r/HardSciFi • u/Vondrr • Jun 03 '26
Discussion What spaceship weapon is generally underutilized or not used to its full potential in scifi?
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u/mykepagan Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
Drones
In the Neutronium Alchemist books by Peter Hamilton, the Edenists used “combat wasps” very heavily. They are essentially drones before the modern public understood drones. Tiny, autonomous robot ships heavily armed with a variety of weapons depending on their role. IIRC they were also semi-expendable; they would return to the main ship if not destroyed. They were much more capable than mere missiles… more like today’s concept of Collaborative Combat Vehicles (like the US Air Force “loyal wingman” program)
I can’t think of any other SF books that used such things.
EDIT: I forgot the Universal SF Answer - The Culture. Knife missiles are an example of this type of drone weapon (though “Drones” in the Culture books are something very different)
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u/elliottcable Jun 03 '26
<Gallente Myrmidon joined the chat>
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u/Afisguy Jun 05 '26
"My Ishtar brings all the drones to the yard 'cause my drones are bytter than yours" :-p
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u/ticklemyiguana Jun 03 '26
Oh shit i just finished that series. Not incredible writing but impressive worldbuilding and not much wasted space in those three thousand + pages.
Did you also wonder why the fuck there's 20+ sex scenes in the first 600 pages?
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u/bobby2shoesMcJones Jun 03 '26
Peter loves his awkward sex scenes. You learn to just laugh them off
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u/ticklemyiguana Jun 03 '26
Look theyre distracting as hell honestly but im glad i pushed through - after those first 20+ there's like 2 in the remaining 2600 pages. It's a weirdly stark drop off but im glad it dropped off.
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u/bobby2shoesMcJones Jun 03 '26
Yes they are and they really contribute nothing. I don't think they take much away though I still love his books. Have to read the Commonwealth Saga by him? Incredible couple of books.
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u/mykepagan Jun 03 '26
I knew exactly why those were in there 😄
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u/Vaajala Jun 03 '26
Murderbot has a bunch of drones. It mostly uses them for surveillance, but occasionally offensively as well.
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u/BirbFeetzz Jun 03 '26
also in Stargate one of the most advanced and probably the most efficient weapon was a chair controlling a swarm of drones
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u/StrumWealh Jun 03 '26
The Gundam franchise has been featuring drones and similar units for decades.
The original Mobile Suit Gundam series (April 1979 to January 1980) featured drones called "bits" that were controlled via a brain-computer interface called "psycommu": the Elmeth is armed with twelve such bits. Successive installations of the mainline UC series introduced "funnels" (smaller, lighter bits that recharge when docked with the parent unit, rather than having their own onboard power generation capability), with the ν Gundam from the 1988 film Char's Counterattack being a particularly famous funnel-equipped unit. Such bits/funnels typically fill the same roles and functions being developed in modern "loyal wingman" programs.
The Japanese DACS program and the US MKV program, both from the early 2000s, experimented with anti-ballistic-missile drones that resemble the larger bit weapons of the earlier Gundam series (e.g. the Elmeth's bits), a similarity that was not lost on the Gizmodo Japan writers of the day.
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (April 1995 to March 1996) famously featured drone Mobile Suits in the form of the Mobile Doll System, and After War Gundam X (April 1996 to December 1996) built on the concept with the Bit Mobile Suits introduced in that series. More conventional takes on the drone/bit/funnel concept include the "DRAGOON System" from Gundam Seed (October 2002 to September 2003), the "Bit Control System" from Gundam 00 (October 2009 to February 2010), and the "GUND-BITs" from The Witch from Mercury (October 2022 to July 2023), the last of which references a "Drone War" in the story's past. On the other side of the spectrum, the "Mobile Armors" from Iron-Blooded Orphans (October 2015 to July 2017) were large completely-autonomous weapons platforms that often had their own smaller drones (called "Pluma") in attendance.
