Cool and informative post, but velocity isn't the issue. Whether you are stopped or doing 0.9c, adjusting your heading 90 degrees and blasting off in the new direction will displace you in the same amount, unless the subspace mass reduction effects on ships nullify basic physics that much further.
The difficulty in intercepting an object (and therefore the viability of evasive maneuvering) is the amount of energy an interceptor needs to create a new intercept point with a target that's changed it's trajectory.
A tank turning 90 degrees in 0.1 seconds is still going 30kph and the difference amounts to meters. That's a minuscule amount of delta-v for a near-supersonic missile and is why surface vehicles can't dodge airstrikes.
The delta-v required to intercept a maneuvering aircraft is what dictates the NEZ I mentioned above. If you're within the NEZ, you could do a complete 180 with zero loss in speed (which is impossible, but bear with me) and you're still dead. Even if you get lucky, and dodge the missile, you've burned up precious seconds flipping around while your enemy sets up an even more advantageous follow-up shot.
That's actually a tactic. You fire one missile, even outside the NEZ, forcing your target to "go defensive" which means they have to fly a certain way to avoid your missile, and that way almost always means they can't really shoot back as you. You then close the range and fire a second shot that (barring malfunction) is a sure-thing.
In space, you're dealing with the same issues. Sure, the non-maneuvering range of a missile is nearly infinite, but you don't have infinite detection (and tracking) range, and everything maneuvers somewhat. So weapons will still have a practical max range. There will still be a NEZ. Tactics are still broadly the same:
- If, at all possible, find the enemy first while avoiding detection yourself. Cloaking device FTW.
- If detected, avoid the NEZ of an enemy, while forcing said enemy into your (or allied) NEZ.
- If you can't do either of the above, withdraw ASAP. Sticking around is going to ruin your day.
Energy weapons just expand the NEZ to the tracking range. Which, honestly, isn't that big of a game changer. You can always build more, or better missiles, to do the same thing. This is the conclusion of the DoD as well. The DoD builds a new missile whenever their new radar sets can track further than existing missiles can hit. They're not planning to put lasers on warships because they're qualitatively better weapons. They're putting lasers on ships because a laser costs $100 to fire while a missile costs up $4 million (SM-6).
About the only way this breaks down is if relativistic speeds require an engine so large and complex that it's infeasible to build disposable motors for missiles/torpedoes. At that point, yeah, energy weapons are the only way to go. Tactics still revolve around constraining the enemy's ability to maneuver in order to minimize the complexity of your shooting solution.
In one Voyager episode (I believe it's "Fury") They said that at warp you can only go in a straight line. So in order to change direction they have to slow down to impulse first.
Voyager also said that going Warp 10 turns you into salamanders. I recommend we don't take Voyager too seriously when it comes to the limits of warp drive. Especially the stuff that's contradicted by just about every other episode of Star Trek, including other episodes of Voyager.
I think that episodes like "The Menagerie", "The Squire of Gothos" and "The Ultimate Computer" where the Enterprise has to apply reverse thrust to slow down/stop suddenly would indicate that a warp ship has some kind of inertia to it.
That's, mostly, only true with TOS which treated warp speed the same as impulse; Newtonian but faster. By the time TNG came around, warp speed was treated more like how uniderth describes. It's non-newtonian. You go from warp 9 to dead stop instantly when the warp field collapses.
