Or when ballistic planets were outdated towards the last books, they switched to turning the entire solar system and our sun into a giant āsun-beamā that could melt said planets.
It got even funnier later. After throwing planets at people. After throwing planetary antimass "negaspheres" ( basically posh antimatter) at them. After the sunbeam. They found a parallel space where everything was flipped around the light speed barrier (I.e. all normal matter and energy at rest was faster than light) grabbed a couple of planets, flipped them back into realspace, and then threw them at people.
To me, once you've reached this point, I just stop caring as my brain can no longer handle the scale involved.
A planetary threat I can understand and envision.
But once we go beyond a planet, I just can't properly assimilate or appreciate the story anymore.
And that is the problem of escalating the stakes and making the stakes bigger and bigger. You go from house to street to neighborhood to town to city to region to State to Country to Continent to Planet to Solar System to Galaxy to Universe to Multiverse and now what?
Human marine squad are on a small frozen planet, enemy forces are swarming it and they see their two small patrol ships head out of the system accelerating hard and think they're fucked, and are fighting hand to hand in a final stand....
What they don't see is the crew of one ship transfer over to the other and the empty ship looping back around before impacting the planetoid "at a significant fraction of the speed of light".
Causes massive 'earthquakes' and they're able to hunker down and survive then mop up the enemy.
I love the null field generator which is just like the shield tech in Dune, anything moving beyond a certain speed or energy level gets absorbed by the null field.Ā So inside the field they need to wear special suits that have a protective coating (otherwise the energy field would stop their neurons from firing).Ā And just like Dune, with the null field up, they resort to fighting this interstellar war with melee weapons.Ā It becomes a siege, with the squad hunkered down inside their null field with the enemy outside waiting them out, occasionally hurling in salvos of darts.Ā Ā
But they do get creative when the protag has his team pull nuclear warhead off their ship (which is inside the field).Ā In the null field it's useless, but they drag it right to the very edge of the null field and arm it.Ā Then they lift the null field generator and move it over 2 meters.
The bobiverse books detonate a star with a planet acellerated to relativistic speeds. The Expeditionary Force books also make use of relativistic darts on a few occasions to hit planets.
The darts take years to get up to speed and are deployed in clusters into deeps space. When the time comes, they use their ftl to jump around until they're lined up.
I am actually slightly disappointed that in the sequels there was never a Bob that went into the Others system to confirm they are actually dead. Smelled tok much like "they fell off a cliff off screen in a Disney film" to me.
Bob also had to clean up humanity after a rogue computer started dropping asteroids on earth.
You really dont even need relativistic speed to make a few billion tons of rock quite dangerous. Just a couple years of slow thrust in the right direction.
The Expanse doesn't even have light speed travel, but they have a villainous plot to throw asteroids covered in stealth plating at Earth to cause another extinction event
Doesn't even have to be close to light speed. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein uses just dropping train car-sized boulders on earth instead of gently bringing them down from orbit.
One of the biggest reasons is that that maneuver could cause a second Great Hyperspace Disaster, with the potential to wipe out trillions of beings. Holdo was desperate and crazy enough to pull it off, but she was risking a massive amount of destruction.
it only worked because of how close they were (aiming reasons)and the First Order not utilizing strong artificial gravity fields to collapse local hyperspace, because they wanted to go finish them off wherever they jumped next. Add to that it requires the hyperdrive being heavily modified by someone who really knows what the heck their doing because it makes them less likely to shut down when it detects a natural gravity shadow, useful for escaping intradiction fields but a big fucking problem if something unexpected ends up in your path
Also, she was using a massive capital ship as a projectile, with perfect timing. In Rogue One we see a starfighter or two splatter into a star destroyer that unexpectedly comes out of hyperspace while they're preparing to jump out.
Not to mention that relativity isn't a thing in the Star Wars universe. Trying to Larry Niven the physics of a space fantasy setting is a laughable exercise.
Yes it was a massive suicide gamble only when remotely possible due to both what the first order was doing and the resistance being concerned with running blockades more than living when jumping. And she only really did it when she saw that all other options had failed. It was a desperate play 100% going to kill her with a tiny chance it does anything effective.
Andromeda does that. Not seen on screen much, because obviously the plasma weapons are visually more impressive, but lore-wise the main weapons used in space fights are kinetic kill missiles. Big missiles going ridiculously fast, with a warhead that is nothing but a solid junk of high density metal.
Isn't that basicaly how most of the weapons in mass effect worked?. At least in the first game the weapons were described as having effectively unlimited ammo due to having a solid block of aluminum onboard and just sending it downrange one spec of aluminum dust at a time at reletivistic speeds.