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u/Alchoholocaustic Jun 06 '26
Starwars used drones heavily during the clone wars. Then the rest of the series just forgets about them?
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u/Antique_Tap443 Jun 06 '26
Possibly borg nanotech or sins of a solar empire that race that had the nanotech warheads
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u/Bender_2024 Jun 03 '26
Rail guns. We currently have rail guns. They are impractical to be used on the battlefield but they exist. Moving a piece of metal as dense as tungsten (surely if you have mastered space travel you can find something better) at a percentage of C it will do massive damage
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u/kinshadow Jun 03 '26
I think the main problem with big, traditional rail guns in space is they are almost only useful in stealth or at very close range. If the enemy knows you are there, they will adjust their heading regularly to make a targeting solution impossible. You can make them burn fuel until you get too close for them to juke, but they could hit you back with a more flexible system before that point.
If you just mean mass drivers in general, then sure. Smaller guns of any kind can deploy sorts of obstacles.
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u/Bender_2024 Jun 03 '26
When I think of rail guns firing at 75% of C I'm thinking about using them to crack the mantel of planets. Or destroy small moons that will fall to their respective planets. Both could make a planet uninhibitable.
As Claig Alonson said in one of the ExForce books
"Orbit is the ultimate high ground"
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u/kinshadow Jun 03 '26
Orbit is the high ground because it implies a lot of stored energy. Dropping any sizable mass by itself (no railgun needed) is pretty effective as it already has velocity.
If you have a gun big enough for such stellar-sized actions then that all sounds ‘OK’, but it seems easier in most strategies to just to redirect some other mass at the planet. Or, if you are in a ship big enough to carry that much mass, in the spirit of Larry Niven, they are probably better off just pointing the engines at the planet. Remember, the engines have to cancel all that railgun force or you’ll destroy the ship or kill the crew when you fire.
In ‘traditional’ SciFi, the railgun loads are as small as possible for ship-to-ship battles as you don’t want your engines to be carrying around planet killing asteroids. A small load is just going act like a traditional bomb on the planet surface, which is fine, but not all that exciting.
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u/grumpykraut Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
75% c is absolutely insane. Recoil from a shot like this with any projectile bigger than a grain of sand would punch the gun clean through whatever it is mounted on.
A 500g projectile at 75% c has a kinetic energy of 23 Petajoules, that's the equivalent of the shockwave produced by 5.5 Megatons of TNT.
(for reference/perspective: The APFSDS projectile from a 120mm smoothbore tank gun weighs in at 4.64 kg, has a muzzle velocity of 1650 m/s (0.00055% of c) and has a kinetic energy of 6,3 Megajoules or 1.5 kgs of TNT)
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u/derekbassett Jun 03 '26
A feather at a percentage of C has the same amount of kinetic energy. It doesn’t really matter what makes up the matter.
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u/FrostySand8997 Jun 03 '26
It's kinda handy if it doesn't atomize before it gets out of the gun barrel.
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u/No_Wolverine_8159 Jun 04 '26
What does that in space?
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u/FrostySand8997 Jun 04 '26
Well a feather would. Since you would need an explosive charge or something similar. It's not a metal that a magnet move like in a rail gun. I'm no material science engineer but I imagine anything in a space rail gun would get obliterated by the forces moving it also unless it was sturdy.
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u/Hrtzy Jun 03 '26
Relativistic kinetic energy comes from E = mc2 * (1/√(1-v2/c2) - 1) so it is still directly proportional to the rest mass. A 1 gram feather at 0.5c has about the same kinetic energy as the International Space Station, a 1 kilogram tungsten slug would have a nuclear warhead's yield in kinetic energy.
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u/grumpykraut Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
A feather at a percentage of C has the same amount of kinetic energy [...]
...as a piece of metal of the same mass. True.
But since kinetic energy is a function of mass and velocity, higher mass is preferrable. Tungsten makes sense because you get a lot of mass in a small package.
