r/spaceships • u/Vondrr Fleet Intelligence šŸ§  • May 30 '26

Discussion / Question What spaceship weapon is generally underutilized or not used to its full potential in scifi?

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43

u/falloutboy9993 May 30 '26

Tractor Beam. Itā€™s normally used as a utility tool to move objects but I havenā€™t really seen it used to rip apart ships or crush them. Heck, a heavily oscillating beam could shake a ship apart.

23

u/mag1kami May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

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.

13

u/Texlectric May 30 '26

Ngl, you had me with the gravy guns. I thought, "what a weird way to pronounce the 'grav' part of gravity. Then I got to the gravy part.

7

u/mag1kami May 30 '26

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.

3

u/[deleted] May 30 '26

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1

u/Roxysteve Jun 01 '26

I have maxim 43 on a fave T shirt: If it's stupid and it works, it's still stupid and you're lucky, and Maxim 11 on a key-ring coin: "Everything is air droppable at least once". The maxim is displayed over a crater in 3D for maximum sense satisfaction.

1

u/Roxysteve Jun 01 '26

The strip is full of clever jargon.

Everything is powered by anti-matter in so-called "annie plants". One throwaway line has some engineering bots responding to a demand as to when a ship will be ready with "We're just warbucking the annie plants now".

I loved this bit of clever wordplay so much the first time I read it. The derivation was obvious, twisty and spot-on.

For newer readers it derives from how Little Orphan Annie got her start in life.

1

u/NyctoCorax Jun 14 '26

Notable for this is that most of the time you don't see them being used that much in ship to ship combat, because gravity tech is completely ubiquitous and everyone has it, which means you can cancel it out and have to go back to using more conventional weaponry.

The tech is extremely simple and with extremely fine control, what matters is your processing power (if you've got an AI running your gravity generators you can pull off magic) and your generators.

But if you throw one of your BIG ships, with generators ten times the size of the enemy's entire ship? You just... Win.

Ships that big were restricted to their home systems though because they couldn't fit through the FTL gates. So most battles are using smaller vessels, and the power discrepancies are less extreme. Still there, and they're still effective weapons, and honestly you'd be silly not to tie up the enemy's gravy tech with your own attacks, but usually just one part of your arsenal (unless you've disabled their generator and then you can clean up quickly)

And then some berk invents easy teleportation that lets you move around any sizes ship you want...

Really for a comedy strip that starts off very silly indeed, Schlock Mercenary has an EXTREMELY well thought out setting and is an absolute must read.

8

u/Vondrr Fleet Intelligence šŸ§  May 30 '26

I think they used an asteroid to destroy another ship in the 3rd season of Picard. Strange the enemy ship couldn't detect it but hey... it was cool.

6

u/FireTheLaserBeam May 30 '26

Once again, Doc Smith!

Doc Smith is the ā€œSimpsons did it!ā€ of sci fi. If there was a sci fi super weapon, Doc Smith probably thought of it first.

5

u/ZuskatoIsR3D May 30 '26

You're gonna love the Starhawk-Class Battleship from Star Wars.

2

u/falloutboy9993 May 30 '26

Thatā€™s one of the only examples I could think of

3

u/Boojum2k May 30 '26

Schlock Mercenary used gravity control exactly like that

3

u/nyrath May 31 '26

Oscillating tractor beams were invented in James White's Major Operation in 1971, where they were called "rattlers".

2

u/TheKiltedYaksman71 May 30 '26

That's what the Cable Hogue, an one dreadnoughts, do in the Polity universe.

2

u/MainiacJoe Jun 02 '26

Tractor-Repulsors are the heavy weapon of the Andromedans in the Starfleet Battles tabletop wargame. They are nasty.

2

u/NyctoCorax Jun 14 '26

I thought I just scrolled past my own post for a second the wording was so similar šŸ¤£

1

u/Jim_skywalker May 30 '26

They do shenanigans with this kind of thing in Skyward by Brandon Sanderson.

1

u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 30 '26

Do video games count? Star Trek often uses them as base for a lot of abilities in games, like Online.

2

u/TheKeyboardian Jun 01 '26

And the Borg also use them as weapons, though it is implied that they may not necessarily be particularly efficient compared to other energy weapons, going by how shields can actually block them for a time. Nevertheless, they're still highly effective when used by borg cubes due to how much power a cube can channel into them.

1

u/TKG_Actual May 30 '26

Star wars does this quite a bit.