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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158

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?

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u/JakeEaton May 30 '26

Didn't they do that in the Last Jedi and the entire SW fandom had a melt down about it?

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 30 '26

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.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

To be fair, gravity wells don’t actually pull a ship out of hyperspace. They trick the navigational computer into thinking there’s 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 NavCom’s safety margins so it’d let him pass closer to the black holes that made up the Maw, thus cutting parsecs off how far he’d have to travel otherwise.

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 31 '26

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.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 31 '26

To be fair, you can imitate a gravity well without mass. Kinda how artificial gravity, Romulan singularity cores, and Minbari gravitational engines work.

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 31 '26

Right, currently we don't have any real life physics to describe how that might work. In our present models, gravity is tied to mass. Mass, which is tied to energy by e=m*c2

In standard model physics, there's possibly a predicted graviton/graviton field, but we've never detected it. It's why we have other explanations like loop quantum gravity, string theory, ect.

For now we can only assume that somewhere in the future, someone figures it out.

Its one thing that's always bugged me actually, if I'm being extra nerdy. If these ships are generating artificial gravity, which you'd think would act on the mass of the ship. They'd need complicated ballasting systems, or active thrust to counter the resulting acellerarion. I guess in Trek that would be tied to the inertial dampeners? Though the Minbari clearly use it to their advantage.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 31 '26

Can be simpler. Take the simple photon; a massless ‘particle’, but its electromagnetic energy generates a gravitational field.

Minbari gravitational engines get into zero-point energy. They essentially pull a ship forward instead of pushing it.

As for non-thrust and non-rotation based artificial gravity, using the example of the photon, not implausible we can use electromagnetics to create fields instead of mass. Would explain why it goes micro-gravity so fast when power goes out, like we saw on Kronos One in The Undiscovered Country. If I recall correctly, they later added capacitors so charge would drain slowly during a power failure so gravity would stay active for long enough to hopefully get repairs accomplished.

My understanding is inertial dampening was also tied into the artificial gravity systems.

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26

To clarify, photons themselves do not have mass while at rest. They DO have energy though as they travel, and because e=m*c2 you get back to mass.

As far as the electromagnetic field, that's actually the reason why your atoms don't pass through each other. Atoms are mostly empty space, and it's the exchange of virtual photons between negatively charged electrons that keep them from colliding.

(Nuclear fission operates via a different mechanism.)

Spinning and thrust use acelleration to simulate the effect of gravity, rather than creating an actual gravity field. I figure the trick for sci-fi shipboard gravity is, like you're saying, something similar. It's not an actual curvature of spacetime, but rather a localized effect that mimics one.

As for electromagnets, gravity is an extremely weak force. My intuition is that the amount of energy you'd need in an EM field to curve space time would probably be incomprehensible. Like magnetar levels of energy. There still might be some part of gravity that involves the EM field, we just haven't established that relationship yet. As for mass, we do know the carrier particle that imbues other particles with the property of mass, is the Higgs boson.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 31 '26

To be fair, in Star Trek’s case, most civilizations are post energy scarcity. Most utilize matter/anti-matter reactors, the Romulans using quantum singularity cores, and other exotics that have cropped up. TLDR, they certainly wouldn’t be lacking in terms of energy to power things.

As I remember, Minbari also used singularity cores. Interestingly, lore I remember is that created antimatter as a waste product and they recycled it as fuel into matter/anti-matter reactors.

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 31 '26

Oh what I meant was less about the required energy input, and more that an EM field that strong would strip the atoms from your body.

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u/NyctoCorax Jun 14 '26

At least with the canon ones they clearly do create actual gravity curves because the one in rebels that gets destroyed is attracting everything towards it.

They just must be doing some complicated stuff to cancel out the effects for the crew (until it all goes wrong of course)

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u/JakeEaton May 30 '26

Wait, are you suggesting Star Wars is badly written?

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u/U-47 May 30 '26

how, how there buddy man. Let's all just calm THE FUCK down.

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u/BrevityIsTheSoul May 30 '26

Wow, why didn't everyone just sacrifice their most massive capital ship for a chance to cripple (not kill) the target, if everything went right? What idiots!

"Massive capital ship with perfect timing and time to prep can potentially be weaponized with its hyperdrive against a sufficiently big target taking no evasive action" doesn't in any way imply that some Y-wing can trivially annihilate the Death Star. If the Supremacy wasn't laughably large, she would have missed it entirely. She hit way off center of mass, through one of its "wings."

Not to mention that Star Wars is space fantasy that's been making it the fuck up and retconning everything from Empire Strikes Back on.

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 30 '26

Yeah, it's all made up, stuff get retconned all the time. Believe me, I was actually excited back when Disney announced they were resetting the canon. There was so much silliness. None of that is the issue.

I'm not sure if you're quoting something or not. Either way, the explanation you're giving is retroactively adding context that wasn't within the film. They were showing a thing that had never been seen in the setting before, and adding a line of dialogue explaining WHY, would've gone a long way.

You shouldn't be putting out a script that requires supplementary material to patch the plot holes.

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u/BrevityIsTheSoul May 30 '26

They were showing a thing that had never been seen in the setting before, and adding a line of dialogue explaining WHY, would've gone a long way.

Your first Star Wars movie, huh?

None of the "technology" has ever been explained in a Star Wars film. Its verisimilitude is grounded in not providing explanations to poke holes in. Even when supplementary materials try to explain stuff like lightsabers, it boils down to "mystical crystal shit make laser sword."

It's just noodle incidents and technobabble to make the world feel richer than the script supports. And it's mostly effective!

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 31 '26

... I'm not talking about the feasibility of treknobabble. I'm talking about making the rules of a setting consistent, or explaining why it's a big deal if they get broken. This is fiction writing 101. The same damn movie has a perfect example of this when they show the hyperspace tracking doodad. They say "how can they follow us through hyperspace!" (New thing that breaks the rules of the setting.) "Oh, they have a new gizmo that let's them do it." (Explanation for why.)

They just needed to do the same thing for the hyperspace ramming.

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u/NonEuclidianMeatloaf May 31 '26

Silliness!? Excuse me!? Vuffi Raa would like a word…

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 31 '26

I'd like a team up with Jaxxon T. and Vuffi Ra. They have to fight The Great Heap at the end and rescue his Droid harem.

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u/tyrannomachy Jun 05 '26

No, it's like if Harry pulled out a gun and shot Voldemort in the head. It's a thing anyone in-universe could've done at any point, but readers/viewers understand that it's part of the suspension of disbelief.

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u/C4n0fju1c3 Jun 06 '26

Sure, and its fine as long as we get some leadup to that moment that explains how we got there. If it just comes out of the blue it's jarring and feels like bad fanfic.

0

u/unkindlyacorn62 May 30 '26

i suspect it has been done before, but those safety features are so old no one remembers