In the last few weeks, I saw a lot of posts about how well missiles would work against laser armed space ships, and I would like to add my own piece to this debate.

I believe that for realistic space combat, missiles will still be useful for many roles. I apologize, but I am not an expert or anything, so please correct anything I get wrong.

1. Laser power degrades with distance: All lasers have a divergence distance with increases the further you are firing from. This means that you will need to have an even stronger laser system ( which will generate more heat, and take up more power) to actually have a decent amount of damage.
2. Stand-off missiles: Missiles don't even need to explode near a ship to do damage. things like Casaba Howitzers, NEFPs and Bomb pumped lasers can cripple ships beyond the effective range of the ship's laser defenses.
3. Ablative armor and Time to kill: A laser works by ablating the surface of a target, which means that it will have a longer time on target per kill. Ablative armor is a type of armor intended to vaporize and create a particle cloud that refracts the laser. ablative armor and the time to kill factor can allow missiles to survive going through the PD killzone
4. Missile Speed: If a missile is going fast enough, then it has a chance to get through the PD killzone with minimum damage.
5. Missile Volume: A missile ( or a large munitions bus) can carry many submunitions, and a ship can only have so many lasers ( because they require lots of energy, and generate lots of heat to sink). If there is enough decoys and submunitions burning toward you, you will probably not have enough energy or radiators to get every last one of them. it only takes 1 submunition hitting the wrong place to kill you.
6. Decoys and E-war: It doesn't matter if you have the best lasers, if you can't hit the missiles due to sensor ghosts. If your laser's gunnery computers lock onto chaff clouds, then the missile is home free to get in and kill you.
7. Lasers are HOT and hungry: lasers generate lots of waste heat and require lots of energy to be effective, using them constantly will probably strain your radiators heavily. This means that they will inevitably have to cycle off to cool down, or risk baking the ship's crew.

These are just some of my thoughts on the matter, but I don't believe that lasers would make missiles obsolete. Guns didn't immediately make swords obsolete, Ironclads didn't make naval gunnery obsolete, and no matter what the pundits say, Tanks ain't obsolete yet.

What do you guys think?