So been a little short on some replies on this topic, so figured would add a bit of details.
Fire is defined in different ways.
One is related to combustion, and combustion again is defined in different ways. One is “Exothermic oxidation”, note here that oxidation doesn’t have to involve oxygen, oxygen is just extremely reactive*1 and quite abundant around Earth, so that’s where science named the type of reaction from.
But for the firetrails in Eve, all that matters is some sort of light emission things happening (that will make us call it flames). There are also non-oxidating things that will produce this, stars fx, tend to manage quite well being all flamy while in space - with no chemical reactions involved at all.
It can also simply be hot matter, fx molted tritanium shards blasted off the armor, glowing as it cools down.
For smoke trails, some sort of smoke coming out or being produced by the above light emission thing, could happen. Being able to see this though would be harder, since dark matter*3 is invisible unless shined upon by something else.
One simple way to get both fire and smoke into space, is at severe hull damage, you will be leaking atmosphere from the inside (remember we have crews running around in the ships, they need to breathe).
Something that does not happen, is you seeing laser beams in space, in order to see a laser beam you need to see it directly form the front (you will go blind very fast). You can see items the laser beam illuminates when hitting, which is often just a dot on an object, but if you fx take a squad of soldiers equipped with laser sights, and either bring them out in heavy fog, or walk through cover smoke, there will be a lot of small particles illuminated, which makes you see the entire path of the beams, that light show is pretty cool.
However, 2 things space does not have all over is fog and smoke. In fact it is named space because it is nearly nothing but space between a few objects (stars, planets and such).
This also applies to light shafts. There is no atmosphere, there is no dust, there is no fog, you will not see the light create a light shaft as it hits space while traveling past you.
1* So ya, Eve PI fails completely with harvesting Noble Gasses* 2 to produce Oxygen.
2* Noble Gas = gas that is very hard to make react with anything (helium, neon etc), at the time of the naming, believed to be impossible to react at all, but iirc only 1 remains to be made react chemically today.
3* Real Dark Matter is just anything that doesn’t shine (find a lexicon that predates the Pluto-scientists). And hence is freaking hard to see, fx The Moon, now we are realllyyyy close to that one, so the reflected light from the nearby star (Sun) makes us see the part of it that is directly illuminated by the sun pretty well (which makes it appear as a circle turning into a seal, then nothing, and then reversed seal and on to full circle again). But we do not see the full circle all the time, even at this short range. As for what the Pluto-scientists call dark matter, got no idea if that’s even a thing or just them trolling a new subject because they are too stupid to get a rocket to Mars.
EDITs combatting Eve forums layout issues.
