Jim smiles a little, more than fine with elaborating on the idea. "The most basic thing about starship combat that a lot of species forget is that you're operating in three dimensions, not two. Unless a species evolved to fly, most people we've met tend to favor flat, horizontal planes of movement. A starship can move in any direction, and come at an enemy vessel from an unexpected angle."

"There's also a tendency to only count your actual weapons as weapons. Every starship in the Federation has what's called a warp core at the heart of its engines. It's a very powerful reactor, and without it, you're not going anywhere in a hurry. They can also be manually ejected, if there's a breach and the core's going to explode or something. So while you can only use it once, every starship has a potentially powerful explosive that can be jettisoned in the path of an enemy craft."

"There are creative defensive options, too. We have energy shields to protect the ship from damage, but they can only take so much before they fail. If you're taking torpedo fire, a lot of those kinds of missiles are heat-seeking, so venting plasma from the warp nacelles can confuse the targeting and draw the torpedoes away from the main body of the ship."

There's another aspect that immediately comes to mind, although the memories surrounding it are a little less casual than what came before. "Boarding another ship's usually done by transporter, which is a kind of mechanical teleportation, or flying over in a shuttlecraft. On my last mission, I had to board an enemy ship without use of either, to try to take it over from the inside. So I suited up, had my ship line up with their airlock a few kilometers out, and got jettisoned out the garbage chute. A living person isn't a typical target for starship sensors to pick up out in space, so they wouldn't have been able to lock on and shoot me down before I made it over."