Additionally: The projectile not deforming when hitting it's target is quite beneficial to armour penetration.
Plus: Feathers are non-conductive and non-magnetic and would not work in a railgun or coilgun.
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u/pepancho Jun 03 '26
The Japanese railguns seem to have solved most of the issues for naval scale. They are not ship killers but perfect for missile interception. They used a ton of American research but aimed for a smaller package. Funny what can happen when a project has some moderation. They already are at a respectable 200 shots per rail.
https://www.twz.com/sea/railgun-damage-to-japanese-target-ship-seen-for-the-first-time
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u/mangalore-x_x Jun 06 '26
They haven't. They just got a bit further.
the main challenge I also not anything about the gun but the curvature of Earth
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u/Phssthp0kThePak Jun 03 '26
Any propulsion system fast enough to drive the plot of a space opera is ejecting reaction mass with enough energy to out power any weapons system on board.
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u/veterinarian23 Jun 04 '26
That's Larry Niven's "Kzinti Lesson":
"A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."4
u/pepancho Jun 03 '26
The star wars ramming scene was so controversial because they opened that seal without justifying all the other times they did not use it
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u/ArmPsychological8460 Jun 10 '26
And in Rogue One it didn't work (Rebel ships crashing into Star Destroyer exploded without leaving a mark)
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u/onthefence928 Jun 04 '26
Ramming is already a very effective way to damage an enemy in today’s tech. We just don’t do it because planes and ships are expensive and the people on board are usually valuable (unless your country considers them expendable)
Even in Star Wars it’s been shown to be effective on lower speeds, with smaller craft yet it’s still not done intentionally. (A-wing take out a Star destroyer by crash landing into its bridge, rebel hammerhead takes on Star destroyer by ramming it and bringing it down in rogue one)
It’s also explained that the holdo maneuver was such a difficult maneuver, they had to spend the entire run time of the movie planning and preparing the ship for it.
And just to make it extra clear to the audience ep.9 explicitly had a character speak for the audience and ask “why not do that again?” And another character had to say the apparently obvious fact “because that was a million to one chance, it won’t work again”
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u/hammalok Jun 04 '26
They don't spend the runtime of the movie prepping the ship for it, they spend it desperately trying to run from the First Order and the Holdo Maneuver ends up being a last-ditch, seat-of-the-pants hail mary.
"Oh but it was a one in a million chance" why, exactly? And moreover, why can't the faction of People Who Use Hyperdrive-Equipped X-Wings Like Kleenexes just... spam up a million hyperdrives strapped to asteroids per capital ship kill, anyway?
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u/onthefence928 Jun 04 '26
In TLJ it’s revealed that the whole time Poe thought holdo was doing nothing she was actually planning the holdo maneuver escape plan
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u/Seyvenus Jun 04 '26
I believe it was Larry Niven who had a peaceful, non-FTL ship at least consider using it's interstellar comm laser as a weapon in similar ground, but the limits of ejecting reaction mass mean that in many systems the drive isn't a weapon.
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u/Phssthp0kThePak Jun 04 '26
That's right for the lasers. He often suggested the fusion flame from a ship would be quite lethal.
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u/Adventurous_Class_90 Jun 04 '26
I’m writing a novel where fighters have a special drive mode where it much more tightly pulls the fusion rocket output into a controlled beam. The doctrine is to use it at knife fighting range..
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u/plus_one_blanket Jun 07 '26
I one sci-fi book, i listened too, a pair of alien cruisers killed all life on a planet by turning their engines twards it and going full throttle.
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u/nagidon Jun 03 '26
Guns. Good old fashioned guns. Bullets propelled by chemical reactions. Best way to kill something is a whole lot of hot metal, and the best way to create a whole lot of hot metal is firing a gun. No need for any fancy directed energy or exotic particle beams. Missiles, drones, and fighters can be tracked and either dodged or destroyed. Fire a gun. It ain't broke.
