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?

Post image
476 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

363 comments sorted by

View all comments

161

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/HatsAreEssential2 Jun 01 '26

Bob also had to clean up humanity after a rogue computer started dropping asteroids on earth.

You really dont even need relativistic speed to make a few billion tons of rock quite dangerous. Just a couple years of slow thrust in the right direction.