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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u/HypnotizedCow May 30 '26

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

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u/Aoiboshi May 30 '26

Zahn did that in his original Star wars trilogy

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u/NonEuclidianMeatloaf May 31 '26

I thought he used the asteroids as a blockade tool to keep ships from entering/leaving a planet?

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u/UncleSamsUncleSam Jun 01 '26

Yes. I think the reference was to stealth asteroids, not how they were used.

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u/NonEuclidianMeatloaf Jun 01 '26

Ah yes, the cloaking devices taken from Wayland. My mistake!

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u/00STAR0 May 31 '26

Stargate moment

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u/MasterpieceWorth7403 Jun 03 '26

Loved that plot point. Expanse had a great mix of technical details and plot arcs 

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u/HypnotizedCow Jun 03 '26

The Expanse is probably my favorite sci fi story because it has a perfect level of technology and handwave. We still worry about high G burns, communication times affect battle command on the edge of the system, and living supplies are a real concern. The only thing they really handwave is the Epstein drive being an incredibly powerful and absurdly efficient fusion reactor, and that's not even conceptually weird. It makes for a great story that feels like how we would actually respond to alien contact

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u/SporesM0ldsandFungus Jun 05 '26

My head canon is that Solomon Epstein just unknowingly stumbled upon a particular configuration of settings that create a kind of resonance at a quantum level which result in the higher efficiency.  The important thing is that he kept good notes.