Charles Stross notes that the weapons very likely don't work, anyway.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi/2003/Aug/14#wartime-35

Good to know.

By the way, Stross’ Singularity Sky is pretty good. The love scenes made me wince, but the characters are otherwise well-drawn (his Admiral Kurtz, particularly, is my favorite minor character in a long, long while), and it’s imaginative as hell.

Apropos of the current discussion, you can tell he spends a fair bit of time thinking about these sorts of things. Sky is reminiscent of Walter Jon Williams’ The Praxis in that the space opera technology is pretty much all straightforward hard-SF known physics (aside from the occasional tame black hole, it’s mostly stuff we could build today if we were willing to throw enough trillions of dollars at it) and he’s come up with some nice new wrinkles on some old ideas.

Which he then totally undermines by sending his space opera shock troops out to fight a post-Singularity entity with superhuman intelligence, alien thought processes, and advanced nanotechnology. But that’s what makes it fun.

I thought Singularity Sky was great fun, too, even if the characters were a bit thin. I'm looking forward to the sequel.