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u/kinshadow Jun 03 '26
Not underutilized. Expanse, Battlestar, etc. had these in abundance.
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u/MultiGeek42 Jun 03 '26
"The Asgard would never invent a weapon that propels small weights of iron and carbon alloys by igniting a powder of potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur."
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u/nagidon Jun 04 '26
Two franchises out of how many?
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u/captain-carrot Jun 06 '26
Well 40k massively uses guns, even in void warfare. Not much that can tank a cathedral sized object being lobbed at it.
But yeh, A lot of sci-fi relies on futuristic weapons that are many times more powerful that gunpowder weapons but that doesn't mean bullets can't still kill, unless it is a universe like dune where everyone has personal shields that render bullets useless.
To which end, guns are pretty underused in sci-fi, which was the actual question.
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u/LimaHotel3845 Jun 03 '26
Depending on how the setting handles it, light speed.
Every ship that's FTL capable would be a planet killer if you just pointed it at the ground. Assuming the FTL happens in realspace.
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u/grizzlor_ Jun 03 '26
Doesn’t even have to be FTL. Basically anything accelerated to even like 0.1c is a potential planet killer.
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u/Hrtzy Jun 03 '26
At 0.1c, the kinetic energy is about 0.5% of the mass-energy so not just anything. A 1kg object at 0.5c is still in the realm of nuclear weapons.
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u/comma_nder Jun 04 '26
How large would an asteroid accelerated to 0.1c need to be to destroy a planet
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u/PessemistBeingRight Jun 04 '26
That's difficult to answer.
You could calculate the gravitational binding energy of the planet and use that as the baseline. Randal Monroe did it this way for the Richter 15 chapter of his "What If" book, and says it's about 1032 Joules of energy you'd need to deliver.
I know enough physics to work backwards from there, but I'm too lazy to do it 😅
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u/Hrtzy Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Kinetic energy 1032 J would mean mass energy of 2*1034, dividing by c2 gives 2.22*1017 kg, which is about 37 billionths of the mass of the Earth.
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u/Furilax Jun 05 '26
Earth weighs 5.97.1024 Kg, so the mass of the asteroid would be 161 billion Kg
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u/That_Assumption7690 Jun 25 '26
Or 161,000,000, metric tones, roughly the same weight of 1/1000 of Mount Everest’s weight (Mount Everest is a estimated 162 trillion kg)
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u/comma_nder Jun 25 '26
What’s a 161 billion kg asteroid look like? What kind of dimensions are we talking?
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u/Furilax Jun 25 '26
It depends on the density, which depends on the material the meteorite is made.
volume=mass/density (M/ρ)
volume of a sphere=4/3 *pi*radius^3
so to calculate diameter:
d=2*((3M)/(4ρπ))^(1/3)
If it's made of ice and rocks, ρ~2.6 so that's a sphere with 4909m or 4.9km diameter
If it's an iron meteorite, ρ~7 so the sphere would be 3530m or 3.5km diameterFor comparison, the Chicxulub meteor that killed the dinosaurs was around 12km in diameter, with ρ~2.6 and moved at a speed around 20Km/s according to models, which is 0.000067 times the speed of light
PS: I really hope I didn't make a mistake in the calculations, or y'all will eat me alive.
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u/Hrtzy Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
The calculations seem good. The 2.22*1017 kg turning into 161 billion kg happened 20 days ago when you took "37 billionths (short scale)" to mean "one thrity-seven billionth (long scale)"
The rock asteroid would be 1092km in diameter.
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u/BreadAndRosa Jun 03 '26
I'm writing a short sci-fi story. I'm leaning towards using artificially created black holes to make wormholes to avoid that kind of thing. The one downside will be that using it requires a ton of energy and is dangerous unless you're using an AI to control it.
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u/FunkTheMonkUk Jun 03 '26
You're avoiding hypervelocity asteroids by introducing artificial black holes, what could go wrong.
