[quote=@Willy Vereb]
Snip snip.
Speaking of which, how durable are the warships? Realistic as in paper thin and easy to destroy or they take multiple hits and behave more like naval ships in this sense?
[/quote]

So I'll take a modern day naval ship such as an Arleigh Burke Guided Missile Destroyer. Now poke it full of holes with some high velocity tungsten rounds. Ships come with a lot of redundant systems and a rather large amount of empty space meaning that the possibility of something vital being it hit comes in rather low all things considered, but it's likely they killed crew and damaged other non-essential systems. Hit it with an Exocet anti-ship missile or two and it's essentially a goner.

Now imagine your ship is in space. Poke it full of holes again and it may explosively decompress, so you just depressurize the ship before battle. You attempt to intercept any missiles because those are death sentences in space and pray that close-in-weapons-systems don't manage to poke a hole through something (or someone) important. Railguns would likely be a rather deadly hit as well, don't imagine anything would be capable of stopping a super dense round traveling at a measurable fraction of the speed of light.

Lasers are far easier to combat than its likely thought. Ablative plating would be a huge defense against them and doing things like setting a ship on spin during combat would spread out a continuous laser hit lessening intense damage to a single area. Not to mention most lasers have to be either A) Massive to do any sort of damage at anything farther than 1 light second or B) within 1LS range to inflict damage.

I think the real question is are lasers as we think of them weapons (Really powerful laser pointers) or are blasters (charged particle beam) such as those we see in Star Wars the real weapons.

I wrote this a bit ago, but didn't finish it until now and will just post it anyway.

[@TheSovereignGrave] the conventional railgun does normally fire solid ultra-dense slugs. If there are correctable railguns slugs, then the possibility of a knife fight is essentially null. Who ever has the best railgun wins, hands down every time. Your plasma arc will do nothing to the slug other than turn it into a cloud of molten hot metal still traveling as fast as it was before, if the arc even has enough time to act upon it. CIWS will not be able to intercept something so fast and a missile would face the same interception problem. A ship could not out run a self correcting round, at least not larger ships. I find the idea to be a bit OP.