Ammunitions Storage

Let’s see, you now know what weapons your ship has and where those weapons are fired from. By now I hope you have also decided where those weapons are located on your ship. Next comes storage. If your weapons are energy based, such as lasers, they will need a lot of energy. There is a scene in Star Wars where the Death Star fires its massive laser. The laser goes through a tunnel where it grows in power, likely from little energy packs or such that add more power and focus to the deadly laser. If you have a laser on your ship, I’d recommend a separate power source, or at least battery packs stored near the weapon so it doesn’t interfere too much with your main power while in battle. As convenient as it would be to have one power source on the ship, it wouldn’t be smart to have life support, engine power, and weapons all hooked up to one system. A single feed back pulse from the enemy and you’re dead in space or too much demand on energy and your captain may need to choose between taking life support off line for a short time, shutting down the engine, or not returning fire. None of those are very good choices so at least have rechargeable battery packs stored nearby for your energy weapons if you don’t want a whole other power source on your ship.
If you plan to do like the timeline of Firefly does and have large weapons that shoot bullets or similar things, you also need to plan where backup ammunitions will be kept. That space will need to be near the weapons to allow easy reload but in a place on the ship that a direct or indirect hit could explode the room and stuff around without losing things like engines, life support, or a lot of people.
Another thing to keep in mind when thinking about weapons are missiles. If you plan to keep missiles on board, which it’s always smart to have them when energy weapons don’t seem to work or your projectiles can’t pierce the hull of the enemy ships. Missiles are bombs that lock onto a target and don’t let go, unless confused by good defenses of course. Mines could be released to block an escape route or protect a find to be explored more at a future time. Either way, missiles and mines are explosives and will need to be sheltered from radiation or vibrations that could set them off on ship as well as radio waves. If you watch various science fiction shows or movies you’ll notice some have missiles and bombs carefully stacked together in a specific cargo hold designed to store weapons, but most have individual tubes where they stay ready to be loaded and protected from exploding unexpectedly.
Now that I’ve given you some ideas, where will your ammunitions storage be and how is it protected?