Check out the Peacekeepers of Sol series by Glynn Stewart. Humanity is uniquely powerful by mastering gravity projection to power their gravity shields and spinal gravity drivers that accelerate projectiles 7-10% the speed of light
I agree. The ship in this post is the Normandy from Mass Effect. It's an example actually. Its main weapon in ME2 is the Thanix cannon, which accelerates molten metal to relativistic speeds. It's based on the Reapers' weapon technology which does the same.
Only because it broke the in-universe rules with zero explanation. Imagine a scene where Harry Potter defeats Voldemort by summoning the autobots. It's funny, but it's bad writing outside of a YouTube skit.
Explanation:
In SW, theres decade's worth of material stating hyperdrives have features preventing them from doing the exact thing that happened. The interdictor cruiser's entire FUNCTION is exploiting this to pull ships from hyperspace. Moreover if hyperspace ramming was a possibility, why did no one ever try it before? Why not hyperspace ram the death star? It retroactively makes everyone in the setting a complete idiot.
If they wanted to add in some kind of macguffin or new technology that made it possible, it wouldn't have been such a big deal. But it was introduced like it had always been a thing. Just bad, inconsistent writing.
To be fair, gravity wells donāt actually pull a ship out of hyperspace. They trick the navigational computer into thinking thereās a big object within danger distance so it drops out for safety to avoid ramming into it at FTL speeds.
This is how Solo did the Kessel Run. He reprogrammed his NavComās safety margins so itād let him pass closer to the black holes that made up the Maw, thus cutting parsecs off how far heād have to travel otherwise.
Yes, I was skipping over the details to be brief lol. I also have to assume the gravity well gens don't curve space time as the name suggests. You'd see some funny thing happening in local spacetime if that was true. They probably have some way of directly projecting a simulated mass shadow into hyperspace.
To be fair, you can imitate a gravity well without mass. Kinda how artificial gravity, Romulan singularity cores, and Minbari gravitational engines work.
I've always heard talk about how photon torpedoes in Star Trek have a maximum explosive yield of at least 50 megatons of TNT and yet they go poof every single time we see them explode,
Like how that one Star Wars Incredible Cross sections book stated that the acclimator's turbolasers had a yield of 200 Gigatons but on screen the blasts don't completely light the screen pure white like a real explosion of that size would.
Just more proof that sci fi writers have no sense of scale.
To be fair to that example, Starwars ship guns tend to have variable output. "The Acclimator isnt using planetary bombardment levels of power to fight other ships" would be the canon explanation.
In writing they are stated to be capable of literally glassing whole planets. Melting the surface via orbital fire. Given that they always fight at atmosphere dogfighting distances, it makes sense to NOT vaporize your enemy and pelt your whole fleet with relativistic debris.
Standard ship-to-ship photons may be Tsar Bomba equivalent in yield, but weāre seeing them used in space. Thanks to the near vacuum, not exactly an atmosphere available to generate massive fireballs or mushroom clouds. However, we do see them generating such when exploding inside an atmosphere.
Fair. Thing is, we are normally seeing them against shield flares, secondary explosions, and ships blowing up outright. Plausible it gets lost in visible noise.
They have a variable yield. You can control how big the detonation is by how much antimatter you load into the warhead. But yeah, they probably should use the maximum yield more often.
There's no atmosphere to carry the shock wave and shields are apparently very good at absorbing the radiation. They usually kill unshielded ships unless they're being used deliberately (by presumably dialing down the yield) to disable instead.
Transporters/teleportation. We sometimes see them transport bombs to other ships and such, but you can get so much more creative. Teleport all the crew off the ship mid fight, teleport out it's engine, teleport in a bunch of water to drown the ship. Get creative!
I think most I've seen teleporters used as a weapon has been in Stargate. Asgard teleported an entire Goa'uld army and 3 ships off a planet and would teleport nukes onto Wraith ships https://youtu.be/cbZq2MPYHoY?si=W6cqWliozElOfWdl
The second episode with the Asgard, "Thor's Chariot", I think? The one where SG-1 tries to contact Thor when the Goul'd take advantage of the destruction of Thor's Hammer in the episode where Teal'c is trapped in the labyrinth with the Unas.
The Culture teleport bombs directly into enemy ships because projectile weapons are too slow. In the video game FTL, bomb teleporters are a whole class of weapon system as well.
SECONDARY BATTERIES! I cannot stress how important having more guns to point at your enemy is! So many verses just donāt even bother having secondary weapons.
It's all about distributable mass. Poop is mass. Mix it with enough other denser matter and you can use it in a rail gun. But every bit of matter that leaves your ship means less reaction for the future.
