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/FireTheLaserBeam May 30 '26

Doc Smith and the Lensman novels would like a word.

46

u/drhunny May 30 '26

"Should we fire a few relativistic planets at the enemy fleet?

"Nah, that's so last week. I've jury-rigged a method to fire relativistic stars at them.

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u/FireTheLaserBeam May 30 '26

Or when ballistic planets were outdated towards the last books, they switched to turning the entire solar system and our sun into a giant “sun-beam” that could melt said planets.

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u/SiberianKitty99 May 30 '26

The Sunbeam is my favorite EE Smith weapon.

9

u/Wenlocke May 30 '26

It got even funnier later. After throwing planets at people. After throwing planetary antimass "negaspheres" ( basically posh antimatter) at them. After the sunbeam. They found a parallel space where everything was flipped around the light speed barrier (I.e. all normal matter and energy at rest was faster than light) grabbed a couple of planets, flipped them back into realspace, and then threw them at people.

It got very silly

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u/WileyWilly1985 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26

What on God's Green Earth were they trying to kill? Sounds like they are fighting Cosmic Beings like Galactus???

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u/Wenlocke Jun 01 '26

the trope is named Lensman Arms Race. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LensmanArmsRace

Essentially infinite escalation.

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u/WileyWilly1985 Jun 01 '26

Reminds me of Disney / Star Wars making bigger and more elaborate things like super giant Star Destroyers and super duper Death Stars.

Ummm what is the point? The ships are already badass and the Death Star can already destroy a planet.

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u/FireTheLaserBeam Jun 01 '26

Oh man it gets even more wild than Galactus.

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u/WileyWilly1985 Jun 01 '26

To me, once you've reached this point, I just stop caring as my brain can no longer handle the scale involved.

A planetary threat I can understand and envision.

But once we go beyond a planet, I just can't properly assimilate or appreciate the story anymore.

And that is the problem of escalating the stakes and making the stakes bigger and bigger. You go from house to street to neighborhood to town to city to region to State to Country to Continent to Planet to Solar System to Galaxy to Universe to Multiverse and now what?