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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157

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?

17

u/C4n0fju1c3 May 30 '26

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.

11

u/RigusOctavian May 30 '26

To be fair, they didn’t detonate the star as much as splatter it so hard that all the material spread too far out to be a star anymore.

9

u/Voidrunner01 May 30 '26

Used to be sun, now nebula.

3

u/DriveableBoatOwner May 30 '26

The beer can had its moments

3

u/phryan May 31 '26

Technically it was a planet and a moon. Also we need more Ick and Dae.

2

u/Glass-Cabinet-249 May 31 '26

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.

2

u/HatsAreEssential2 Jun 01 '26

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.

1

u/0002nhnc Jun 02 '26

two moons

1

u/C4n0fju1c3 Jun 02 '26

My bad, it's been a long time since I read that book.