The answer is in what I quoted an you yourself re-quoted:
A field, not a tight beam, a field. ...
A node is a word with a specific meaning. I can view it as being like a searchlight or a headlight or a wide beam hand-held flashlight or whatever, it still comes down to two units and the effect happening in a node at an intersection determined by their range from each other. It might be a pretty big node, but that is not a field. The limit on the number of direct fire rounds affected in Striker tells me the node there is small enough that only one weapon at a time is affected: "
They make three attacks against direct fire rounds; in addition to missiles, grenades, and rockets, they may attack other rounds (those fired from CPR guns and other projectile weapons) under two conditions: the firing weapon must be at least 50 cm from the target, and the damper fire control unit must be able to see both the target and the last 50 cm of the round's trajectory; one hit destroys all rounds fired from one weapon in a phase." Ergo, a node small enough that only the rounds from one weapon are passing through it on their way to the target - else there's no need to see the trajectory at all because it would act like a wall instead of blocking only one path to the target at a time.
Certainly the effect in space would be larger, but it's still a node.
At any rate, I'm not buying deuterium shedding its neutron in a damper field. Why? Law of unintended consequences. When we discuss tech doing X, there is often a ramification elsewhere. In this case, if the damper can cause deuterium to shed its neutron, then it can do the same to other stable isotopes, turning them into unstable radioactive isotopes. It becomes a weapon. Turn it on a tank and watch the crew die of neutron radiation effects and the electronics fail as the tank's hull and the carbon in their bodies shed neutrons. Create a wide strip of radioactive ground to inhibit passage by infantry, then clean up your barrier later. We can draw an arbitrary line and say it doesn't - but that is an
arbitrary line.
Now that I think about it, I'm not buying triggerless fusion warheads either. Same reason, unintended consequences. We hypothesize some unstated material that can store energy so effectively that the energy it releases approaches the energy released by fissioning several kilos of plutonium. Even if we hypothesize that the tritium is stored in a hypercondensed state - a concept that invites its own unintended consequences since that ability could be very useful elsewhere (such as combat weapons) - we're talking about a storage medium capable of storing tens or hundreds of gigawatts while having a small enough mass to fit into the head of a missile. An enduring storage medium, since the missiles do not need to be powered up before launch.
But, accept the storage medium. Accept the laser-triggered fusion - or some other method. Now ditch the tritium. Get rid of it. Use the lasers directly, set them in the missile head to trigger when the missile is very close to the target hull. Or use some other method powered by this fantastically dense storage medium. One way or another, you have a weapon capable of delivering tens or hundreds of gigawatts of energy as a sudden pulse to the hull of a ship - and it's not affected by dampers since it has no deuterium or tritium. Unintended consequence brings us full circle to a weapon that still defeats dampers.
Or we say the storage medium IS affected by dampers, and it might as well be plutonium at that point because it's irrelevant. No game effect.
