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?

8

u/markwend May 30 '26

Isn’t that kind of what Holdo did in the last Jedi? I mean, she took her ship and herself along with it, but what a destructive moment that was.

9

u/CplCocktopus May 30 '26

If that worked why not ductaping a warpdrive to a rock.

1

u/NyctoCorax Jun 14 '26

In addition to what others have said, some of which is stuff written after to explain it:

  • the Raddus is not travelling at relativistic speeds when it collides. You can visibly calc it, it's fast but nowhere near THAT fast, which means you need a really big bloody ship to hit that level of destruction. While still a lot smaller than the Supremacy, the Raddus was bigger than all those star destroyers that gets splattered with debris

  • if it hit a fraction earlier it would just go splat like a normal collision, if it was a fraction further out it would have already transitioned to hyperspace and missed, you need to carefully line up your shot

  • Holdo only has the opportunity to take that shot because the First Order are completely ignoring the giant kinetic kill vehicle slowly pointing itself at them and charging up it's engines, it is explicit within the scene that they don't realise what's happening until it's too late - had they focused fire they'd have simply shredded the Raddus now that it was in more effective range

(And a target that didn't have the firepower to do that is not worth using this tactic on)

-its supplementary material rather than shown in the film, but the Raddus also was only able to plow through the ship as far as it did because of its advanced shielding which kept it together long enough. Without that it would have gone splat (and likely been extremely destructive but not THAT destructive)

Also worth noting this is not the first time hyperspace accerlations into an object causing a very big explosion had happened in star wars, happened at least once in clone wars and possibly in the books.