Jack of Harts

Pre-Contact warships used a mix of various forms of lasers, projectile weapons, and rockets as their primary armaments. Most lasers did very minimal damage compared to modern versions but were very accurate. Heat shielding was cheap, and therefore warships could easily armor themselves against most laser attacks. Where lasers excelled at was at burning out incoming projectiles and rockets that carried minimal or no armor. Almost every warship carried some anti-ship lasers for after other weapons breached the armor though. Few things can kill an enemy faster than setting them on fire in space after all. Oxygen runs out amazingly quickly.

Science fiction authors used to say we would use something better when we went into space, but three centuries later we still use rockets. Yes they are more advanced than what propelled our Apollo missions, but the German scientists that pioneered them knew what we still use. We dump fuel into a reaction chamber, make it explode, and use that push to send us flying in the way we want to go. But the Peloran gravtech changed everything. Now we use a gravitic generator to lower our effective mass so it only takes a very small push of the engines to send us flying far faster than we ever could in the old days. It is amazing how much just a single application of alien technologies can change all of our worlds.