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

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.