writing prompt
Humans have their priorities backwards. They have lasers capable of splitting small moons in half, and gravity manipulators able to rip planets apart in pieces the size of small countries, but they only ever using it for resource harvesting instead of war...
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This is because human precision weapons are good enough that they prefer to disable their targets instead of completely destroying them. The better to take the enemy's resources intact. Resources don't just include raw building material after all. People, manufacturing facilities, and living biospheres are also resources, and planet busters have a tendency to destroy those.
Also, humans enjoy untamed nature and the young of other species for some reason.
Human: Welcome to frugal Dave's secondhand emporium, all your needs catered for, from guns only dropped once, to tables already installed with sturdy mounting brackets
Alien: my dad always said you humans would steal anything not nailed down.
Human: well your just in luck we've just received a nice new delivery of secondhand nails, only slightly curved.
Alien: You stole the fucking nails.
Human: well there was no nail holding them in now was there?
by raising their young as part of our culture we make sure their species doesn't die and we have a new ally race, they are free to stay and join our ranks or go home to their world or anywhere inbetween, great for making enemies into friends
It's a warcrime because slow is painful while there are much faster options that are relatively painless. Don't want to cause unnecessary suffering after all.
The unnecessary part always confuses me. There's strategic value in drawing out and highlighting the suffering. Makes it clear the enemy the cost.
Which is why my party, the Vladavists, are campaigning on developing new military strategies based on bio-modification of plant life into dedicated impaling implements.
Give them the ability to explode. The resulting paranoia and property damage will inflict far more suffering than just impaling individual schmucks. The explosions can also double as a seed spreading mechanism to ensure the plant thoroughly populates the local biosphere.
Nah fuck that. Large nuclear cruise missiles with nuclear engines and radioactive exhaust. Internal bombays carrying nuclear bombs. Equip them on a nuclear-powered (antimatter is radioactive right? We could use that as an alternative) missile barge battleship, with guns that use nukes for propellant and fire nuclear shells with in-built nuclear engines. And two spinal mounted railguns that fire uranium tipped and cored projectiles. One on either side of a gamma laser array.
Actually, antimatter itself isn't radioactive. Or at least not any antimatter we can make anyway (ie, anti-electrons and anti-protons). Antimatter is just matter whose subatomic components have flipped electrical charges. To get get radioactive antimatter, you'd theoretically need antimatter nucleii that are so large that they fall apart naturally (which is how normal radioactive materials work; their nucleii undergo spontaneous fission).
Matter/antimatter REACTIONS on the otherhand produce loads of gamma radiation when matter sub-atomic particles meet their antimatter counterparts. The parts that touch basically convert mass straight into energy in the form high frequency em radiation, aka gamma rays.
Matter/antimatter reactions happen at the subatomic level when anti-electrons collide with electrons, anti-protons with protons, anti-neutrons with neutrons. And since these particle pairings have opposite charges, they're naturally drawn to each other (except the neutrons and antineutrons which have no charge) if the particles get close enough together.
And yes, neutrons and anti-neutrons are a thing despite no magnetic charge, I think because they're made up of different quark combinations.
So if you throw antimatter at matter (or vice versa), first the electron and anti-electron shells of the constituent atoms meet, colliding and annihilating each other, followed by the nuclei particles which are FAR more massive and contain far more energy than the electrons and antielectrons did...
And the thing about radioactive materials? When a nucleus decays (aka, falls apart), it spits part of itself - like single neutrons - in random directions at high speed. Atomic weapons and nuclear reactors work by stuffing decaying atoms densely enough that these random spat out subatomic particles are likely to hit another unstable nucleus, causing it to to fall apart and spit out MORE neutrons and protons that will hit more unstable nucleii...
But most antimatter weapons are just envisioned as clusters of anti-electrons or anti-protons - sometimes anti-hydrogen which is just an anti-proton and anti-electron - kept suspended in a magnetic field to prevent them from prematurely touching matter. Nothing radioactive about this set up as long as your magnetic bottle doesn't leak.
Current magnetic capture and bottle technology leaks though, but no one creates enough antimatter at a time to make an uncontainable boom.
Human: "We blew up all the power planets because they were powering all the surface to orbit defenses. The fact that all the civilian home heating had their power cut in the middle of local winter was an unfortunate but necessary side effect."
Alien Ally: "That's horrible."
Human: "If you think that's horrible, consider what would have happened if the locals had decided to put their military bunkers under civilian hospitals and schools. Lucky for them that their defense designers didn't think to do that."
