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[NullForceOmega]

That is entirely dependent on the material being used as the base for the plasma, and its properties while in plasma state, hypothetically ferrous plasma could be cohesive at rather decent ranges.

[MonkeyHead]

I think that any plasma weapon is essentially a coilgun, since you need the electromagnetic field to propel and contain it. Railguns are not very good at that, they mostly just brute-force throw electricity at whatever completes their circuit until it goes hella fast.

Sort of-ish.

Coil guns accelerate ferrous projectiles in the direction of a force due to magnetism. Plasma, being electrically charged, would move at right angles to a magnetic field, meaning an interesting arrangement of coils and timings would be needed to use a coil gun style accelerator for plasma - just look at a Tokamak (radial field) or Stellerator (twisting linear field) as a rough example. A rail gun device accelerates a projectile at a right angle to current flow through it by virtue of a resultant force from two interacting magnetic fields. The plasma, in theory, could be used as a current carrying medium, and as such accelerated by a railgun like device, but has the added complication of being highly charged itself offering a third set of electromagnetic force to deal with. It might be easier to have the plasma delivered via a ferrous capsule by either method. In UFO:AI, humanity reverse engineers alien weapons to create encased plasma rounds fired from traditional guns, which are basically a round with a small charge capable of producing and venting a small amount of hydrogen plasma in a small shaped charge style detonation when the tip of the round impacts its target. Neato, huh?

Making a weapon that shoots plasma past very short ranges would be hard^{[Citation Needed]}

Not if you can cleverly use EM fields to direct it as one wishes.

[Amperzand]

The point is that that's very hard to do.

[MonkeyHead]

... and there is also the sun, which via its magnetic field flings plasma insane distances. All one needs is a mastery of how to produce and control strong magnetic fields, and one can literally bend plasma to their will.

[i2amroy]

Plasma vs rail.

Plasma is more powerful at penetrating armor than magnetic weapons in some cases, but I think that a railgun would be better. It's fast. Really fast. Plasma's just burny (but only really burny). Right?

Basically what you're asking here is "thermal vs. kinetic". Plasma weapons rely on heat to hurt things, and as such are great for systems that have low thermal conductivity (such as say, things in a vacuum). On the other hand railguns have a huge amount more penetration force due to actually being a kinetic impact. Plasma works great against things that can crispify (like human flesh) while railguns will literally just punch through a soft enough target and pass out the other side without really causing any serious damage. (Seriously, a fast enough railgun projectile would literally pass straight through a person leaving two fairly neat little holes behind without any other real damage, while a plasma shot would basically crispify you to death). Railgun shots fly faster (so fast that they can actually go off course when they hit the atmosphere) than plasma shots do, which aids in firing over long distances.

Considering space warfare, though, they both kinda suck. Both are way too slow to cover any meaningful distance (heck, light is too slow in anything but the absolute most close range shots), and have the disadvantage of both having mass which gives them a hell of a stronger backwards kick than a laser beam does; a backwards kick that you have to burn an equal amount of momentum in the opposite direction or be pushed off course by.

Realistically any sort of spaceship warfare with anything moving at a speed less than the speed of light simply comes down the question of who can burn the most delta-v and still have enough fuel left to get to wherever they want to go. The distances in space are so vast that there's plenty of time for anyone to see your shot coming and move out of the road if they want to (since you have to be shooting at not where they are, but where they are going to be in several minutes/hours), so the question just comes down to how much each of you can afford to move out of the road and not end up stranded in the middle of space. Lasers still have the problem in that you have to know where someone is going to be in another half hour or so, but have the advantage that it's impossible for them to see them coming, because the information that you fired at them reaches them at the same time that the laser does.

Stealth fields:
These are actually pretty simple to make (and honestly we're approaching the technology level where we could manufacture one right now), there's just a few big problems with them.
1) They'd actually be a "stealth shield", not a "stealth field". As in you'd have a physical shield surrounding you that bends light to conceal whatever is inside of the egg-shaped shield bubble.
2) If no light gets into the shield, then you are essentially flying blind. If light can't get in then it can't get out either, meaning that you can't see where you're going. (On potential solution to this would be to make it only work on certain wavelengths, though that means you wouldn't be invisible to anyone looking in on the same wavelength that you were looking out on).
3) Due to physics any sort of propulsion system has to be outside of the bubble (though you could open/close the bubble as needed with some work), meaning that you can't steer while invisible either.
The end result is that while you can go totally invisible, you've essentially got to surround your spaceship with a bubble made out of a very delicate metamaterial that probably won't work well if it gets damaged even a little bit, and while it's active you have no idea where you are going nor can you turn in any way. This also gives the further disadvantage that if an enemy sees you go invisible than your invisibility doesn't make a difference, all they need to do is calculate out your trajectory based on your speed when you cloaked and then put a bullet right where you are going to be, and there's nothing you can do to dodge it or even see them shooting at you.

