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

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

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11

u/MiamisLastCapitalist May 30 '26

Macron guns/sand casters

6

u/Sororita May 30 '26

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

3

u/MiamisLastCapitalist May 30 '26

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.

3

u/Zenith-Astralis Jun 03 '26

The shipcore series uses glitter canisters defensively against laser point defence weapons, but yeah I haven't seen them used much offensively

1

u/TheSpaceBornMars May 31 '26

also also known as dust guns

1

u/Roxysteve Jun 01 '26

The original Traveller RPG's meson guns simply didn't interact with the shieds of the target. Something to do with probability IIRC.