Hmm, I see nowhere that the use of grenades, shotguns or katanas would be prohibited, so I guess that's a sport for me.

You do not want thrusters at the front because you might have something similar to the Coanda effect, where the flow of gasses will tend to stick to the surface of the material due to superficial tension. This means the surface of the ship is going to be constantly battered.

If you wanted, I guess you could go for a 'Hammerhead' design, where the thrusters are at the front, but placed at a certain distance from the fuselage. This however increases the construction costs and the overall mass of the craft.

Such designs do however present the advantage of having the motor force at the front, which creates a bit more stability. But the much larger cross-section and mass might offset this advantage

No. That station has had several life extensions and 1/3 of is becoming unserviceable

Well, we first need to chill out and see how things progress. Right now, LG is nothing more than a touted World Wonder of modern age, but nothing more.

At the time of its construction, ISS was supposed to be a hub for further space explorations, where Shuttles would bring in components for Mars missions that would refuel the ISS before heading off to the Red Planet and stuff like that. Now, it barely serves 10% of the purposes originally touted.

But to explain a bit more the plan for LG.

LG is part of a whole system of lunar transportation. Unlike current and previous means of reaching the Moon, which meant the need to have a spacecraft going back and forth from Earth to Moon, LG project envisions LG as a node in a transport network, where supply ships will create a stockpile of materials on the space station and then there will be another fleet of space ships dedicated to going from LG to the Moon and Back. In theory, this is a bit more efficient than simply repeating the Moonshots because you can jampack a lot of unmanned rockets with supplies for LG and send them back to Earth, optimizing fuel consumption. Bleeding delta-V is not a problem as big as you make it to be. If you want to land something on the Moon, you would still need to bleed a huge portion of your fuel reserve in order to reduce your relative speed. Instead of bleeding it fully to land on the moon, you bleed it partially to dock with the space station. And then you bleed it again using a different space craft optimized for landing. Again, the efficiency bonus comes from the fact that you can send in lots of large supply ships to the space stations which you do not need to worry about getting off the Moon (which would require extra equipment and more fuel). The landings would be done by more simpler space craft, with streamlined equipment, which would lack stuff like thermal shielding for getting back to Earth (which would reduce their mass and fuel consumption)

Well, I mean, technically, with a powerful enough laser, you don't need to precisely aim it. You can use the same technique radars use and do 'sweeps', with the lasers going from right to left or up and down, or perhaps having multiple layers doing the same thing. But, as mentioned, you will still have some holes in the 'fishnet' even with this method. The best strategy is a layered defence. Kinetic protection is the most sound choice when it comes to singular impacts, but overtime it's going to fail due to multiple impacts and radiation exposure. Especially if you go for the traditional 'armor' ideea (liquid metal armour, while more Sci-Fi, at least prevents the forming of cracks).

It kinda depends on how you design the stuff. I mean, light has kinetic energy as well. And here we are not talking about melting a tennis ball made of wolfram, but rather changing the energy of a speck of dust. A strong enough laser beam probably has enough kinetic energy to deviate that speck of dust and the laser beam impacting the speck would be the equivalent of a building taking a nuclear blastwave in the face.

Also, this is irrelevant for what I said. You missed my point. You could collide with that thing at 1m/h, meaning you could have the thing in the laser sights for quite some time, because you are travelling 'behind it', basically making it look stationary for your ship, or you could collide head on at 36km/s because your velocity vectors are opposed to each other.

The problem is the 'fishnet spyral'. Basically, imagine your 'laser shield' as a fishnet. No matter how many laserheads you are using, some particles will always go through. And if I misunderstood your idea and you meant something like having laser turrets to melt incoming particles, well, the chances of the turret to succeed in that are highly reliant on your sensors being able to pick up the particle in time and discern it from background noise.

For shielding, the most interesting shielding I've seen in Sci-Fi media is a combination of hard layered armoured hull, similar to what Soviet tanks like T-64 had for the front of the turrets; and then the ship being surrounded at a certain distance by a fluid armour. Something like a magnetic field or a gravitational field or something holding a very thick layer of dense metal (Like Mercury -Hg- or lead -Pb-) around the ship. Alternatively, the field could be made out of plasma or some very hot gasses to melt incoming particles and dissipate their energy. The logic would be that the exterior layer absorbs as much energy from kinetic strikes, either through density or through pressure variations, keeps it's shape. because it's fluid, and what's left from the impactor is dealt with by the armour of the ship.

Of course, this is not perfect shielding, even if you manage to pull it off. There's always the ancient problem (I mean, literally, from times of Antiquity if not pre-history) of how exactly are you going to see what lies in front of the shield without the enemy stabbing you in the face

Erm, lasers move at light speed, which, as far as we know, is the only constant speed. There is no such thing as 'orbital speed'. You could collide with a speck of stardust at 1km/h or at 36km/s, it all depends on how both of you are travelling