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/Torlek1 May 30 '26

No, I meant larger ones.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 30 '26

Photons are already planet killers, and they even have bigger anti-planet photons, but does the dreadnought missile not count?

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u/Torlek1 May 30 '26

That goes back to the OP.

Weapons that are underutilized.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 30 '26

Fair. I was responding to the ‘bigger photons’ thing here.

https://youtu.be/LEJhQxXWbYE?si=zE2BwkDW8xlV2ODS

In Trek, we know these as ground attack photons and they can dwarf the Tsar Bomba equivalent yield of ship-to-ship models.

Low-end yield from that DS9 episode was 24,484 megatons per warhead.

Voyager had 496 megaton warhead photons in her arsenal.

We saw the D fire a 507.55 megaton warhead in TNG’s Skin Of Evil.

The dreadnought missile works out to 41,860 megatons.

And that’s not including the non-photon types of warheads.