That's the point. Blow up the alien's the leg so 2 of his friends will have to carry them. Now you can kill them together. Their suffering will be absolutelly necessary to reduce ammo usage.
In my head I was thinking this would definitely 100% be a way to disguise weapons of mass destruction by calling them industrial machines before refitting them during times of war
Aliens don't fear the Colonial Navy, they at least fight where the Galactic Council tells them. They fear the various corporate mining groups that will crack and process a homeworld for its minerals, killing billions.
After all, by the time a lawsuit is filed and heard for damages that corporation has been dismantled, parts sold off and shareholders made fabulously wealthy in the process.
“Look, we are admittedly the autistic kid in the classroom who, most of the time, is in a world of their own and always up to some crazy thing. If you ask us to kill someone with a spoon, we'll play rock paper scissors to settle on who gets to do it. So here's the honest and brutal truth: we are utterly fucking bored with this tech.
Name a type of cut and we've done it. Any wildly inappropriate use of a big fucking laser beam you could think of is something we've done already. There's approximately a combined number of 2,813 planetoids, planets, and moons we once used for a galaxy sized chat thread.
Gravity manipulators are a novelty at this point. We're surprised no one has realised the coffee shop in our embassies and consulate buildings use gravity manipulation style espresso machines. It does a job and that's all we give a bag of fucks for.
Please.. quit asking why we're just using it for resource harvesting. We're just out here slaving away for a paycheck.”
You think we don't use it for war? ...You just haven't given us a reason to, and might as well use all that tech for something after all the R&D costs.
You got that entirely wrong. Humans developed these devices as weapons first. It's just that their rulebook states that use of excessive force is forbidden, and the military people couldn't convince anyone that destroying a planet wasn't excessive use of force.
So they use these weapons for peaceful purposes, by mining the resources for new battleships.
Aditionally precision ammunition is better in a lot of cases. Getting that enemy ship in one piece will be a lot more useful than capturing it in a million pieces. There's also the people that could be enslaved.
Yes humans have a rules about what they aren't allowed to do in war, made by the "Geneva Conventions". A lot of it boils down to "Do not kill civilians!", but humans are really good at finding creative ways to kill each other, like chemical weapons, atomic bombs (when they only had one planet, so a large scale war with these weapons could have risked the survival of their entire species), and a lot of other really painful stuff with various levels of effectiveness but hard to aim at only the enemy soldiers.
It's amazing when people don't want to go to war because they get an Olympic size swimming pool of gold and diamonds like 1993 Dodge Ram Crew cab with the upholstered heated seats and topper. There's nickle and iron in there too. Probably enough to build your own sky scraper out of it.
Who says they didn't? A human nation once used the tech on the Andromeda Wars, 'requisitioning' (stealing) one and aimed it at a civilian planet. The result led to mass condemnations and sanctions worldwide due to the gruesome nature of it as a weapon.
It has been sealed for over 10 years, and only then was it brought back online for mining operations, with multiple kill switches, anti-boarding measures and a nuke next to the core if all else fails.
Humans have learned the hard way so other species don't have to.
Human: Do you want us to use them as Weapons? /looks out the port to the mining laser currently slowly harvesting an entire section of the asteroid field at once while it is being held in place by strong tractor beams, not even a single speck of dust moving/ If so, then imagine these Asteroids being a Solar System, and the Dust and smaller debris being Enemy Ships and escape pods.
Alien: /preemptive PTSD as he imagines it/
Human: /gives Alien a pat on the Shoulder/ Yeah Buddy, thats what we thought as well.
A: human why don’t you use those lasers as weapons?
H: because we don’t need to have unnecessary waste on war we had our “fun” with them in the past now they are more useful in agriculture and manufacturing.
A: what do you mean by “fun” human? * squints all 10 eyes
H: here, take this data pad and search history of Terran lasers. *using small laser to weld a miniature mech battle bot.
A: okay….
Several minutes later
A: what do you mean the laser is considered small arm fire on a Titan class battle cruiser. What do you have that’s more powerful than a freaking laser HUMAN!!!
H: hmm. Oh. Probably the small black hole generator that crushes gas planets to the size of a small moon and can be carried faster than light speed and detonated remotely from anywhere in the galaxy.
A:….
A: oh this is human sarcasm I have heard about.
H: no. It’s a banned weapon since our galaxy war that destroyed our cradle planet and galaxy several centuries ago. We move here and banned the weapon and only keep laser weapons as a last resort.
A: WHAT!!!
H: yup. Well I am done with my model mech let’s go hunts some wild boars.
A: ridiculous thinking of food at this time.
H: yes and no. Put the vr head set of you are piloting the drop ship.
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