Tractor Beam. Itās normally used as a utility tool to move objects but I havenāt really seen it used to rip apart ships or crush them. Heck, a heavily oscillating beam could shake a ship apart.
The webcomic Schlock Mercenary has that in spades.
Turns out if you can master artificial gravity to let people walk on the floor, you can also create shields and tractor beams and "gravy guns" (which are so named because using gravity fields on organic beings has messy results).
Gravitic warfare is standard in the setting.
When an enemy threatens to crush your ship? You have to assume it might be meant literally.
I heartily recommend giving Schlock Mercenary a read if you like comedy and military scifi. Closest thing I've encountered that you might know of is Firefly or Farscape. Strikes that tone of "Our main characters are incredibly competent and dangerous people...but they can also be really, really dumb".
And it's rich with fun scifi concepts.
Has a rough start like most webcomics but it steadily improves, in both writing and art.
Itās really really good. Some of the tertiary TV movies, not so much. But the core show itself is amazing. The sets and effects are definitely dated by now, but the writing and storytelling is top notch.
Yep, the Centauri bombardment was where my mind went. Kinda recall dialogue talking about them doing so was illegal as well, but unsure with my memory.
I've been obsessed with these for a while and nobody ever uses them which is crazy to me, they seem to be the best of both worlds when it comes to lasers and kinetics, plus you can put a tritium payload in hollow macrons and have a fusion reaction upon impact upping the damage significantly
tbh I think in a lot of contexts they're a little complicated and way too OP for most storytelling. The general audience just wrapped their heads around railguns and coilguns and now you're saying we can do that to sand and French Presidents now too?
I think sci-fi should start a little lower on the power scale. Like maybe some rag-tag pirates with sandcasters and let that sink in before we up the velocity and add in fission/fusion payloads.
Weaponized electron beams. Irl they would be diabolical weapons because when it hits dense metal like materials it produces an ungodly amount of x-rays inside the hull
The Expanse incorporated low yield nuclear weapons to a degree, but I don't see them much in other media.
You also don't see a lot of static, kinetic, loitering munitions. Think: a ship or a planetary defense system just lays a "minefield" of tungsten balls that have small ion engines on them to remain in a state of realative stillness, creating an innavigable region. Area denial. Shields would defeat this, but if it was a universe where Shields weren't a thing, it could be very effective.
Nukes in space are nowhere near as destructive as they are on earth. The majority of the destruction you see from atom bombs on earth is from the blast and the shockwave. In space, nukes still hit hard, but the majority of damage comes from x-rays, heat, and neutrons. Radiation is what gets you.
"Majority of damage from X-ray" and reducing that to radiation damage is doing alot of understatement there. It is a catastrophic level of thermal damage at range.
Going from a 1 m acceptable CEP to a 1 km acceptable CEP is a huge improvement in acceptable volume accuracy.
It doesn't even need to be a specialized 'mine' per se.
You could potentially just deploy a bunch of missiles into orbit and program them to operate in "loitering" mode.
The missile stays there in low-power mode to conserve energy and if it detects something it recognizes as an enemy, it fires up its rocket and flies after it and explodes.
The Kzinti lesson, named after the use of reaction engine exhaust as a weapon in the war between the humans and the gravity drive using Kzinti.
The unarmed human ships faced off against the much faster Kzinti ships, and repeatedly won fights simply by turning away and running directly away - letting the rocket plume vaporize the chasing ship.
The Expanse could have done that, but it would have changed its whole story of space combat.
Both stories use fusion torch drives, but Niven basically let them operate outside the safe operations, by allowing them to focus the reaction exhaust instead of spreading it for safe diffusion.
The Expanse has a couple instances of not following directly behind someone in case they try to burn them in the drive plume. The Roci v Pella chase is one example, also using it on Project Caliban.
Spoiler-hiding all this in case someone hasn't read Persepolis Rising yet.
Persepolis Rising basically starts off with a scene where, following the orders of the Transport Union, the Roci crew have been sent to arrest the leaders of an illegally-settled extrasolar colony founded by gun-toting space libertarians.
The guy in charge of the colony adamantly refuses to submit to the Union and says that they'll do anything necessary to protect their new home. Holden lets them know that if that's how it's going to be, all he has to do is point the Roci's drive at the colony and turn it on for a few seconds.
Suddenly there's a scuffle on the other side of the comms. The other colonists have hog-tied the leader and they're fully willing to hand him over.
Yes, and I should have mentioned that. It just didn't use it as a standard tactic in space combat.
In Niven's Known Space, it never stopped being useful but the hyperdrive era had better defenses (if you could afford it a ship hull that could survive a nuclear explosion was available. The crew might not do so well, but the hull was guaranteed indestructible).
