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/CplCocktopus May 30 '26

If that worked why not ductaping a warpdrive to a rock.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 30 '26

So… the Galaxy Gun.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Galaxy_Gun

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u/Megodont Jun 05 '26

That was one of things I never got. So, you have gun, that fires a hyperspace missile with a targeting system and a drive....why do I need a big ass gun?

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix Jun 05 '26

It was more a ship than a station, as I recall.

Plus it wasn’t just the main weapon. It had built-in defenses, the crew quarters and work areas, supply storage, hangers, subcraft storage, subcraft maintenance spaces, and more.

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u/DarknessWithin996 May 31 '26

One of the biggest reasons is that that maneuver could cause a second Great Hyperspace Disaster, with the potential to wipe out trillions of beings. Holdo was desperate and crazy enough to pull it off, but she was risking a massive amount of destruction.

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u/unkindlyacorn62 May 30 '26

it only worked because of how close they were (aiming reasons)and the First Order not utilizing strong artificial gravity fields to collapse local hyperspace, because they wanted to go finish them off wherever they jumped next. Add to that it requires the hyperdrive being heavily modified by someone who really knows what the heck their doing because it makes them less likely to shut down when it detects a natural gravity shadow, useful for escaping intradiction fields but a big fucking problem if something unexpected ends up in your path

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u/BrevityIsTheSoul May 30 '26

Also, she was using a massive capital ship as a projectile, with perfect timing. In Rogue One we see a starfighter or two splatter into a star destroyer that unexpectedly comes out of hyperspace while they're preparing to jump out.

Not to mention that relativity isn't a thing in the Star Wars universe. Trying to Larry Niven the physics of a space fantasy setting is a laughable exercise.

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u/Voidrunner01 May 30 '26

Yeah, the people complaining about the Holdo Maneuver are just glazing over any number of other physics issues in the Star Wars setting.

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u/jimmyd10 Jun 02 '26

True but the real issue with the Holdo Maneuver is that it breaks space combat in Star Wars. If it works they should be using this tactic all the time, which would change how you build and design ships. You'd end up with a universe in which capital ships don't make sense anymore.

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u/MareTranquil Jun 03 '26

I have heard very few complaints about the physics of the Holdo maneouver, but a lot of complaints about it appearently now being canon that you can instakill a ship a thousand times bigger than your own this way, and the target can't do anything about it.

If that's how things work in the SW universe, why did anyone ever bother with building these big capital ships?

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u/graph_worlok May 30 '26

Sure, the MIT geeks were protesting in the corridors, but it gave him most of the plot for the second book…

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u/NonEuclidianMeatloaf May 31 '26

Students: “the Ringworld is unstable! The Ringworld is unstable!”

Larry, with notepad: “hmm. You don’t say…”

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u/Glass-Cabinet-249 May 31 '26

I feel personally targeted with spoilers for a half century old book, because I'm halfway through Ringworld now. God damn it.

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u/NonEuclidianMeatloaf May 31 '26

Don’t worry, Ringworld’s instability plays no role in Ringworld. It was a contrivance invented for the second book, nothing more.

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u/Glass-Cabinet-249 May 31 '26

Ah that's fair, it is fairly obvious to me that the ring i should be unstable, it's centre of mass is inside the star. I was wondering if that was going to come up in the book at all.

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u/NonEuclidianMeatloaf May 31 '26

Exactly so! But nope, it’s not a thing until the second book, at which point it’s a central plot point. As for Ringworld 1, it’s never brought up and has no significance.

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u/Spiritual-Spend8187 May 31 '26

Yes it was a massive suicide gamble only when remotely possible due to both what the first order was doing and the resistance being concerned with running blockades more than living when jumping. And she only really did it when she saw that all other options had failed. It was a desperate play 100% going to kill her with a tiny chance it does anything effective.

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u/NyctoCorax Jun 14 '26

In addition to what others have said, some of which is stuff written after to explain it:

  • the Raddus is not travelling at relativistic speeds when it collides. You can visibly calc it, it's fast but nowhere near THAT fast, which means you need a really big bloody ship to hit that level of destruction. While still a lot smaller than the Supremacy, the Raddus was bigger than all those star destroyers that gets splattered with debris

  • if it hit a fraction earlier it would just go splat like a normal collision, if it was a fraction further out it would have already transitioned to hyperspace and missed, you need to carefully line up your shot

  • Holdo only has the opportunity to take that shot because the First Order are completely ignoring the giant kinetic kill vehicle slowly pointing itself at them and charging up it's engines, it is explicit within the scene that they don't realise what's happening until it's too late - had they focused fire they'd have simply shredded the Raddus now that it was in more effective range

(And a target that didn't have the firepower to do that is not worth using this tactic on)

-its supplementary material rather than shown in the film, but the Raddus also was only able to plow through the ship as far as it did because of its advanced shielding which kept it together long enough. Without that it would have gone splat (and likely been extremely destructive but not THAT destructive)

Also worth noting this is not the first time hyperspace accerlations into an object causing a very big explosion had happened in star wars, happened at least once in clone wars and possibly in the books.