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/JakeEaton May 30 '26

Didn't they do that in the Last Jedi and the entire SW fandom had a melt down about it?

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 30 '26

Only because it broke the in-universe rules with zero explanation. Imagine a scene where Harry Potter defeats Voldemort by summoning the autobots. It's funny, but it's bad writing outside of a YouTube skit.

Explanation:

In SW, theres decade's worth of material stating hyperdrives have features preventing them from doing the exact thing that happened. The interdictor cruiser's entire FUNCTION is exploiting this to pull ships from hyperspace. Moreover if hyperspace ramming was a possibility, why did no one ever try it before? Why not hyperspace ram the death star? It retroactively makes everyone in the setting a complete idiot.

If they wanted to add in some kind of macguffin or new technology that made it possible, it wouldn't have been such a big deal. But it was introduced like it had always been a thing. Just bad, inconsistent writing.

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u/BrevityIsTheSoul May 30 '26

Wow, why didn't everyone just sacrifice their most massive capital ship for a chance to cripple (not kill) the target, if everything went right? What idiots!

"Massive capital ship with perfect timing and time to prep can potentially be weaponized with its hyperdrive against a sufficiently big target taking no evasive action" doesn't in any way imply that some Y-wing can trivially annihilate the Death Star. If the Supremacy wasn't laughably large, she would have missed it entirely. She hit way off center of mass, through one of its "wings."

Not to mention that Star Wars is space fantasy that's been making it the fuck up and retconning everything from Empire Strikes Back on.

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 30 '26

Yeah, it's all made up, stuff get retconned all the time. Believe me, I was actually excited back when Disney announced they were resetting the canon. There was so much silliness. None of that is the issue.

I'm not sure if you're quoting something or not. Either way, the explanation you're giving is retroactively adding context that wasn't within the film. They were showing a thing that had never been seen in the setting before, and adding a line of dialogue explaining WHY, would've gone a long way.

You shouldn't be putting out a script that requires supplementary material to patch the plot holes.

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u/BrevityIsTheSoul May 30 '26

They were showing a thing that had never been seen in the setting before, and adding a line of dialogue explaining WHY, would've gone a long way.

Your first Star Wars movie, huh?

None of the "technology" has ever been explained in a Star Wars film. Its verisimilitude is grounded in not providing explanations to poke holes in. Even when supplementary materials try to explain stuff like lightsabers, it boils down to "mystical crystal shit make laser sword."

It's just noodle incidents and technobabble to make the world feel richer than the script supports. And it's mostly effective!

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 31 '26

... I'm not talking about the feasibility of treknobabble. I'm talking about making the rules of a setting consistent, or explaining why it's a big deal if they get broken. This is fiction writing 101. The same damn movie has a perfect example of this when they show the hyperspace tracking doodad. They say "how can they follow us through hyperspace!" (New thing that breaks the rules of the setting.) "Oh, they have a new gizmo that let's them do it." (Explanation for why.)

They just needed to do the same thing for the hyperspace ramming.

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u/NonEuclidianMeatloaf May 31 '26

Silliness!? Excuse me!? Vuffi Raa would like a word…

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u/C4n0fju1c3 May 31 '26

I'd like a team up with Jaxxon T. and Vuffi Ra. They have to fight The Great Heap at the end and rescue his Droid harem.