I was wandering, what would future space weapons be like by about 2150 or something of the likes?
To get everyone's opinion I will make a writing prompt for your answers. Also, if you are going to answer with something like "I don't believe in warfare!" then don't say anything and leave. Because warfare is pretty much the topic of this thread.

p.s. The more detail the better!

Would we use kinetic weapons or energy weapons:
What kind of specific weapons would we be using:
Would firearms play a role in future combat, if so, how:
Would drones be used, if so then how:
What kind of software/hardware would the ships have on board:

Something like this: MAC

1940755
Kinetic energy weapons are probably never going away; a ping-pong ball can hit a planet harder than a nuke if it's going at a respectable fraction of light speed. That said, energy weapons are pretty cool, too: lasers in the nastier part of the EM spectrum, like X-rays and gamma rays. Then there are always particle weapons; if you can throw enough positrons at somebody to annihilate a fair amount of electrons, not only will they have all of the radiation from the annihilation to deal with, but a lot of matter is going to end up ionized and crackling with electricity as well. In short, they're gonna have a bad time.

Would we use kinetic weapons or energy weapons:

I would imagine energy weapons if there is space combat. It's simply too inefficient to cool anything in space without wasting resources. You could take a rifle and it would be glowing hot in only a few shots if there's no way to cool it. Although, perhaps there's a way to create a frictionless kinetic cannon such as guiding the projectile through a "barrel" of magnetic rings that are wider than the actual round...

What kind of specific weapons would we be using:

On ground, probably kinetic. Making a solid object go really fast is a very efficient form of energy transfer, which all weaponry is.

Would firearms play a role in future combat, if so, how:

Yes. With infantry.

Would drones be used, if so then how:

Support for the infantry. Hopefully they won't be used in COIN...

What kind of software/hardware would the ships have on board:

More advanced than what we have. Imagine flying submarines, not the things you see in Star Wars or Star Trek. Maybe a bit roomier...

1941053 You must note that direct energy cannons are notoriously inefficient.

1941137
They are. Have I implied otherwise?

1941195 No. I am just pointing out that it will be very hard to use lasers as weapons for a sustained amount of time. A more viable option would be a coil-gun. Much like the one you described when you were talking about the problem with over-heating weapons.

Sooooo.

Mass Effect?

I want to be Megatron.
I hope we discover how to upload consciousness into mechanical bodies.
It would be awesome for me, and a boom for the building and industrial complexes.

As for the questions.
Just play or watch transformers and you'll get the drift.
Megatron out.

Would we use kinetic weapons or energy weapons: A mixture of KEW and DEW, honestly. Most lasers are actually really shitty in close quarters because when you hit something with a very hot projectile, the wound cauterizes itself.
What kind of specific weapons would we be using:
Would firearms play a role in future combat, if so, how: Infantry weapons, tank cannons, etc. Most likely they'd be small arms, while larger weapons would be railguns or coilguns. They'd of course be vastly better than what we use now, with nearly all-plastic constructions, better primers and powders, caseless rounds, etc.
Would drones be used, if so then how: Mostly in the position of planes and tank autoloaders. Maybe the gunners of AA vehicles.
What kind of software/hardware would the ships have on board: Go look up what's used on a submarine. Now scale it up for space.

1940828

Kinetic energy weapons are probably never going away; a ping-pong ball can hit a planet harder than a nuke if it's going at a respectable fraction of light speed.

The thing about this is that... a "respectable fraction of the speed of light", also referred to as "relativistic speed", could range anywhere from 10% to over 99% the speed of light in a vacuum. I'll calculate examples using 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 99%.

• (0.0027 kg*1.0 c^2)/√(1–(0.1 c^2/1.0 c^2))–(0.0027 kg*1.0 c^2) = 1.2225×10^12 joules = >290 tons of TNT
• (0.0027 kg*1.0 c^2)/√(1–(0.25 c^2/1.0 c^2))–(0.0027 kg*1.0 c^2) = 7.958×10^12 joules = >1.9 kilotons of TNT
• (0.0027 kg*1.0 c)/√(1–(0.5 c^2/1.0 c^2))–(0.0027 kg*1.0 c^2) = 3.754×10^13 joules = <9 kilotons of TNT
• (0.0027 kg*1.0 c^2)/√(1–(0.75 c^2/1.0 c^2))–(0.0027 kg*1.0 c^2) = 1.242×10^14 joules = <30 kilotons of TNT
• (0.0027 kg*1.0 c^2)/√(1–(0.99 c^2/1.0 c^2))–(0.0027 kg*1.0 c^2) = 1.4775×10^15 joules = >350 kilotons of TNT

Yes, most of them are within the territory of nuclear weapons, but all of them are still in the low-yield range. Also of note that accelerating a ping-pong ball to just 10% the speed of light requires more than 340 megawatt-hours (and that's with an impossibly high efficiency and little-to-no energy loss due to heat), which would require something like a small nuclear reactor to power.

Now, a standard regulation table tennis ball like the one you used in your example is a 40mm diameter, 2.7 gram ball made of celluloid or some similar thermoplastics material. Celluloid is mostly made of nitrocellulose and camphor — the former auto-ignites at 160–170 °C; the latter melts at 175-177 °C, boils at 204 °C, and auto-ignites at 466°C. The drag coefficient of a sphere is ~0.47. The majority of the Earth's atmosphere, with a mass of about 5.15×10^18 kg, extends out to over 120 km, with 75% of the atmosphere being within a 11 km radius of the planet's surface. The atmosphere exponentially increases in density (and therefore pressure) as altitude deceases, with the pressure at ~11 km being roughly 101.325 pascals.

Tell me, which one would you bet your money on? The 2.7 gram hollow celluloid sphere or the atmosphere?

My point is that you can't operate such a weapon within atmosphere without the projectile immediately being destroyed without ever leaving the muzzle of the weapon, so it's really only applicable in vacuum. Even then, it's not that useful, because it requires an absurd amount of energy. Yeah, you could shoot a ping-pong ball at a planet, but if that planet has an atmosphere like Earth... the ball is going to be atomized once it hits the 120 km reentry barrier.

1943709
We're going to need near-light travel anyway to make interstellar battles even the slightest bit plausible. So if you can somehow accelerate a ship to 0.9c anyway, there's nothing wrong with throwing some small objects at your destination before you decelerate.

But if we're talking about keeping things interplanetary/intra-stellar and/or at anything like our current tech levels, then yeah, what I said is impractical as hell.

1943744
Yes, well my point was mostly that "relativistic ping-pong ball >>[...]> a terrestrial planet's atmosphere". Something like a ping-pong ball — really, anything that isn't either a planetoid or submolecular — is going to be immediately destroyed once it enters the planet's atmosphere, failing to cause appreciable damage to any target whatsoever.

1943776
Would you feel better if I suggested lead spheres? Plus, I think you're forgetting the overall usefulness of relativistic speeds when it comes to penetrating things that would normally resist them...

1943801
I honestly think particle beams are more practical.

1944195
You're probably right, but I don't like to rule anything out in terms of potential mayhem.

1940755

I think weapons would still be shell like, if anything fights would happen very far away, they would send a missile a few miles away to puncture another ship, really space crafts aren't that sturdy, a single hole can kill everyone because it's difficult to fix that shit up in space. Battles would happen very far away from each other in order not to crash into each other or have debris hit. really weapons would be small spacecrafts remote controlled to fly into the other persons vessel, shooting force in one area will reel a ship backwards and thus is very clumsy, also there is the danger of the missile exploding on the ship itself.