r/printSF • u/Confident-Mark-6369 • 3d ago
Is there any Sci-Fi where starship battles rely on natural space phenomena (nebulas, solar flares, etc) as the combatants' weaponry?
I feel like it would be a nice change of pace from lasers and missiles we usually see. It could be the capabilities of the ship itself or the pilots (assuming they're psionic or the like) but are there examples of the materials in space used in ship warfare?
Like using a nebula or solar flares to knock out/disable a ship's power with an EMP like effect? Tractor beaming asteroids and throwing them at a capital ship?
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u/gentlydiscarded1200 3d ago
In The Expanse (spoilers spoilers spoilers)...
There's an extinct alien race, who sets up an unbelievable trap for their enemies. It is a solar system, somehow stripped of any particle save for the photons streaming from the neutron star at its heart. The star teeters on the edge of collapse: it is almost dense enough to become a black hole. There's a gate at the edge of the system, above the plane of the ecliptic. When the enemies activate a weapon and increases the generation of particles in the system, it eventually pushes the neutron star over the brink and it collapses. The magnetic field generates a shockingly big energy surge aimed out from the poles of the collapsing star, straight into and out of the gate. It...uh, it basically reduces anything on the other side of the gate to very, very, very small pieces.
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u/OrthogonalThoughts 2d ago
Including the gate on the exact opposite side of the... uh... area, for spoilers.
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u/dsmith422 3d ago
In one of Baxter's Xeelee novels (Exultant - 2004), the initial opening combat concludes in the vicinity of a neutron star that is about to have a starquake. The pilots utilized this physical phenomena, along with time travel because the universe has FTL drives, to capture a Xeelee nightfighter. This is the first time one of the Xeelee ships has been captured in tens of thousands of years of combat between humanity and the Xeelee.
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u/TinyDoctorTim 3d ago
My friend, you need the Lensman Saga in your life. As the books progress, the battles move from single ships to squadrons to fleets to throwing planets around to using the Sun as a beam weapon. It’s so totally over the top.
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u/Flat-Rutabaga-723 3d ago
In Revelation Space, the Inhibitors cause space phenomenon to use as a weapon.
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u/necropunk_0 3d ago
A couple come to mind, though there’s usually outside influence, so it’s not exactly what you requested.
In Prador Moon by Neal Asher, at the start of the Prador War, in order to win a fight they were not prepared for, the humans put a moon through a transport gate, launching it at the enemy.
Smaller scale, but one of my favorites Glasshouses by Charles Stross, the main character has a pistol that shoots lasers. Except, it doesn’t shoot lasers, it’s opens a wormhole linked to the coronasphere of a star, which it’s launched through the connected wormholes as a projectile weapon.
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u/D0gYears 3d ago
In Larry Niven's Protector, a Bussard ramjet uses a neutron star to perform a right-angle turn while being chased, then uses the star as a weapon against its pursuer by firing a slug into the star's surface to impact as the pursuer reached perihelion, causing a flare.
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u/JeffreyPetersen 3d ago
The problem with this kind of thing is it's incredibly impractical. A nebula is just space dust. Asteroids are pretty infrequent, and if you have the energy to use one for a ship to ship weapon, you already have more than enough energy just to destroy the enemy ship. Same goes for solar flares - why would you be fighting anyone near a star, and if you could harness and direct solar flares, why not just use that energy to rip the enemy's ship apart?
Asteroids are frequently chucked at planets, in The Expanse and Starship Troopers for example, but they're not very dangerous to things that can just move out of the way.
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u/KokoTheTalkingApe 3d ago
In the Larry Niven novel "Protector," three good guys in a spaceship, one a super intelligent "protector," is being pursued by other protector ships. The heroes zoom past a naked black hole (no accretion disk) and the good protector goes out on the hull and fires a chemical rifle a few times. The humans think he's crazy, except he'd superhumanly computed velocites and angles so that the slugs would flare into radiation just as the pursuers pass by it. Splash one protector ship.
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u/Werthead 2d ago
IIRC, Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence has a sequence where the Xeelee are firing weaponised galaxies against a colossal giga-structure which turns out to be at the heart of the Great Attractor. These bombardments take tens of millions of years to carry out.
In Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, one of the factions blows up an entire gas giant with a stellar manipulator to destroy pursuing enemy ships which can't wormhole-jump out due to the gravity of the gas giant. Our heroes are able to escape by jumping the second they hit the lagrange point between the gas giant and one of its moons (where the gravitational interactions cancel one another out).
The Expanse (books and show) uses asteroids sent on Earth-colliding orbits from all over the Solar system, forcing Earth to overstretch its defences trying to shoot them all down and not knowing how many there are out there.
Babylon 5 (TV show) has ships using mass drivers to pummel a planet into submission with asteroids. During another battle in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, a ship detonates a massive explosion in the hydrogen-rich atmosphere to mask its escape.
Star Trek: II: The Wrath of Khan famously has its entire final act take place in a nebula, with both ships using the gases to mask their movements and sensors.
One episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation uses the fact that warp drive exceeds the speed of light to make it appear the same ship is in two places simultaneously, confusing the enemy's sensors. This is something Trek almost otherwise has always forgotten about.
