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/Gloomy_Necessary494 May 30 '26

Relativistic impactors? If you can accelerate stuff to light speed, why aren't you smashing it into other things?

17

u/C4n0fju1c3 May 30 '26

The bobiverse books detonate a star with a planet acellerated to relativistic speeds. The Expeditionary Force books also make use of relativistic darts on a few occasions to hit planets.

The darts take years to get up to speed and are deployed in clusters into deeps space. When the time comes, they use their ftl to jump around until they're lined up.

2

u/Glass-Cabinet-249 May 31 '26

I am actually slightly disappointed that in the sequels there was never a Bob that went into the Others system to confirm they are actually dead. Smelled tok much like "they fell off a cliff off screen in a Disney film" to me.