This is something that has always puzzled me... why do UEF weapons even HAVE a maximum range?
Why do white-hot beams of plasma have a maximum range that's measurable in single-digit or low-double-digit kilometers?
Because otherwise the game would be a chess game of positioning your ships thousands of kilometers away and praying they can't move fast enough to avoid your attack, that's why.
That's actually realistic. Plasma is a collection of highly energetic charged particles, and those things don't like being near each other. The sort of magnetic bottle used in BP canon would be a massive engineering challenge, and extremely demanding in terms of energy if it could be achieved at all.
That said, every time you try to apply real-life physics to FreeSpace, God
kills a sends Noemi a picture of a dead kitten
