Having just finished reading the book of this thread's title, it actually got fairly cool, to me, once the story moved away from the weirdness which is civilian life and into space exploration and combat.
There's a ship type from it which isn't completely matched, although I'll have a feeling that I'll be told otherwise since everything has already been done that can be done and whatnot, but anyway: a class of cruiser which serves as a 100 terawatt laser cannon. The laser cannons of other ships, in this book and not SoaSE necessarily, are 20 terawatts but the cruiser is capable of firing a 1/10th second burst of laser light every few seconds which is 5 times more powerful than a capital ship laser cannon.
