Lasers or particle weapons powerful and long ranged enough to hit a space target from the ground or vice versa are probably out of our reach.
Just saw this line, thought I'd flesh it out somewhat -- your best current laser weapons designs are only capable via cluster/burst firing with psi-amp enhancement to be weapons-effective at ranges of up to 3 kilometers. A single laser has an effective range of 2 kilometers. That puts your lasers at just beyond "knife-fighting" range for fighter-scale space combat (typical combat ranges for fighter craft in B5 are about 1km-10km range). This is itself something of a schizotech thing for the colonial database they're largely drawn from, as the asteroid mining lasers had effective cutting ranges of a couple dozen meters at most. (Using the psi-amps for non-physical focusing lenses and the "stickiness" effect on the beams emitted increases their effective energy delivery by an order of magnitude, and increases their beam coherence by a factor of 100x.)
Right now you only have mimicked PPG weapons tech that's purely "civilian grade" as that's what the uptimers remembered the parts of well enough to get a research lab to reproduce faithfully. That's not even military-grade PPGs, and largely just pistols at that. There's no psi-amp integration into the weapons at this time either. You
could explore the weapons further with additional research to improve upon them, mind you.
Needless to say, neither of these have even the slightest hope of reaching the 160-2,000km of low planetary orbit (to say nothing of the 2,000-36,000km of middle planetary orbit, let alone even further).
Your teek missiles are limited in delta-V by onboard electrical power supply, and as such can
just barely make LPO (maximum effective range is about 200km). But their stealth characteristics would be defeated by the thermal signature of their atmospheric wakes.
This is why even with the improved militarization capabilities, you still have to actually
get the shuttles into space before you can do anything effective with combat. The Spaceport's ancient-alien "borrowed" mag catapults can make that happen fairly quickly for a surface-to-orbit launch, but the Ready Response module would unilaterally beat that in terms of response times for extremely obvious reasons.
That all being said, you
could meaningfully install some kinetic-laser turrets somewhere in the colony to act as an interceptor grid equivalent, thanks to the lasers having that kinetic effect from the psi-amp enhancement. But that would require a Human Job to make functional. They'd also be limited in efficacy since a lot of the time destroying a plasma projectile or kinetic slug two kilometers before it impacts will still do all manner of unpleasant things to the target below.
(Honestly this is actually a pretty good argument for spreading habitation areas away from the central facilities -- in terms of the scope of damage done by a pirate raiding force, they'd likely target the central facilities of the colony first, leaving anyone stuck in their homes to just hunker down and ride it out.)
