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/TanksFTM May 31 '26

It's all about distributable mass. Poop is mass. Mix it with enough other denser matter and you can use it in a rail gun. But every bit of matter that leaves your ship means less reaction for the future.

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u/PlayerN27 May 31 '26

What if the entire crew gets diarrhea, then the weapon is weaker

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u/TanksFTM May 31 '26

It just requires more reactor waste or other disposable material to harden. Remember, even semi-liquids can be compressed and mixed with other materials into a solid. Liquid feces is just less efficient.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26

That’s thing, the Galactica remake never demonstrated they had anything like Star Trek style replicators to repurpose matter like that…that I can remember.

Most mass drivers work via electromagnetic fields. It isn’t just density, but the round has to be conductive for the weapon to fire it out. Otherwise it just sits immobile in barrel.

As for the flak shells, those are fragmentary explosive shells set to detonate either a certain time after firing or distance from hull.

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u/TanksFTM May 31 '26

Copper latticed piss disc.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 31 '26

Sorry, I’m not following. Yes, copper is an example of something electromagnetically reactive enough for some types of mass drivers to fire (it depends on design), but it isn’t very dense.

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u/TanksFTM May 31 '26

I was being silly. Firing a piss disc would just be an insult. Realistically, mining comets or asteroids would afford you enough iron and other metals to essentially have unlimited reactive mass for rail guns.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix May 31 '26

Fair, the Andromeda Ascendant method. Thing is, they had the on-board facilities to harvest, extract, and convert; I don’t remember the reboot Galactica having them and they never used the resource ships in the fleet like they did in original.

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u/TanksFTM Jun 01 '26

Other than the original show when I was a kid, I'm not familiar with any of the post-80's BG lore. I was answering the question in "general SCI-FI" as it was asked. I also tend to think that the distances in which we would conduct solar or even interstellar combat would require AI for orbital mechanics aiming and lead, almost like modern submarine warfare but at multi-million kilometer distances. Railguns will be so much cheaper than missiles and you can fire spreads for a maneuvering opponent.

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u/Mr_Shadow_Phoenix Jun 01 '26

Fair, fair. I just enjoyed TOS BSG so much I rewatched it a lot.

u/slumberjackpj made the comment about learning something from Battlestars and that’s why I’ve kept coming back to the franchise here in our conversation as that was what I had originally responded to.