Probably the most creative space tactic I ever read was in the (otherwise undistinguished, IMO) book "Europa Strike". It goes like that:

Evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence is found on Jupiter's moon Europa while, for unrelated reasons, tensions mount between US and China. An armed American spaceship is dispatched to Europa, while another is orbiting Mars. A Chinese ship launches, seemingly toward nowhere in particular. Few days after launch it detonates a fusion device, in a 100 megaton range, in empty space. No one in US can figure out the purpose of that, except possibly as a "message" -- demonstration of power. ("What happened to sending messages by e-mail?" grumbles one US Marine.)

What the Chinese spaceship actually did was fire an enormously powerful railgun, twice. The fusion bomb was a smokescreen -- the sleet of charged particles completely masked the EM pulse from firing the gun. Inert railgun projectiles are easy to get out of the way -- if you know they are coming. But no one does.*

One swarm of projectiles is aimed at Jupiter -- or rather where Jupiter will be some months later, when first American spaceship arrives. Needless to say, it is timed to arrive simultaneously with the said spaceship... and the projectiles have enough self-guidance to hit it. The other swarm is slower, and is aimed to where Mars -- and the second American ship, -- would be at that same time. Chancy, of course -- if that ship leaves Mars orbit in the intervening two months, it is safe, but the Chinese take this gamble. And the beauty of this is that if for whatever reason Chinese Politbureau decides to call off the attack -- no one will ever know it was underway! Just send a very short radio code to the projectiles, ordering them to miss their targets. And if they are needed, the attack is undetectable and unstoppable. Europa-bound swarm moves at over 100 km/sec, the Mars-bound one at about 25 km/sec. The course correction occurs within seconds from impact, and until then they are black, cold and silent.

*This was one of the things Heinlein got wrong in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" -- short of a nuclear detonation, there is no way to hide the EM pulse from a railgun. Manny and company could never keep their second catapult a secret.

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That reminds me of something from one of my "novels" (actually stories I came up with but which will never really be written, nevermind published). A population secretly developed surface-to-space missiles, knowing that they could and would be shot down on launch by orbiting weapon satellites. But they built a bunch and launched them together, in swarms. Each cluster's outermost missiles were indeed shot down, but having them go first protected the ones in the middle of the group because they'd just have to be hit later in the order, and it took long enough for the inner ones to reach escape velocity & altitude, drop their engines, and coast away past the satellite network on inertia alone, thus creating no emissions to alert the satellite network to their existence. Drifting cold on the trajectory they'd been given before dropping their engines, they then completed a slingshot maneuver around the moon and came back in to strike the satellites from above/behind a few days later, using only minor little lateral thrusts for final guidance.

I was always impressed with the idea of the "stasis field" put forth in The Forever War, which not only set an absolute speed limit of so-many meters per second, but which neutralized all electromagnetic activity. In the novel, this protects the soldiers inside from laser fire, bombs, and missiles, but forces hand-to-hand combat.

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my favorite tactic is when they sit nose to nose with the enemy ship, and the captain orders the deflector dish to be energized..

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My favorite is from one of Brin's Uplift books, where the dolphin ship dumps most of its water in the path of the pursuing ships,

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Hardly unique, although it was a complete surprise to Uplifted cultures. Heck in Benford's "Tides of Light" Killeen does exactly same thing with sewage rather than water. (Which has added benefit in creating spectral signatures of heated organic matter. Enemy ships interpret it as the evidence of ruptured hull, and give up pursuit.)

Novaderrik's and Romanus' examples break known physics.

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The megahuge inflatable 'bluff' ship from AC Clarke.

I think you are confusing Clarke and Cordwainer Smith: "Golden The Ship Was -- Oh! Oh! Oh!"

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To make it clear, I want to stick to known physics. Otherwise, the most creative tactic is "hypometric weapons" from Reynold's Absolution Gap -- your enemies (or parts of your enemies, if you are feeling "creative") simply disappear. Indistinguishable from magic. And when Inhibitors adapted, hypometric weapons "simply stopped working against them". Bigger magic.

Although Absolution Gap had some creative tactics within realm of possible. Such as what happens when two relativistic starships are travelling from one star to another at same speed, one few light-hours ahead of the other? Keep in mind that "throw ball bearings in the path of pursuer" is not particularly effective because ball bearings will retain velocity and just keep on alongside the lead ship. Anything you care to throw from either ship to the other must be accelerated, and thus can not be completely invisible.

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I have a couple questions:
How big are these ships?
You have a ship that is big enough to have a railgun powerful enough to accelerate to 100kps, is that standard?
How did they hide the reaction of the firing? (the chinese ship would change course)

I keep doing that. Thanks for the correction.
http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/rediscovery.htm

I'm still waiting to hear of something cooler than Han Solo clamping onto the backside of a star destroyer.

In the real physics category, Europa Strike is pretty cool, but I'm going to have to go with pretty much the entire last chapter of Footfall - especially the gamma ray lasers

Wouldn't wrapping them in superconducting materials and a Faraday cage do the trick? Superconductors exclude magnetic fields , they can't pass through.

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The rifle bullets in Niven's "Protector".

The computer program in "A for Andromeda".

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We've taking the main guns from the Iowa, added autoloaders and wrapped a one man spaceship around each, then attached them to Michael for launch and individual fighting once we get up there.
Who is going to man them?
We have volunteers.


My favorite from that battle is definitely the stovepipes.

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It might not be cooler looking but there's an AC Clarke short story about an space-faring spy who lands on one of Mars' moons (sorry for lack of details, book not anywhere near me). He's pursued by this fully armed and operational battle..err, ship. But, because of the size of the moon, and the problems the battleship encountered in trying to turn and maintain any sort of orbit around the tiny moon, the spy was able to avoid capture simply by walking in pace with the ship, staying just at or below the horizon. Apparently, the commander of the ship was demoted or discharged and the final line of the story was (paraphrased): "They just couldn't see how the fastest ship in the fleet couldn't catch a man in a space-suit."

Only going into what I seen and read—and not in too much detail at that—I'd have to say the atmosphere jump in Battlestar Galactica and the ending of Ender's Game.

Wow...my post looks so lame compared to the ones above.

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I've always enjoyed the way the troopers landed in Heinlein's Starship Troopers. (the book! not the movie!)

One of the Firefly episodes is pretty funny where Walsh is piloting the Serenity though a winding canyon to escape, and the pursuers are casually cruising above it.

tell that to Captain Picard..

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I don't think measurements were explicitely given, but my impression was on the order of modern naval shis. 100-200 meters, and fusion-powered.
Not at all, in fact unique. Moreover, the power drain of the second firing (the one toward Jupiter) slagged the ship's fusion plant -- and that was planned. High cost of the tactic was part of what made is so surprising.
Initial hydrogen bomb explosion. For a few minutes it masked both radar, and the ships was too far from any American eyes to resolve visually (or in infrared). By the time it could be seen again there was no indication of how quickly the course change happened.

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