Cause energy is literaly free and simple to harness and permeates every thing.

While this is technically true (energy/mass equivalence and all that jazz), in reality it's impossible to extract the energy from 99.9% of those things.

[Insanegame27]

What about space missiles?

[MonkeyHead]

What about space missiles?

Too slow, too easy to shoot down.

[Virex]

If you want to do stealth right, you also have to cool your space ship down to close the temperature of the solar wind at your position, else people will spot you by your thermal signature. Theoretically this is not impossible to do, you can dump the heat generated by on-board processes into internal some sort of internal storage, but such an internal storage has a limited capacity so your time instealth is likely to be limited to a few hours at most.

[Insanegame27]

So really it comes down to if you can move out of the way (Guns, lasers, rail/coilguns, plasma weaponry) or shoot it down.

[TheBiggerFish]

PTW for !!SCIENCE!!

[MonkeyHead]

... and there is also the sun, which via its magnetic field flings plasma insane distances. All one needs is a mastery of how to produce and control strong magnetic fields, and one can literally bend plasma to their will.

Yeah, but the sun produces insane amounts of energy and is so fucktastically large it is able to produce that strong a magnetic field. Trying to contain that in, say, a gun would mean that if the gun was damaged a huge chunk would be torn out of the planet you're on at best.

Well, yes, some handwavium science to scale it down is required...

[Amperzand]

What about space missiles?

A space missile is basically an automated space ship, maybe smaller than others, maybe not, that focuses on speed and carrying a warhead rather than having weapons, defenses, or crew. Useful for being able to hit something over extremely long range, since it can correct for dodges, but also visible from literally everywhere b'cuz engine flare and nowhere near as fast as relativistic slugs or lasers.

Cause energy is literaly free and simple to harness and permeates every thing.

...I think not.

All matter is made from energy, and rather a lot of it, but the ways of converting it into a more versatile form of that energy are pretty expensive/complex/dangerous. Antimatter's great at it, for instance, but it's super hard to obtain and has the slight problem of going up like a megaton-range fourth of july if the storage tank has power supply issues or gets bored.

[i2amroy]

If you want to do stealth right, you also have to cool your space ship down to close the temperature of the solar wind at your position, else people will spot you by your thermal signature. Theoretically this is not impossible to do, you can dump the heat generated by on-board processes into internal some sort of internal storage, but such an internal storage has a limited capacity so your time instealth is likely to be limited to a few hours at most.

Hypothetically a stealth shield could be engineered to be able to turn the majority thermal energy back inwards as well (since it's just infrared radiation), though you would still need to address the connection point of the bubble and the ship (or induction energy if you controlled it with magnetism), your limitation as such would probably be more how hot can things get inside the bubble before the metamaterial starts to be unable to turn it all back or your crew bakes to death instead of a limitation on keeping the shield cool.

The best use of a stealth shield is cloaking physical projectiles launched at unmoving (or at least predictably moving) targets, as well as cloaking things like satellites. A railgun projectile or kinetic rod weapon that was cloaked would be completely undetectable on any wavelength (except for maybe gravity waves) after a certain amount of time, since it wouldn't contain any moving parts at all and thus wouldn't even be detectable on a thermal scale (and thus let's you reach the same state as lasers, where the instant that they find out you shot at them is when the shot actually hits them).

[TheBiggerFish]

You can vent it in a particular direction though.

[i2amroy]

But then said thermal energy that is being reflected back in builds up. You know what's bad for a lot of things, life, computer systems and spaceships included? I'll give you a clue, it rhymes with 'meat'

Which is exactly why I said this:

your limitation as such would probably be more how hot can things get inside the bubble before the metamaterial starts to be unable to turn it all back or your crew bakes to death instead of a limitation on keeping the shield cool.

Remember, you already aren't allowed to fire your engines while your cloaking shield is closed up, so the only heat sources you've got running are the basic electronics of your computer systems and any living creatures aboard. You'd certainly heat up, but it wouldn't be like you'd bake instantly or anything.

So instead: Bullet like capsules with handwavy freeze substance/liquid. Shoot it at someone, and it splatters all over their armor, entering the chinks/joints/small holes and basically cryofreezing their muscles. Main use: Nonlethality. Futuristic police or something can use this as a bullet replacement - neutralizes target. It's safer and still as/more effective. When their freezing they can't shoot you back or something as they could if they were bleeding.

Think less "bullet" and more "mortar"/"grenade" and less "ice" and more "adhesive foam" and you'd get something that would actually be nonlethal (instead of causing horrible internal damage from freezing) and a lot more viable for actual use. (With the advantage that ice can be melted while foam could only be dissolved with the proper solvent, and you can get a lot more foam out of a small canister than you could ice).