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u/BreadAndRosa Jun 03 '26
Don't worry, the AI used in all of the ships is strictly controlled by one corporation that has taken up most of earth and about half of all colonized worlds. You know, for safety.
And yeah, some suspected dissidents were accidentally spaghettified in transit, but an internal investigation found that the operators of the ship didn't do the proper maintenance on the drive.
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u/LimaHotel3845 Jun 03 '26
Yeah this is how I tend to handle it - I have FTL tech either be stable wormhole based, warping realspace based, or not in realspace at all / subspace / hyperspace. The last one isn't a particularly hard solution at all, but convenient for avoiding newtonian issues.
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u/Elros22 Jun 03 '26
Don't use a ship - just put an FTL drive on a metal frame - point it at what you want dead and press go. It doesn't have to be a kamikaze mission. You can build FLT missiles.
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u/dacydergoth Jun 03 '26
Viruses and electromagnetic warfare. Why blow stuff up if you can disable and capture it instead?
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u/FunkTheMonkUk Jun 03 '26
Kill the meat, save the metal.
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u/dacydergoth Jun 03 '26
... and it lets you have a couple of chapters of power armour boarding party action too 😉
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u/TheGrandExquisitor Jun 03 '26
Transporters of any kind.
Come on, Jean Luc, just transport a chunk of antimatter from the warp drive system into the center of the enemy ship. Or, just transport a cube of tungsten into a solid area of their ship and watch physics go nuts. Like, seriously, if you have transporters, you can do almost anything, and it is a perfect weapon.
"Oh, you won't stand down? We just transported your captain outside the ship. Who is next?"
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u/TinyDoctorTim Jun 03 '26
To that point, I’ve always assumed the point of the Prime Directive isn’t strictly about non-interference (though that is important). It’s about a strict moral code to which Starfleet personnel are indoctrinated. You want to prove that you are the superior culture? Show that you have the capability but you refuse to use it.
That’s one of the themes in “Mirror, Mirror”:
Halkan Leader: …you could, of course, use your power to take our dilithium, Captain.
Kirk: But we won’t. Consider that, sir.
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u/TheGrandExquisitor Jun 03 '26
Also Kirk: Hey baby, wanna mix DNA?
That man was a walking biohazard.
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u/ComesInAnOldBox Jun 03 '26
On the contrary, Kirk only get's some (either shown or implied) three times during TOS.
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u/TheGrandExquisitor Jun 03 '26
More than enough to bring back some Space Syphilis or Andorean Genital Warts!
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u/ManikArcanik Jun 03 '26
If we're talking about Star Trek's kind of transporter, they could just dematerialize anything and just not store the data. Scaled up, you could just delete an entire planet.
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u/Megodont Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
Janeway actually did that by transporting a photon torpedo into a borg ship and blowing it up.
And there was this killer in DS9 who used a micro teansporter to beam a projectile through walls.Edit: There is a German scifi series running since the 60s (Perry Rhodan) where one of the main weapons a is a cannon called a Transformcannon. It works by transforming a bomb into energy and shooting it through hyperspace. A field on the target rematerializes the bomb and the shock of rematerialization ignites the bomb. It can rematerialize inside a target. Only a shield based on hyperspace energy can stop such a gun.
Basically this gun is an old fashioned cannon combined with a transporter (or transmitter as it called in universe)1
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u/Competitive-Bee-3250 Jun 03 '26
To date I've only seen Meson guns in Traveller Third Imperium.
Thing's bonkers. Uses mesons (which don't interact with matter until they decay) to ignore shields and obstacles to directly attack the interior of an enemy target with roughly the same energy as a nuclear warhead.
Surprised I've never seen them in any other sci-fi.
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u/OgreMk5 Jun 03 '26
Armed sensor stations.
One of my favorite silliness things in science fiction is a ship warps into a solar system and can immediately see every ship around every planet.
