, there is no reason that you could not aim a stream of mass in whatever direction you saw fit.