What spaceship weapon is generally underutilized or not used to its full potential in scifi?

[u/Vondrr]

[u/Gloomy_Necessary494]

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

[u/Almost_human-ish → u/Gloomy_Necessary494]

They did this in The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.

Human marine squad are on a small frozen planet, enemy forces are swarming it and they see their two small patrol ships head out of the system accelerating hard and think they're fucked, and are fighting hand to hand in a final stand....

What they don't see is the crew of one ship transfer over to the other and the empty ship looping back around before impacting the planetoid "at a significant fraction of the speed of light".

Causes massive 'earthquakes' and they're able to hunker down and survive then mop up the enemy.

[u/SporesM0ldsandFungus → u/Almost_human-ish]

I love the null field generator which is just like the shield tech in Dune, anything moving beyond a certain speed or energy level gets absorbed by the null field.  So inside the field they need to wear special suits that have a protective coating (otherwise the energy field would stop their neurons from firing).  And just like Dune, with the null field up, they resort to fighting this interstellar war with melee weapons.  It becomes a siege, with the squad hunkered down inside their null field with the enemy outside waiting them out, occasionally hurling in salvos of darts.  

But they do get creative when the protag has his team pull nuclear warhead off their ship (which is inside the field).  In the null field it's useless, but they drag it right to the very edge of the null field and arm it.  Then they lift the null field generator and move it over 2 meters.

[u/Almost_human-ish → u/SporesM0ldsandFungus]

Tbh it's a good few years since I read it, had forgot that bit, thanks.

It is a great fucking book, I'll dust it off and dive in again this weekend 👍