Hypothetical scifi weapon

[OmegaGuy]

Obviously they have different ideas about how to do things, factions often break up or new factions arise, but the wars continue over the same issues.

[Winston Blake]

This 'weapon' could be easily defeated by throwing a sheet of half-millimeter thick plastic in its way, far enough away that your armour can take the 200 megaton explosion.

Don't forget momentum. If this thing is a laser, the pressure on the little speck of that sheet of plastic it hits will be around 2e44 pascals. All it will accomplish is to add a bit of vapor to the beam.

So? The beam magically releases all of its energy in one picosecond. There won't be any time to push matter out of the way.

[Patrick Degan]

The logical end to this scenario is that the economies of both space powers collapse under the weight of the military budgets, leading to at least one revolution breaking out somewhere.

The wars are fueled by long - standing racial/religious hatred that makes all of the factions bloodthirsty fanatics.

Big deal. Fanatacism doesn't fuel a war machine when the money's all gone.

[Uraniun235]

That could be an interesting resolution, actually: whichever side starves itself out first, loses.