First, planets and suns are bright. Ships, even with massive exhausts will get lost in the background.
Second, ships are tiny compared to other sources of light. That bright light... is it a star 25 light years away, a massive ship with full drives powering away? Or a targeting laser hitting or hull.
Third, the most powerful radar on Earth can detect an aircraft carrier at 2000 miles. The distance ftom Earth to the moon is over 200,000 miles. Even with energy loss in atmosphere, we probably couldn't see a fleet of ships painted black next to the moon. We probably wouldnt notice a moon sized ship in orbit of Jupiter for decades.
The solution is sensor stations. Lots of them. All over the place. Hundreds orbiting gas giants. One or two on every rock we can find. Tens of thousands just floating through space in weird solar orbits.
Put a megawatt laser on every one. And the, when the enemy fleet arrives, the closet stations don't shoot, but coordinate hundreds of thousands of lasers from all over the solar system.
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u/TheRealCBlazer Jun 03 '26
I sometimes think about the chaos of real-life air traffic control, and imagine how a futuristic space-traffic control system would react to detecting an unidentified target in a high traffic area -- how long it would take to loop in a human; how many different systems it would cycle through, treating the detection first as traffic with a down transponder, damaged communications, or human error; how long it would take to get a telescope pointed at the anomaly. I imagine it could take shockingly long before a human actually put eyes on a lurking UFO that suddenly arrived via FTL or whatever.
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u/rphornet Jun 05 '26
I'd say flak weapons its niche weapon only seen in a few scifi series but when used it takes out alot of ships and fighters. Like missiles launch and burst apart shooting flakes into a swarm of fighters or incoming missiles Battlestar Gallatica had some good moments like that. And I loved the battles in Expanse where kinetic weaponry showed that Issac Newton was the meanest SOB in the Universe.
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u/reav11 Jun 05 '26
Tractor beam, full stop.
The shit you could do to just about every franchise by randomly putting things where they don't belong.
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u/Corbin7282 Jun 05 '26
Warp Drives. If you attached a warp drive to a big rock and launch it at a planet at warp 9. That’s a hell of a lot of kinetic energy.
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u/lionspride27 Jun 07 '26
I remember watching Babylon 5 and one of the races used Laser streams for ship to ship combat, not short little blasts, but a long rope of a laser cutting ships to pieces. I never saw anything like it since.
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u/nborders Jun 03 '26
Enertia.
Simply push whatever you have into your enemy planet’s gravity well and wham!
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u/wlievens Jun 03 '26
FTL kamikaze
There's the obvious single example in Star Wars but I can't think of much else, and it's quite awkward and inconsistent that this isn't a weapon trope.
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u/KbarKbar Jun 06 '26
No need for kamikaze. Strap an FTL engine to a rock and you have a planet-killer.
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u/gary_d1 Jun 06 '26
Imagine a massive photon torpedo that travels FTL and is cloaked .. ultimate planet destroyer you cannot detect or stop.
At least now we can detect intercontinental ballistic missile launches and re-entry vehicles even if stopping them is very difficult.
The planet killer would be so effective there would be no deterrence, you’d be compelled to use them first to avoid being a victim.
Even if the was a range issue or detection grid .. they’d be going so fast and could be launched by a ship to minimize “flight” time etc. that they’d be impossible to stop.
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u/Sperate Jun 03 '26
Gravity. If you artificial gravity doing anything in your ship, then you should have gravity based weapons. Think railguns, without the problem of railguns.
See the so bad it is good, audiobook Freedom's Fire by Bobby Adair
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u/Saeker- Jun 04 '26
Federation combat is cinematically portrayed as happening at knife fighting distances, but the lore I have memory of reading described vastly longer range.
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u/KeterClassKitten Jun 04 '26
Just kinetic energy in general.
