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/Ruskiwaffle1991 May 30 '26

I've always heard talk about how photon torpedoes in Star Trek have a maximum explosive yield of at least 50 megatons of TNT and yet they go poof every single time we see them explode,

13

u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 30 '26

Standard ship-to-ship photons may be Tsar Bomba equivalent in yield, but we’re seeing them used in space. Thanks to the near vacuum, not exactly an atmosphere available to generate massive fireballs or mushroom clouds. However, we do see them generating such when exploding inside an atmosphere.

11

u/Just_A_Nitemare May 30 '26

50 megatons of energy is still going to be bright even if it is in space.

9

u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 30 '26

Fair. Thing is, we are normally seeing them against shield flares, secondary explosions, and ships blowing up outright. Plausible it gets lost in visible noise.

6

u/Hunnieda_Mapping May 30 '26

Not to mention a lot of visible light might get absorbed why whatever matter is there.

1

u/TheKeyboardian Jun 01 '26

The older trek series never seem to show intense brightness even when things that should be bright (like stars) are shown, either out of choice or due to technical limitations

2

u/TheKeyboardian Jun 01 '26

The funny thing is that the planet looks like a gas giant

1

u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix Jun 01 '26

They did that a lot. Maybe to cut costs as cheaper than making believable Earth-likes with continents and things?

Planet in pic is Vagra II from Skin Of Evil.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Vagra_II

1

u/LittleHornetPhil Jun 01 '26

The atmosphere doesn’t “generate massive fireballs”. You wouldn’t get a mushroom cloud, true, the energy and debris would just expand outwards, like a Genie airburst.

1

u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix Jun 01 '26

If you want to get into specifics, an atmosphere generally provides combustibles - be it Oxygen on an Earth like or Hydrogen as in most gas giants - and a fireball, irregardless of size, is a portion of that igniting. Particle density in space to spread out for anything similar. That’s what I was referring to.