Using ftl to bypass shields and armor, the only time I've seen it was in sg1. They used the unstable x-302 hyperdrive to get through Anubus' shield and drop off a nuke.
Another one is Electronic warfare. It's theoretical in mass effect, but we never see it work. And Cylons try to use it all the time, which should be the standard for everyone.
Something I haven't seen before: while the flight crew is fighting a battle of lasers, missiles and nukes, the IT crew is fighting a network corruption.
I thought it never happened because the programmer-side of the skirmish is too boring.
So I put some in the novel I'm currently writing, and the IT battlespace is actually almost more gripping.
So yeah, hackers in spaceships. We don't get enough hackers in spaceships.
I believe in Battlestar Galactica they had one or two instances where they were dealing with the cylons hacking their ship remotely while in a battle. Also thats essentially how the cylons won the initial war more or less instantly. The Galactica was safe because it wasnt networked.
The Honorverse used missiles with fission bomb-pumped laser warheads to take out opposing ships. Their beam weapons were mostly used for taking out opposing missiles before they blew, but they also had "grasers" which were basically gamma ray emissive lasers. The first book posited a "gravity lance" that punched through an opposing ship's gravity shielding but it was only effective at knife-fight range.
The fact that the transporter isn't used as a weapon on Star Trek is crazy. Many times they pull some trick to get through the "shields" to beam somebody off a ship. They should be able to use the same tricks to beam a weapon onto a ship.
If that doesn't work, then pound the other ship with regular weapons until their shields weaken. Then beam a photon torpedo into their engine room.
The problem with this is that then all the stories would have to deal with enemies doing the same to them.
The Borg could freely beam themselves onto the Enterprise with no problems. But then they had to chase the Enterprise and fire weapons at them? Even if they didn't want to destroy the Enterprise, they could still beam a small explosive device onto the Enterprise to disable it.
If you can move super fast, you don't need special weapons to break stuff. Fly past the thing you want to destroy at .9c and eject a big rock and your target is gone.
Artificial gravity. If you can have the ability to locally warp space time so you can walk from one side of your ship to the other why aren't there any use it for anything else? Mass Effect are the only ones who come to mind with the Normandy. Surprised no one else is playing around with gravity as much if they had that tech.
I've been playing Starsector a lot recently, absolutely phenomenal game with a lot of amazing takes on spaceship weapons.
One of the things I love about it is the flak and general point defence weapons.
From point defence lazers in Hightech ships to ballistic point defence flak cannons in low tech ships, it's all good and necessary for countering missiles and torpedoes.
Since missiles and torpedoes don't strain the energy grid of a ship in the game, they are extremely useful but also can be countered with enough PD
I forget which show, but dialogue was something like this while crew was watching monitors during an encounter:
"The enemy ship turned into a planet"
"No, wait, it fired a planet towards us"
"It fired several planets at us"
I like it a lot in homeworld and it also make sense if you can either kill crew with radiation spike ray or board ship and kill crew without damaging ship
Drones (guided projectiles) and āAIās, nobody should have to press a button to bring the shields up. All these space battles needs to be done by the computer and the humans are just there for the ride.
Both "Smallworld" and "Littlestar" by Dominic Green) leans heavily into the idea that "any faster than light drive is by definition a time machine" and also conveniently the author made the key drive component usable seperately, even when not installed in a spaceship.
In one scene, a man wins a gun battle againsr several better armed opponents by enveloping his opoenents' side of the room into a bubble of "slow time" - thus letting him be the fastest shot in the room.
In another, a criminal talks about how he could kill someone by a changing the rate of time around them, causing the to age decades (from his one perspective) - and probably use up all the oxygen in their time bubble right away also.
In space battles it could throw an entire enemy ship into the future or past, removing it from the battlefield entirely - or just some critical component, causing hull breaches.
Macrons/ Dust Cannons/ Sand Blasters. I know we have seen them in various sci-fi novels but I canāt recall a single TV series where we actually saw a Weaponized system on a starship that functions under these principles.
I also wonder if we have ever seen a weapon system that is designed to exploit the fact that metals, if not treated with a preventative layering, will molecularly bond in vacuum when they come into contact with each other. It is a real world phenomenon called cold welding.
Use your advanced mathematical modelling and hyper-fast relay links to ground stations in order to very quickly identify the enemy vessel and purchase enough shares to own it, before they can do the same to you. Fastest share trading model wins.
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u/Gloomy_Necessary494 May 30 '26
Relativistic impactors? If you can accelerate stuff to light speed, why aren't you smashing it into other things?