How come space ships in sci fi always seem to have an underwhelming amount of firepower?

Ships in the UNSC (Halo) use Nukes as standard ordinance

@Fangirlsarah1996: Why the question then?

@Xuan12: Well the UNSC never really use their Nukes...sure every ship has fuckloads of them, but you never see them used in the games at all.

@Fangirlsarah1996: I looked it up. Apparently the UNSC used a large portion of its nuclear weapons in the early war with the Covenant. But facing an overwhelmingly numerous enemy and a diminishing supply of warheads, the deployment of the weapons became strictly controlled for maximum tactical effect.

@Xuan12: Huh, I wondered why they were largely ignored, as Nukes were very liberally used in the early years of the war.

because why deal with an army when you can just nuke it right?

@Fangirlsarah1996: Yeah, since nukes are among the few effective weapons they have against the Covenant, and they're running out of them, they reserve them only for the highest priority targets and battles. I do remember nukes being used a couple times in the Halo franchise, when they really, really needed them.

@Xuan12: I think they used a Nuke in their first engagement with the Covenant in space...when that didn't work the infiltrators they sent to deal with the ship from the inside were given nuclear warheads

But in the games the only game that had a nuke in it at all was Halo 4 in the last mission.

@Fangirlsarah1996: Oh, the things I was thinking of were a Covenant bomb and a broken slip drive or some such. Similar effect to a nuke though.

@Xuan12: Odd The Covenant didn't employ those highly effective tactics in other situations...