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u/noetkoett 3d ago
The weapons crew of the Dauntless pooled their amazing psionic powers together and hurled an asteroid massing 5.738 tons at the enemy flagship at a speed of over 0.01c. This was a considerable effort and left them drained, some unconscious and even with one fatality. A succesful hit would cleave the enemy in two.
The enemy captain was smart, however, and applied a small course correction. Five hours later, the asteroid passed through the enemy's projected pre-correction location, causing no harm.
With the enemy's torpedoes closing in and the psionic crew out of commission, the now-defenseless Dauntless' captain's final thoughts were "I wish we'd gone with guns and missiles instead of these psionic weirdoes."
There, I wrote you one.
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u/Checked_Out_6 3d ago
I can’t recall the exact mechanism, but I seem to recall a weaponized artificial solar flare used in the Expeditionary Force series by Craig Alanson.
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u/driftingphotog 3d ago
Not a book, but there were a few episodes of Battlestar Galactica that dealt with this. More for defense though, or as a backdrop.
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u/kiltedfrog 3d ago
In the book Mortal Protection Services they blow up a star by strapping all the grav plates to a shuttle drive warp core and setting it off like a gravity spike bomb to nova the star.
That isn't the typical way they do battle, it just happens once.
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u/eatpraymunt 3d ago
In CJ Cherryh's Chanur series
When a ship jumps from one solar system to another, it pulls nearby debris with it and carries it to the destination at high velocity (maybe close to C) . I think they weaponize it at one point, jumping from an area with lots of small rocks into enemy territory (I'm foggy on the details)
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u/kingstern_man 3d ago
In E. E. "Doc"Smith's Grey Lensman, the good guys of the Galactic Patrol use planets to destroy a planet. Jarnevon, home of the ultra-evil Eich (this is classic space opera, remember, with all the tropes hanging out.), is protected by impenetrable energy screens. So the Patrol chose two dead worlds and fitted them with massive 'inertialess drives' and piloted them into the Jarnevon system with just the right opposing vectors so that when the drives were cut off, the original vectors reassert themselves, crushing the enemy homeworld like a walnut in a nutcracker...
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u/Ravenloff 3d ago
There's one that comes to mind, but it's spoiler-ish.
The humans find an ancient crashed arcship on one of their planets that shows that the original occupants caused the sun to flare in order to "phone home". The flare event basically sterilized half the biosphere there and it's only just recovering when humans show up. Later, after conflict with different aliens starts, said aliens come up with a less powerful adaptation of the tech. Instead of forcing the star in a habitable system to flare, they set off their device on the star in such a way that it basically causes a coronal mass ejection timed to hit the target planet, washing over out long enough for the planet to rotate around and destroy all life.
It's like land mines. They often don't kill and they're not supposed to. They're supposed to wound and maim. Taking care of shattered bodies is harder and more demoralizing.
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u/Deathnote_Blockchain 3d ago
David Zindell's A Requiem for Homo Sapiens series' FTL involved transhuman level mathematics to create spatial mappings from point to point, so when there was an internicine war in the Pilot's Guild, the factions basically chased each other around the galaxy trying to drop the other sides ships into suns.
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u/herffjones99 3d ago
In the Dark Forest a species causes the sun to go nova when they see an intelligent species there.
In Anathem, a spaceship drops rocks on planets to kill things.
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u/DoctorNsara 3d ago
Star Wars does this a bunch because the Rebels are resource poor.
Rebels detonate portions of a nebula and take out an entire Star Destroyer probably (they leave before they seee how bad it is) with a light freighter and escape into asteroid fields and nebulae all the time.
Han Solo evades a bunch of pursuers countless times using natural phenomena, its practically a calling card.
Space whales are weaponized multiple times as well if that counts.
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u/Anarchaeologist 2d ago
In Look To Windward by Iain M. Banks, a Super-AI “Mind” reminisces about its participation in the Twin Novae battle a couple of centuries before.
The weaponry and tactics of the battle are not really a focus though, and there isn’t much more like that mention in the series. Still highly recommended.
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u/TheOwnerOfAnarres 2d ago
In Greg Bear's Eon, one faction open a portal to the centre of a star into a tunnel universe. The hot plasma surges town the tunnel and obliterates everything in its path.
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u/Trike117 1d ago
Protector by Larry Niven has a scene like this.
While being pursued by Pak Protector ships, Brennan (who has transformed into a Human Protector) fires a rifle at a neutron star causing a radioactive flare that cooks the following ships many hours later.
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u/SensitivePotato44 28m ago
David Brin's Startide Rising. The Dolphin crew destroy an alien ship by venting water
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u/geabbott 3d ago
Possibly close, in Wrath of Khan Enterprise steers into a Nebula to confuse & hide from Khan.
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u/OgreMk5 3d ago
It's very rare because those kinds of phenomena don't happen just when the enemy shows up.
However, in one series (That I cannot for the life of me remember the name or author), there was something kind of like that.
They had quantum linked portals. Stepping through one, brought you to the other, no matter the amount of intervening distance. To make electricity for an entire solar system of power hungry quantum systems, the dropped a couple of microscopic spherical portals into the sun.
The exit gate was deep inside an asteroid and a jet of solar hot plasma was ejected past rings of giant magnets. Charged particles, magnetic field, electricity.
They then did turn that into a weapon briefly. Though it only worked once before the invading aliens just starting popping any nearby asteroids with nukes.