Disabling a spaceship while leaving it repairable?

I'm looking for a weapon a ship can carry that can disable a ship without any permanent damage to its subsystems or significant hull breaches. This will mostly be used by pirate factions (capturing a ship to hijack and/or loot) and law enforcement (retrieving stolen ships and capturing fugitives alive, etc.)

I don't believe EMP is a viable option due to its ability to permanently damage electronics. This is meant to be a highly specialized weapon for people who want the ship and/or its crew/cargo intact for boarding. Often times the ship needs to be able to fly away after being captured.

I had one thought of a weapon that forcefully shuts down the main fusion reactor of a vessel by one of two methods:

• Disrupting a continuing fusion reaction by denying one of the conditions required to sustain it.
• Introducing elements that would cause containment to fail and forcing an emergency shutdown, either automatic or done by those aboard.

The goal of either method is to force the reactor to power down and have to 'cold start' off auxiliary/reserve power, which would take time. By that time, boarding parties would be on the ship.

Is there anything that already exists (even theoretically) that could potentially bypass all of the armor, electromagnetism and thermal/radiation shielding of a fusion reactor and introduce conditions that would shut it down?

posted almost 7 years ago

Arvex‭

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