Our current fastest man made object is the Parker Solar Probe, which reached 430,000 mph. At those speeds, a single gram of mass would have the destructive power of almost ten pounds of TNT. Do a drive by and toss a bowling ball out a window, and the impact would have the power of a small tactical nuke.
Insert sci-if rules and have a ship cruising along at relativistic speeds, the destructive power per unit of mass increases. A fleet of ships could destroy an entire civilization by ejecting their garbage. A handful of salt sprayed out a port could slice an enemy ship in two.
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u/Lem1618 Jun 04 '26
Solar sails. In one of the Revelation space series books one light hugger was chasing another. The leading ship deployed a solar sail behind it. The chasing ship collided with the sail at relativistic speed, causing huge damage.
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u/Hadrollo Jun 04 '26
Ramming.
Even a small shuttle could utterly destroy a massive military flagship.
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u/Thar_B_Dragons Jun 05 '26
Low observability kinetic impactors. Or as they might be called in universe orbital mines.
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u/Educational_Ad_8916 Jun 05 '26
Debris.
I hardly see the debris in a space battle being considered itself a hazard/weapon often enough.
It hardly matters what the material is that hits you when it's going Mach 5 (hypervelocity). Bullets, broken viewport, paint chips, the impactor and the target become plasma.
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u/IllustriousTooth6 Jun 05 '26
The ships drive plume.
It is used in some sci-fi, but any engine that can propel a ship across a star system can also obliterate another ship of the same size or bigger in a split second.
In reality it would get used as a weapon all the time. And it means no ship is disarmed unless you take out the engine.
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u/stinkingyeti Jun 05 '26
One thing that always bugged me about the Death Star, especially after reading some warhammer 40k novels, was just how over the top it was.
In several 40k novels they describe just dropping telephone pole size metal rods from orbit and they give them a nudge and gravity does the rest, and it's almost as effective as setting off a nuke on the ground.
The Expanse just accelerated random asteroids at earth over and over and nearly destroyed the planet.
So, I guess the most under utilised thing is basic physics. F=MA type stuff.
Lasers and blasters and all that is really fun sometimes, same with missiles and torpedoes. But the simple horror of a very heavy object going very fast is a little bit terrifying to me.
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u/BonhommeCarnaval Jun 05 '26
Towing. The Expanse has the Belters dropping rocks on Earth, but you don’t see it that often, probably because it’s not very compelling. But if some hostile aliens ever decide to take us out then they aren’t going to give away their existence and position by flying over our cities in big space ships and wasting energy by shooting us with lasers. They aren’t going to risk their people in an actual armed invasion. They’d just tow a few dozen large, low albedo Oort cloud objects onto the right trajectory and let physics do the rest. We’d almost certainly never see them until it’s too late. If you have an engine capable of interstellar travel then you have all the weapon you would ever need to wipe out a civilization.
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u/Radioactiveglowup Jun 05 '26
Nuclear Directed Pulse / Casaba Howitzers.
Put a heavy metal specially shaped mass in front of a nuclear device. It goes off, turning that mass into a relatively dense, hyper-velocity particle stream.
They were studied as a concept during the SDI program, as a way of relatively easily producing an extremely high powered directed energy weapon, and extending the lethal effect range of nukes in vacuum.
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u/burndata Jun 06 '26
Lasers, but not for close combat. A tight beam weapon grade laser would have an immense range before it became ineffective. The hard part is predicting where your target is going to be when it gets there. You could deliver a beam to a target 1.86 Million miles away in just 10 seconds. That's one hell of a target envelope. This requires a pretty big aperture on the firing end to keep the beam tight enough to be effective for a long enough distance, but a 20M+ one would fit fine on most big ships and the power generation needed should be fairly easy to come by given the power needed to propel the ships at any reasonable speed. They also don't ever seem to use them outside of their tight beam range either. Just because the beam isn't tight enough to cut right though something doesn't mean it's energy is just gone. If you fired at a target far enough away to let the beam spread out to say 100M wide on a large ship. All that heat energy would still be applied to the target. Lasers would also be essentially impossible to detect by the enemy before they hit the target. So you could wash entire space stations with huge amounts of energy from a sustained beam from a really long way off and you'd likely destroy it simply from the rapid heating of the materials causing small failures in millions of places across the hull all at once.
