[quote=Brovo]
Lasers? You know how terrible those would be in space as weapons? The law of conservation of energy would utterly render them useless at anything beyond "knife fight" range in space. Because every second it travelled, it would lose significant chunks of power to dissipation. Yes, it moves at the speed of light. No, that still isn't fast enough in space. you were to engage in space, it would only be against planets, because planets are the only things that can't really dodge whatever you fire at them. Even then, a planet probably has vastly more defences to wage against an incoming fleet than the fleet could muster against it.Space battles in space, if we are talking hard sci-fi, just would not happen.Soft sci-fi, it could go in any direction, though.
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They wouldn't be terrible in space, since hard sci-fi military ships wouldn't be the lumbering armor-clad WWII-knock off vessels most sci-fi portrays them as. They'd be light, so as to conserve delta-v during maneuvers---and to make it easier to accelerate, decelerate and alter their trajectory--- which means they'd have less mass for a laser to burn through. A sufficiently-powerful laser would easily burn through a ship's hull, compromising it and potentially dooming the crew inside. As for the speed, the thought of effortlessly dodging laser fire with a slow-than-light vessel (that obeys the laws of physics) is pretty much inherent to soft sci-fi where antimatter weapons, warp drives and phasers are the norm, as any ship packing laser weapons is going to have them mounted in fully-traversable turrets. While a space warship may be able to dodge one laser, the other 30 that are taking shots at it create an absurdly-large arch of inter-locking fire that simply cannot be avoided. 

And not only that, but as space lacks an atmosphere, lasers become even more dangerous, as there is nothing in their immediate path (or surroundings) to degrade or scatter their beams.