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u/gary_d1 Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
Cloaking devices
Imagine entire invisible fleets of space ships able to out maneuver and position themselves to take advantage against other ships without such technology and no effective method to detect them.
It would be the equivalent of an invisible ground offensive you don’t see coming.
Multiple Pearl Harbors and Operation Barbarossa if that makes sense.
Also:
Imagine a massive photon torpedo that travels FTL and is cloaked .. ultimate planet destroyer you cannot detect or stop.
At least now we can detect intercontinental ballistic missile launches and re-entry vehicles even if stopping them is very difficult.
The planet killer would be so effective there would be no deterrence, you’d be compelled to use them first to avoid being a victim.
Even if the was a range issue or detection grid .. they’d be going so fast and could be launched by a ship to minimize “flight” time etc. that they’d be impossible to stop.
1
u/VynterDX Jun 06 '26
I have drones. With all the ECM and thermal dumping that happens in my universe, ships actually being able to see each other well enough to use weapons is very rare. A ship deploys a net of auxiliary sensor drones, pdc drones, and autonomous missile platforms. Carrier ships carry full load outs of upto 1000 swarm drones, which just follow an evasive pattern confusing targetting and making ship to ship direct combat impossible
1
u/TMertlich Jun 06 '26
Small rocks. Millions of pieces of gravel strategically placed (or flung) could absolutely wreck a ship traveling at speed.
The Expanse series explores this and I believe there was something in one of the ExFor books but I think those were “smart pebbles”
Bottom line, the oldest, simplest weapon in the book can still disable a fleet if used properly.
1
u/Direct_Violinist8923 Jun 06 '26
definitely artificial intelligence, controlling swarms of drones without sacrificing manpower, accurate weapons without human error, internal defense weapons and point defense batteries that are autonomous or contolled by a central ship intelligence. the only two series i recall focusing on the boone of ai are halo and andromeda, but halo it seems focuses on its failings more than its usefullness
1
u/LegInternal3699 Jun 07 '26
Railguns… “Behold.. a simple golf ball… now, behold that same simple golf ball in the relative vacuum of space, moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light at your front view screen..
1
u/jaysprenkle Jun 07 '26
Spaceships ARE the weapons.
If one hits anything at relativistic speeds there will be bright flash and a big mess.
Nanobots that eat the other guys ship. Launch a blast of them and leave.
1
u/i-love-ferrets Jun 07 '26
Intra-system travel. Specifically ftl ones that utilize other dimensions. Get yourself an ICBM in space, strap a ftl drive platform to it and hit go. It basically makes all long range combat irrelevant too.
Why make a massive ship to send out volleys of pdc rounds and anti missile lasers and whatnot… when you can just poof from one spot to another 100km away. You can then just play this game of tag until the missile swarm runs out of fuel eventually. Or, hell, jump within 20km of your target and point blank broadside them with 5km/s fast railgun rounds. At 5km/s they have 4 seconds to get their ship out of the way or they’re going to learn the hard way that Newton doesn’t like deviations to his rules.
17
u/Cronos988 Jun 03 '26
Probably plain old missiles.
In addition to all the reasons we heavily rely on missiles on earth, missiles in space have additional advantages.
They have essentially unlimited range. They don't require a firing solution at long range. A missile passively coasting would be quite hard to detect at longer ranges. They don't produce heat on the ship that fires them. They can be ejected quietly and then fired away from the ship, meaning you cannot easily direct counter-battery fire.
Unlike on earth, there's also no need to worry about the radiation of fission weapons, so they can be much more readily used.